Ask Max: If theres something that can basically describe a people, what is it?

If theres anything that fundamentally describes a community, its neither the government nor the economy nor their religion, its the marketplace.

Go to a physical marketplace or any other area where goods are sold such as groceries, bazaars or malls, and you dont just get to see a curious variety of products arranged in labeled shelves to keep us sane in the entire process. What you see is a set of details that by deconstruction tells lot of things about the people whom this market caters to.

The primary reason why certain products are there isnt because the manufacturers placed them in and told consumers to simply get along with them. Its a total fallacy to say that these producers or vendors play the role of dictators of consumer preference. Most of us believe for example that our increasing dependence on processed food at the turn of the millennium was caused by the advent of artificial processing methods. It doesnt beat common sense at first but if you take a deeper look at it you will realize that it isnt their proliferation that makes us reliant on meals with longer shelf-life, it is our tendency to prefer processed food for various reasons that keeps production continuous.

Hence we can say that its simply grounded on the basic principles of supply and demand. But theres something quite crueler than this. To go on with our example, we didnt prefer processed foods when they were first introduced. We have already preferred processed foods even before the very first processed food came to existence.

You might say I am drunk, but if you ask a few hundred cavemen 5000 years ago and you get lucky to be alive to repeat the same question to the next respondent, your survey would likely yield an overwhelming number of ayes on processed food, that had they been taught how to grind an ibex into a hotdog or make a meatloaf out of the loins of a mammoth they would have worshipped you the same way we worship MacDonalds today, and Kraft would have been merely an understudy of the dairy grandpas of 4800 BC.

The marketplace can be one of the indicators of a peoples dreams and wishes. The more sophisticated it becomes, the more details it reveals on the long-repressed wants of the consumer. From this we can make several other derivative theories. The popularity of a particular mobile brand doesnt produce neurotic problems but rather reveals a once-dormant neurotic hang-up. Stampedes during Black Friday sales reveal peoples grim suspension of empathy when faced with binary choices. In many ways the marketplace gives us a hint on how we struggle to survive in our daily lives even if it simply means getting by through inconveniences, boredom or unhappiness.

Speaking of unhappiness, this reminds me of a study conducted by a porn website in which countries are rated according to the eagerness of their peoples libido, as well as of the data generated by a dating agency in which British cities are rated according to the number of adulterers. One can do this in many other occasions, e.g. to find out which state in America believes the most in Fox News.

Now that we have not only physical marketplaces but also virtual marketplaces (like Amazon and E-Bay) we have many ways to gauge the interests of communities, which is wonderful as these can provide us a more detailed map of the entire sociological picture. Its importance is that by getting to know more about a people we will be able to understand which of its qualities and how such qualities define social behavior when it comes to politics, religion, public choice and so forth.