The Marketing of Economics

When we think of Marketing we typically think of the everyday items that get pushed into our psyche's from billboards to much more recently, our "For you" pages on various Social Media platforms. But Marketing is very much so a part of our day to day lives, even within items that we've already bought. The common person would think that once an item is sold, that item doesn't need to do much in the way of upselling anything else but unfortunately, that isn't true.

As Yanis Varoufakis has pointed out, Your Amazon Alexa is training you, to train it, to train you, to train it on what you like, when you like it so that it and Amazon's algorithm can push appropriate books, items and other services at you. You have in essence invited the algorithm into your house and allowed it to spy on you, even when you are offline. It's like having a private investigator in your house, that you've paid for but the findings of such investigation are never disclosed to you.

Marketing can be subconcious in the way that Alexa is, but it can also be all encompassing and strategic. I would argue, that the world we live in, is very much run on Marketing and very little of what we do as people is a "free choice" especially those who pursue a job in Economics like myself.

It is quite common that someone pursuing a Degree in economics will go into it for one of two reasons; 1) You like the academia of it and want to study in a particular field, OR 2) You already want to work in wall street and are "chasing the bag". If you already believe in the latter, then what i'm about to say doesn't really apply to you.

Once you graduate with a BA, MA or PhD in Economics, Finance or Accounting, you will be faced with many options, but the only one that you get offers on are; consultancy, trading, corporate jobs, etc. There is a reason for that, much of the ideas and thoughts you may have developed in University, such as belonging to a heterodox school of thought are now being pummeled out of you. Preying on the post-graduate financial insecurity you almost certainly have. Your dream of working the halls of Academia are still dreams and will continue to be such unless you are part of the un-lucky few or many depending on how you see it.

You are exposed to more and more offerings from companies, offering peak benefit packages, commissions and other forms of compensation until you bite. With a hope being that you'll leave your heterodox thinking at the door and never retrieve it again. The ad-space that is your thinking can be bought... eventually. If you bite, you will belong to the group of Economists who will be invited onto mainstream podcasts, to talk about stocks, bonds, yield markets, etc and feed into the view that Economics is an overly mathematical field with no difference in opinion about what the "truth" of a given situation is. Nuance is beaten out of you and your morals become a fixture of your past but not your present or future. Instilling a form of false unanimity in the minds of non-academic on lookers.

This cycle instils that the only people who will apply to and graduate with your degree will be people who have already bitten into the sour apple that is Neo-classical or Austrian School economics with the goal of chasing the aforementioned bag. Your unorthodox thinking as a student will be dumped into a hole that cannot be retrieved again, apart from periodically when you get invited to participate in a surrealist fever dream that is teaching at an Ivy League school, not teaching what you dreamt but teaching what you hated and then were baited into doing after school.

Take this story as a warning to my fellow Economics students, the ideas that you have now will not stay with you, but not because they were disproven. The Free Marketplace of idea's is called as such because much like the Free-market, you will be bought for cheap and you will perpetuate false ideas for profit. I don't say this as a graduate, I say this as a student who knows that this inevitably my future.