STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Thursday, 25 October 2012

[Demeter]

7. Kids: Smarter Than Adults By Jeffrey Tucker

http://dailyreckoning.com/kids-smarter-than-adults/

FIRST HE TALKS ABOUT KID MOVIES VS. "ADULT" (R-RATED)

...My explanation is this: Kids movies are better because the kids market is more demanding than the rest of the consumer market. And to put it plainly, kids are more clever than adults and they insist that the services they consume are top quality. Kids easily spot a fraud. The market is merely conforming to consumer demand. It’s that simple. But can it really be true that kids have a keener sense in some areas than adults? Not in every area. Kids have ridiculously short time horizons, for example. But in other ways, they know things that we do not...Here’s an example of where kids prove themselves much smarter than their parents. From an early age, and really from their first interactions with peers, kids become obsessed with their clothes. They have to have the right clothes made by the right makers and with the right insignias and logos.

Parents find this preposterous and maddening. One year, the kid will want a Hilfiger shirt and the next it must be Izod — but the exact same style and color! Surely, this is proof of the outrageous superficiality of the child’s mind, the way in which immaturity leads to mental fog, and the intense need for parents to constantly shape these dumbbells into people who can make sound judgments.

But there’s the problem: It turns out that the kids are more correct than their parents. Last year, Rob Nelissen and Marijn Meijers of Tilburg University in the Netherlands published a paper in Evolution and Human Behavior showing the result of empirical studies of designer labels. In every case, as a report in The Economist shows, it turns out that wearing the right label leads to more success in every area of life.

Volunteers were shown pictures of people with known designer labels and unknown labels but otherwise wearing the same clothes. People were asked which person enjoys a higher social and economic status. The designer label wearer won easily. Silly? Not really. Researchers further tested by sending out people to do a survey. The survey workers who wore designer labels had 58% success in getting people to answer questions, but the same people with the same clothes and no label had only a 15% success rate. The implication: People wearing status logos have more credibility. Then the researchers asked people to put themselves in the position of a boss and asked them to hire people from videos of job interviews. They overwhelming majority picked the people with fancy logos in view, and even rewarded them higher salaries. Finally, people who collect for charity while wearing designer labels were able to collect more money than those who were wearing the same clothes without the labels. This is interesting because it challenges the first intuition that people just assume that the person wearing the label is richer. Actually, it is even deeper than that: People presume that the person is more trustworthy too. They further proved this point with a game that involved transferring money to people with and without labels. Overall, then, people who wear designer labels are more successful, more trusted, paid more, and hired more and enjoy better lives. You can say that it ridiculous, and it probably is, but the kids are the objective ones here. They are intuiting the facts. And they are responding to the world around them in ways that are realistic and likely to get them where they want to be. Parents, completely oblivious to these important realities, try to stop this from happening, under the presumption that the kid is deluded...


I REALLY DON'T THINK THEY HAD DESIGNER LABELS BEFORE THE 70'S...SO THAT'S WHERE I WENT WRONG, MAKING MY OWN CLOTHES, BUYING ON PRICE, FIT AND COLOR, NOT "STYLE"....