I saw an ad earlier that said "Tips to help you save", and I thought of tips such as buying less over-hyped, useless products like cases especially made for your hard drive or your computer or your pencils or your jewelry, or not trusting and buying products that promise to make you less weight as if by magic, but instead focus on speeding up one's own metabolism and reducing the amount/increasing the quality of the food one consumes. I've learned some other tips from my mom: use sodium bicarbonate instead of toothpaste, or just hot water and salt. Use a slice of lemon instead of deodorant. Keep sugar packets, napkins, and plastic cutlery from the food places you go to, and use them in your house. Or simply reducing the excessive luxuries that some people seem to indulge on.
Of course, these are not the tips that would most likely be included in this ad. Most likely these tips would be to buy certain *kinds* of brands or products *instead* of these others, because they will *save* you money. And indeed, these tips may be true and useful, but they essentially keep consumption levels fairly the same. Advertising of this kind only re-directs the consumers' focus from one product to another, and does not necessarily find the MOST efficient and frugal manner to take care of one's necessities.
But then I thought: "If a mass advertisement were indeed to promote the reduction of consumption, and make people realize that much of what they purchase is frivolously unnecessary, what would be its income source? Who has the resources to fund such a campaign? More importantly perhaps, how can this campaign sustain itself? Who would gain from promoting a campaign that attempts to *reduce* consumers' consumption. Only the consumers themselves, actually - but no single entity will profit financially from such an effect of reduction. And, of course, entities possess only a limited amount of resources to dispose of for such a campaign, so if one is to be, it must be supported by very wealthy philanthropists, or by an aware and selfless community who desires to promote well-being in their fellow people.
There are very few examples to illustrate this concept, however. There are many non-profit organizations who direct their efforts toward some specific objective or another, such as helping underdeveloped communities and families to find education or work, or helping conserve the earth's natural resources and living beings, or other such tasks. But money-finding seems to me to always be a critical point, dependent only a few wealthy, good-willing people, but whose own resources are limited, and who cannot always support such organizations indefinitely. So somehow, most of these non-profit organizations depend upon an artificial source of income - one that is not driven as an effect of the organization itself, but is rather the decision made by a relatively small number of benefactors.
The least artificial example that comes to mind of a non-profit organization is Wikipedia. The one exception in my mind. A tremendously popular online encyclopedia about any knowledge known to mankind, people can browse and search through millions of articles and find almost any answer about objective knowledge that one can think of. Wikipedia produces a huge service to the online community, and it has no other income source except individual donors. Since the amount of people that Wikipedia affects is SO ENORMOUS, the financial support of Wikipedia can become a statistically, financially, well-supported system. Some people will decide to donate, some people will decide not to. Some will donate more, some will donate less. And according to a law of large numbers, the expected amount of support from the Wikipedia users should not be hard to predict, and should with relative ease be predicted. It is not like a business, guaranteed to profit if it sells well. Instead it is a system supported dynamically, holding up on the faith on probabilities that will keep a sufficient amount of the population interested in directly feeding their support unto such a useful enterprise.
No comments:
Post a Comment