Rent Seeking Society

The world we live in today is dominated by the outstretched hands of corporations that seek to influence and manipulate our every decision. The corporate world is leading a multi-pronged assault for total control over the consumer through deceptive advertising, relentless exploitation of untapped markets, and unethical wealth creation practices. In “Rent Seeking and the Making of an Unequal Society” by Joseph Stiglitz, we are presented with the concept of rent seeking. It is an umbrella ideology that includes various unethical practices used by the wealthy to drain the lower classes of their wealth and redistribute it at the top. The corporations that are solely after monetary gain, do so at the expense of the poor and are taking from society

However, rent-seeking behavior is not just confined to practices that help maintain a financial hegemony. In “The Mega-Marketing of Depression” by Ethan Watters and “Biographies of Hegemony” by Karen Ho, corporations actively sought to shape the cultural viewpoints of consumers in order to grow their profits and prestige. In their greed-filled pursuit of the dollar, corporations and financial firms were causing the homogenization of cultures and people by changing their conceptions of what equated better health, education/career, and true innovation. These corporations have established an economic and cultural hegemony over their target consumer group, a hegemony on multiple scales, with each level bolstering the next. The rent seeking behavior carried out by corporations has overarching consequences on society that lead to the widening of the gap of inequality between rich and poor and the formation of a hegemony that poses a threat to all members of society

In “The Mega-Marketing of Depression”, pharmaceutical companies were only after growing their profits and infiltrating a new “market”. However, it proved to not be as simple as they predicted because depression was poorly understood and was not perceived as a dangerous illness. The Japanese conception of depression was completely different from its American counterpart, “Indeed, around the world, it is the Western conception of depression, in particular the American version of the disease, that is the most culturally distinctive” (Watters 518). Similarly, in “Biographies of Hegemony”, Karen Ho discusses the cultural shift in attitudes towards Wall Street firms in society and Ivy League students. Financial firms were trying to change what the definition of “smartness” encompasses and what defined a good career. For these firms “smartness” was, “…represented and reinforced by a specific appearance and bodily technique that dominantly signals that impressiveness…such characteristics included being smartly dressed, dashing appearance, mental quickness, aggressiveness, and vigor…” (Ho 167). They were trying to generalize their definition of smartness on the student bodies of Ivy League universities and create this cookie-cutter idea of the perfect candidate for a job. In doing such, financial firms were molding the minds of graduates as they saw fit