Xerographica wrote:Anywhere Else But Here wrote:Why? Wouldn't it just prove that less people want to buy a copy of the Wealth of Nations?
There's no point in anybody buying The Wealth of Nations... it's freely available online. From my perspective The Wealth of Nations is the most important book. So if voting ranked it higher than donating did, then this would falsify my belief in spending.
How many people do you know that buy, say, sandwiches? These are literally the easiest thing in the world to make. People know how to make them. In fact, very rarely are bought sandwiches nicer than home-made ones. So why on earth do people buy them?
The answer is that people buy things for more than just having the things. With the case of sandwiches, coffee and slices of cake it's frequently time that people are buying.
The generalisable lesson is that the expenditure of a person on any arbitrary thing never has an obvious meaning. In fact, we can't believe that the underlying meanings are consistent.
And sure we could just say that people only do stuff that makes them happy, but what you're wanting and requiring is that we break utility down... decompose it into its component parts... but we just can't do that. Not in any generalisable fashion anyway.
see also: involvement (marketing)