He sold. Yeah. He sure did. Michael Pollan sold a lot of books, so his publisher made a profit. But - this is already last year. Who will sell the publishing house's product this year?A success story in publishing, he sold lots of books. OK that was already last year. Who will sell the books this year?
He favored basic, good food. OK. Nothing wrong with that. But houze about you eating some poor food now?
After all, a book is a book, right? What will sell this year?
Or, this time, should Pollan's publisher put out some book that calls for maybe poor food? A book on poor eating (it's called "food porn," as I understand it, or possibly italicization porn) may sell just as many copies as the books on basic, good food and all about how to eat in a basic way that used less prepared food. So, everything's equal. Right?
In our way of life, does succeeding equal making money (more ital vital there)? If you only care about making money, and you are a publishing house, they're all equal.
What all this means -- logically if not so very commercially -- is that you would not want to stop with Michael Pollan. You want another big seller this year. If not in the array of products easy to grab on the shelves, or in libraries, where is the battle of good and bad being waged?
If not in the economy, where? In the heart of the individual, of course. Inside the mind (Buddha's answer). There is man and there is man's information. And man's information is a social affair. That is a battle that is actually waged everywhere, all the time. It is not particularly in the individual and not particularly in the "market" -- and also, we must not use too narrow of a definition for "market." Market should mean something more like society. But regardless of whether we use the more broad definition that would make "market" more like a code word for "society," which is what I think it really is, there is in any case a battle going on, in which there are two sides: good and bad. The "market" does not even decide that battle. The market, therefore, I would argue, is not there to give us a better society. For example, the "Western" (movie) is the stage, a stage on which to pit the good guys against the bad guys. The market is only the platform; it doesn't decide anything. The economic system or market system is merely a place where we play out the action. In a stage play, the stage itself, the play of the platform, is totally (?) passive. The floorboards simply support the action. (But they bend a little?)
You can go to the bookstore and see it very well. Bad books sell just as good books do. We also have a society in which persons eat bad foods. They do that just as often (actually more often) as they eat good foods. Now, books about bad food could be just as interesting, from an entertainment, or a pecuniary, or even several other points of view, depending upon what the individual chooses to read, as books telling us righteously how to maintain better dietary habits and do dumb things like stay alive, by eating less "market," or processed food (which is what Pollan sold so many books about). So the question I am left with is: what are markets for? Do markets, of themselves, give us a better society? Well, whatever our reasoning, that is a big question.
The market contain's man's information. It does not process it, however. That is what I think. It just contains it. The market contains all of this information. Whether we pick a good book or a bad book is up to us. There is man, and there is man's information --- his ideology, all the fine print.
The market, therefore, does not filter, or cull the good information from the bad. The market is a stage. On which action is played out. (With bad grammar, in other wurds!) We need to regulate. That is because, while capitalism did develop in our society, the rest is up to us, not up to "the market," which is a euphemism, a word somebody is using to deceive you.
Thus, the theoretical point here: "market," by itself, does not determine or decide anything whatsoever.
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