Artificial Flavors Aren’t the Only Factor Manipulating Your Tastes, Bud

For my reflection essay, I would like to dig deeper into the topic of tastes and preferences and their influence on demand. Our textbook defines non-price factors that influence demand as “income, taste, and expectations that help to determine the demand for a product” (63). The text continues, “Taste, fashion, and popularity. The demand for “in” items typically increases; and when an item is “out,” demand decreases… A good, catchy advertising campaign that makes a product popular can increase demand” (63).

I found this aspect of non-price factors particularly interesting. As a thoughtful, rational consumer, advertising oftentimes affects my choices in the market even if I don’t realize it. An article from VOA News illustrates this same idea in the context of Yum Brands outlets, like KFC and McDonalds. The article suggests that image trouble may be the culprit for falling profits. “Industry analysts say the fast-food giants need to innovate to keep pace with a changing business landscape and changing tastes,” the article reads.

Nowadays, consumer trends lean towards customizable, healthful menus that are perceived to be of high quality. In an effort to meet consumer’s changing tastes and preferences, McDonald’s has recently made some adjustments to their menu. An article from adage.com says that McDonald’s removed high-fructose corn syrup from its sandwich buns and taken artificial preservatives out of items including Chicken McNuggets “as it tries to appeal to diners hungering for more clarity and cleanliness in what they eat.”

“Part of McDonald’s strategy is telling people more about how it gets and prepares its food,” the article says. In fact, one look at McDonald’s website shows the phrase “The simpler the better” alongside an updated web design that makes finding nutrition facts and food sourcing details more accessible.

McDonald’s is viewed by many consumers as “unhealthy junk-food” (Business Insider). McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson says that “We are also strengthening our creative messages by placing greater emphasis on the quality of our food,” and that’s exactly what they did. Take a look at this picture from the current McDonalds website. The about our food page reads, from left to right, “Commitment to quality, quality food, our food philosophy, nutrition calculator, and our food experts.” This clearly shows the chain’s efforts to shift tastes and preferences by appealing to consumers’ demand for quality, humanely sourced, and nutritious food.

An image taken from Mc.Donald’s website

 

But has this revamped marketing campaign worked for McDonald’s? If we take a look at the stock market price for Mc.Donald’s at the beginning of 2013, when they first launched their healthy marketing campaign, to the present, we see a slight increase in stock market price over the five year period.

Mc.Donald’s stock market price graphed over a five year period, from 2013-2018

Surprised? Don’t be. Mc.Donald’s is not the first company to revamp their marketing campaigns in an attempt to appeal to consumers. For example, take a look at this Coca-Cola commercial compilation, from the 1950s to present day. You’ll see how popular culture, especially celebrity endorsement, is utilized to alter consumers’ perception of the Coca-Cola brand. Here is a Diet Coke commercial featuring Taylor Swift playing with kittens while holding a Diet Coke. If that’s not a blatant appeal to popular culture, I don’t know what is!

Some consumers may find this manipulation of tastes and preferences appalling. In my opinion, consumers’ rational decisions in a mixed market economy act as the driving force of both price and the overall success of a business. McDonald’s efforts to change its public image likely resulted from falling profits. Realizing consumers were becoming more health conscious, McDonald’s changed their menu, quality of service, and entire image! From this perspective, consumers have tremendous power over the success of big-businesses in our free market economy.

Sources:

Welch, Patrick J., and Gerry F. Welch. Economics: Theory & Practice. 11th ed., John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2016.

https://www.voanews.com/a/shifting-consumer-tastes-change-fast-food-industry/2814926.html

http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/mcdonald-s-cleans-food-appeal-u-s-tastes/305277/

https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/whats-hot.html

http://www.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-changes-to-improve-business-2014-9

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0fxR2rzZzA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mqscqDcoEY

Robotic Warfare Could Ensnare Democracy Everywhere

In her essay “War Without Humans: Modern Blood Rites Revisited,” Barbara Ehrenreich proposes that modernizing war tactics and weapons alter how people fight wars and form societies. Ehrenreich offers her definition of war as “a self-replicating pattern of activity that may or may not require human participation.”
When first reading Ehrenreich’s essay, one claim, in particular, caught my attention. Ehrenreich states, “Another thing hobbling mass militaries is the increasing unwillingness of nations especially the more democratic ones, to risk large numbers of casualties.” This implies more military jobs are positioned behind computer screens rather than on the front lines. She continues, saying, “The hard right…has campaigned relentlessly against “big government,” apparently not noticing that the military is a sizable chunk of this behemoth.”

While Ehrenreich’s claim initially seemed accusative, I found this pattern of political opinions when searching further for sources on mechanical warfare. Oddly enough, I found no reliable sources from more conservative news outlets arguing against the topic. Such an absence of diverse sources was quite perplexing: Instead of even supporting the use of automated mechanical weaponry, the majority of conservative sources chose not to address the opposing argument at all. (With this in mind, I recognize that my sources as a whole lean towards the left.)
Policies of modernized warfare have been a controversial topic for years now. In fact, a 2013 article from New York Times, generally a more liberal news outlet, highlighted the immorality of mechanical warfare. Christof Heyns, a United Nations special rapporteur, supported his decision to prohibit lethal automated robotics. Heyns states “War without reflection is mechanical slaughter.” Here, Heyns forces us to question whether robots will make war more accessible, and consequently more frequent.
To relate back to our class discussions, the concept of war without humans reflects a conservative theory, in which a firm government acts as a threat to liberty. Here, presidential involvement would reduce as the president became able to delegate specific roles to automated robotics. If this were the case, would delegating multiple roles reflect presidential success adequately? If success in office associates with a president’s ability to mediate between all of their roles, American citizen’s view of presidential success would have to change as well.

 

 

 

A summary of the President’s Jobs

But if we consider the liberal perspective as real, we then must reflect on the future of warfare amidst the current pattern of stewardship in presidential influence. Stewardship theory, originated by Rosevelt, promised to do anything necessary to protect American citizens, often correlating to an expansion of presidential powers and control. Extension of authority could become a problem as administrative roles rely more heavily upon technological advances, both in communication and modernization of weapons.
Behind a mindless computer screen, politicians will potentially act on hasty decisions without having time to think them over. In my opinion, increased presidential power and accessibility of warfare could eventually lead to deploying missiles at the click of a button in our technological and impulsive era. 

Sources:

Cumming-bruce, Nick. “U.N. Expert Calls for Halt in Military Robot Development.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 30 May 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/05/31/world/europe/united-nations-armed-robots.html.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. “War Without Humans.” The Nation, 29 June 2015, http://www.thenation.com/article/war-without-humans/.

What was Never Declared: An Analysis of the Declaration of Independence

 

 

 

Here is an illustration of Thomas Jefferson discussing the Declaration of Independence with other committee members in Philadelphia, 1776.

Everyone knows the Declaration of Independence: the iconic document that illustrated, in the most eloquent rhetoric, the proclamation of ideas that built the United States. By the same token, very few of us know what the Declaration was supposed to mean. In “American Scripture,” Pauline Maiers analyses the Declaration itself and discusses citizens’ veneration of the text. According to Maiers, Jefferson wrote a draft of the Declaration, but Congress had a significant role in the final wording of the document. Furthermore, the last draft Congress created changed a considerable number of Jefferson’s original statements and deleted an entire paragraph calling for the abolition of slavery. My discovery of this missing passage prompted me to ask, what was it that Jefferson wanted to declare? Was the Declaration changed due to Jefferson’s reasoning or by Congressional omission? Furthermore, how did bowdlerization of the Declaration impact the history of our nation? Such puzzling topics call American citizens to take a closer look at the morals the United States was founded upon.

 

The missing section regarding the slave trade was initially found in the list of grievances against King George III. The adjacent image from nypl.org shows the draft of this passage.

 

This is the omitted passage from the Declaration’s list of grievances.

The passage reads, “He [the king of Britain] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither” (nypl.org). From my reading, Jefferson believes without a doubt that slavery must be abolished to preserve the liberties of all human beings. Furthermore, Jefferson believed that slavery was the greatest threat to the survival of the new American nation. If Jefferson abhorred slavery, how could he list King George III’s oppressive rule of the colonies while simultaneously being an oppressor of slaves?

 

After investigating further, I discovered a critical puzzle piece in the full picture of the Declaration’s hidden passage: Jefferson himself was a slaveowner. With this in mind, perhaps Jefferson feared the possible backfire that would result from him acting upon his beliefs. After all, his views were quite radical at a time when slave labor was the social norm. At the same time, Jefferson may have grown accustomed to this way of life and chose to preserve economic stability instead of promoting positive change. In the Smithsonian Magazine, historian David Brion Davis exclaims, “In 1860, the value of Southern slaves was about three times the amount invested in manufacturing or railroads nationwide. The only asset more valuable than the black people was the land itself” (Smithsonian Magazine). In this context, economic stability seems a likely cause for Jefferson to put his moral values on the back-burner.

To continue, I questioned the significance of the omitted passage. Historian John Chester Miller puts its value in context, stating, “The inclusion of Jefferson’s strictures on slavery and the slave trade would have committed the United States to the abolition of slavery” (Smithsonian magazine). Miller displays with shocking clarity the historic change that would have occurred if the omitted passage had remained in the Declaration. Such statements provoke Americans to ask themselves, what would America be like today if the passage was never omitted? Would we still come face to face with such daunting civil rights issues like police brutality and riots?

At this stage in my research, it became difficult for me to refrain from labeling Jefferson as a hypocrite. While Jefferson saw that slavery violated the “inalienable rights” he was declaring, his actions told a different story. Davis suggests, “The most remarkable thing about Jefferson’s stand on slavery is his immense silence.” And later, Davis finds, Jefferson’s emancipation efforts “virtually ceased” (Smithsonian Magazine).

On my interpretation, Jefferson recognized that he could not be economically successful without slavery. By drawing this conclusion, Jefferson and the committee decided to omit the passage in the Declaration that challenged the social norm. On this note, Jefferson said to John Holmes in 1820, “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” Conversely, Jefferson could have likely given up his goal to abolish slavery due to the political barriers that stood in his way: On July 2, 1776, the members of the Continental Congress edited the draft of the Declaration for three days, removing “Jefferson’s more outlandish assertions and unnecessary words” (American Scripture). Here, Pauline Meiers shows how the final wording of the Declaration was out of Jefferson’s control. Despite this, the editing of the Declaration of Independence promoted systemic hypocrisy and left the document riddled with inconsistency.

Sources

Maier, Pauline. American Scripture. The Easton Press, 1997.

https://www.nypl.org/blog/2012/07/02/closer-look-jeffersons-declaration

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thomas-jefferson-35976004/

https://psychlopedia.wikispaces.com/Cognitive+dissonance

http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/

https://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/wolf-ear-quotation

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/american-scripture-by-pauline-maier/

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=1324

Our Responsibility as Citizens: Popping the Filter Bubble

The filter bubble prevents Americans from fulfilling our responsibilities as engaged citizens. Furthermore, only showing the public what they want to see blinds them to opposing viewpoints, thus limiting their exposure to knowledge. But choosing to expand your perspective beyond your personalized filter bubble will remove this issue and create a country of aware, involved citizens. This act of choosing is known as political efficacy, or a citizen’s ability to understand and influence political affairs. A citizen’s ability and willingness to promote change allows them to engage in all other civic responsibilities, including voting, grassroots mobilization, and cultural change.

The effects of political efficacy in the voting process are enormous. If citizens research and understand the viewpoints of all candidates -from the president down to every representative in city hall- they will know who they are voting for, rather than just straight-ticket voting. While straight-ticket voting may be the best option for some voters, the Pew Research Center’s Political Typology quiz reveals that few members of a political party agree with 100% of their party’s views. Because of this, straight-ticket voting can leave people in office who you would not have voted for if you had been aware of their political views and moral ideals. But choosing to expand your perspective by acknowledging the filter bubble allows citizens to reflect on opinions from all candidates, despite their party affiliation.

Grassroots mobilization is also heavily influenced by a citizen’s efficacy. Grassroots mobilization describes a group of like-minded individuals coming together to make a difference, whether it be economic, social, political, and environmental change. Positive change in a community can only begin when citizens become informed from going out of their way to discover current societal issues. By knowing the problems, citizens can form intellectual opinions, which, upon criticism, can be supported by logic.

Cultural change is a political pathway in which change occurs gradually over time. For example, the legalization of gay marriage has been a public issue for many years. But through lobbying and peaceful protests, those in favor of gay marriage changed the opinions of critics over time. For topics like this, producing positive change can take many years, and therefore requires dedicated and patient citizens to stand for their cause. If the filter bubble prevents us from shedding light on a current issue, it would be impossible to address the matter in the first place.

It is easy for American citizens to overlook the power of civic participation by insisting that just one person doesn’t make a significant difference. But political efficacy allows us to acknowledge the pros and cons of our country. Here, we must be able to recognize where improvements can be made and then improve upon them. We must also acknowledge and utilize the liberties we have, like voting for example. With political efficacy, citizens will be able to vote intellectually, produce positive change in their community, and cause cultural shifts over time. Contrary to the belief that citizen involvement doesn’t make a difference, it is the most effective method of improving our country from the ground up.