C. Wright Mills Quotes
Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.
Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. Oxford University Press, 1956, p. 314.
This quotation appears to be typical of critics’ complaints about modern media and political reform movements lowing their standards and just trying to provide entertainment for the masses. The reason that it is noteworthy is that it was written in 1909. It is typical of the same class of complaints of 100 years later.
An economic bubble occurs when the investing public with little logic and facts to support it actions exhibits great enthusiasm and overvalues some kind of asset with the logic that the price is going up and someone later will pay more than I just did—sometimes called the “greater fool theory”. Historically Fama claims that there were no bubbles until there were media to whip up the irrational enthusiasm necessary for a bubble to take place. Capitalist history is full of bubbles ranging from real estate, to tulips; from silver to dot com shares. The damage is always great to the people at the end who are stuck with the object of the bubble which few people want any more. In the period before the bubble, lots of people make money contributing to the demand for the object of the bubble.
Charles Wright Mills was an American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills was published widely in popular and intellectual journals. He is remembered for several books, such as The Power Elite, which introduced that term and describes the relationships and class alliances among the US political, military, and economic elites; White Collar: The American Middle Classes, on the American middle class; and The Sociological Imagination, which presents a model of analysis for the interdependence of subjective experiences within a person's biography, the general social structure, and historical development.
