Manufacturing Preferences

On Easter Sunday 1929, a group of women walked down Fifth Avenue in New York City smoking cigarettes. They had been hired by Edward Bernays, a publicist working for the American Tobacco Company, to light up in public and treat their cigarettes as what Bernays called “torches of freedom.” Women smoking in public was a social taboo; framing the act as feminist defiance was designed to dissolve that taboo and open the female market to tobacco sales. It worked. Tobacco companies made billions of dollars from this new market in the century that followed, while millions of women worldwide died of cancer. Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, and he had taken his uncle’s ideas about unconscious desire and applied them to commerce. His insight was that you do not need to argue with people about whether they want something. You can create the conditions under which they will want it. The behavioral economics post explained how people make decisions differently than the rational-actor model…