Do you ever feel like what you want to do goes against what society ‘wants’ you to do? Like, maybe you want to be a painter, but your parents and your school tell you that you’ll never make any money. Maybe you want to take a gap year after high school but your parents fear you’ll never go to college and, thus, never ‘amount to anything’. Maybe you are attracted to people of your same…
You’re probably not old enough to remember, but a commercial in the 70s reminds me of this episode. In the commercial, a woman who represented Earth informed the viewer, “‘It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” I don’t know if this ad made an impression on me, but my adult self agrees with it. I don’t think we consult Mother Nature often enough. It might be my Evolutionary Ecology background showing, but I tend to…
Lately, I’ve been wondering about capitalism and competition. As I have mentioned in other episodes (links below), competition only occurs when resources are limited. Also, capitalism requires competition to protect consumers from monopolies. While I argue in older episodes that this protective feature often doesn’t work, the fact remains that capitalism requires competition. That competition is a requirement of capitalism is critical BECAUSE competition only occurs when resources are limited. When there are plenty of resources, there…
I used to own a brewery. In our rural location and with our small customer pool, we struggled to be profitable. My partners and I disagreed about how to best approach profitability. One had an MBA and swore by the neo-capitalist, Econ 101 approach to maximizing revenues. Following this popular approach, we were unable to generate returns on the money we threw at advertising, marketing, and solicitation. Though I was the introverted partner, I eventually mustered…
While I don’t want to perpetuate the ‘capitalism sucks’ argument, I want to spend some time on degrowth. Pretty funny that the spell checkers keep correcting ‘degrowth’ to ‘regrowth’. See? This idea is manifested in everything. Because of capitalism, humans have become obsessed with growth. Mostly in the financial sense. The way our global economy is set up, growth is an essential requirement. Maybe THE MOST essential requirement. When we create money we create debt.…
For the past twenty-some Episodes, I have been trying to figure out how to formulate my current question of interest. Generally, I am trying to make the case that Nature provides a wealth of information. Further, I am pleading with humankind to CONSULT nature when making decisions. Especially decisions that affect our species’ or planets’ health. I have used evolution and natural selection (with DNA being the mechanism) as filters, of sorts, that approve or…
If I’ve said it before, I’ve said it a million times. I still feel cheated by the rat race. The American Dream. The big lie. We are born, at least in the USA, dependent on the exchange of labor for money to support the US capitalist system. If we’re lucky we have guardians to support us until we are ‘adults’, but then we have to earn a few thousand dollars a month just to pay…
Are you familiar with the term ‘sustainability’? You may have heard it in the context of environmentalism, and that is a valid use. I actually came to the term via my Ecology and Evolutionary Biology training. I think sustainability is simply about being aware that things run out. My favorite definition is something like: Making sure what you use doesn’t get used up. In the context of The Are vs Should Problem, I think sustainability…
With respect to economics, people often say that you have to grow to stay in business. I heard this a lot when I tried to run my business at a static level of production (i.e., no growth). I found that we actually HAD MORE MONEY left over when we controlled expenses and held production at the level of demand. I discovered that we spent so much money on growth that we were more profitable when…
I despise aggressive marketing aimed at taking advantage of consumers. But it is necessary to share ideas through some sort of advertising. Here I discuss what I know about these words and how some can be evil. Preview video here: Preview video here: https://business.facebook.com/kpluseiswise/videos/680457336008969/ Full Episodes here: https://chrisburcher.com/2020/05/22/episode-5-marketing-and-solicitation/