This Week in Irony
The Economist | How cries against consumerism have become another form of marketing
Mr Heath and Mr Potter argue that “the counterculture,” in all its attempts to be subversive, has done nothing more than create new segments of the market, and thus ends up feeding the very monster of consumerism and conformity it hopes to destroy. In the process, they cover Marx, Freud, the experiments on obedience of Stanley Milgram, the films “Pleasantville”, “The Matrix” and “American Beauty”, 15th-century table manners, Norman Mailer, the Unabomber, real-estate prices in central Toronto (more than once), the voluntary-simplicity movement and the world’s funniest joke. George Sand goes unmentioned; otherwise the authors might have fitted all of Western civilisation into a 360-page book.