Problems of Post-War Capitalism in the United States

By Pat McLoughlin
When the book Problems of Post-War Capitalism in the United States is talking about how important marketing is in American capitalism, I will agree with the fact that advertising is extremely important in stimulating the economy. I will also agree that because of the money we spend on advertising and products, it somewhat has an effect on the job market, but at one point in the book they said that more products will keep bringing more jobs. I think that as with most things this happens to a certain point, but maybe our society has reached this point. Advertising for a product will create the urge for people to buy that product, but at what expense?

Customers will stop buying one thing to buy the new thing and although the new product is getting more customers, the older product is losing customers. In this case, the job market does not change. As one company needs more employees, the other will need less. There is more or less something for everything in the world currently so once you introduce something new to the market it is just going to take away customers from another group.

For some reason reading this book made me think about my 6-week stay in Ghana. As I read here how fragile Capitalism seems to be and how our market, buying habits, and job market affect our economy so much, I realized that much of this was not present in Ghana. I am not saying that their society is any better place than us, but the stress dealing with certain issues does not exist there. In capitalism I feel like people all want to succeed. Prestige is worked toward and wealth is always an issue. In Ghana, fame, wealth, and power have a less important role in people's lives and therefore the general public is a lot less stressed on a day-to-day basis.

From this book I learned that capitalism might not be the way to go. This is somewhat contradicting because most Americans have been brought up learning that capitalism is the only option and it's the right way. Reading about capitalisms dependency on advertising and buying products is disconcerting because if that market ever died or was altered, capitalism would fail. I am also very interested in going green and the constant buying of new products seems wasteful to me. If products were made to last a long time and not break/become obsolete, then people would be able to save money and be less wasteful. Unfortunately, after reading this book, I see now that if this were the case, capitalism would greatly suffer. I believe in the future we will have to find an alternative to capitalism.