It’s only a few days to Christmas. It was supposed to be the season of goodwill to all men when I was a kid. Now it’s the season for fulfilling the desires fuelled by a merciless commercial engine, whatever the cost to the consumer. I thought about the difference between the needs of people and their artificially accumulated desires, and came up with this.

America has a number of advertising geniuses. These are people who can convince you that you cannot exist without something that wasn’t even available until yesterday. They have worked very hard at creating assumptions over the years. They don’t ask me if I have a car, they ask me what kind of car I have. They don’t ask me whether I watch TV, they ask me my favorite programs. I haven’t watched TV since 1950, when I saw it was becoming a method of mind control. And that was in Britain, with the BBC.

The Holy Grail of Social Science is predictability. The S.A.T. scores, I.Q. tests, Gallup Polls, we hear about them all the time, and distrust them much of the time.

Politicians want definite, accurate predictions about the behavior of voters.

Marketers drool at the very concept of a totally predictable consumer population, and do their best to create it by cunning psychology and research about T.V. watching and demographics.

It is refreshing to learn about an amazingly accurate method of predicting success that required material that costs less than a dollar. This may be the reason it isn’t widely used today, in spite of its success. It was the marshmallow test applied to four year olds in the 1960's.