To the Editor:

David Brooks rightly points out that lack of social protections, individual responsibilities and environmental pressures are all important variables that factor into our culture of hyper-consumption and debt. But in referring to our penchant for “retail therapy” and unhealthy financial decision-making, he did not mention a broader social problem: the very deliberate creation of irrational needs to mitigate our reasoning ability and get us to spend.

Our desire to spend more than we have is directly related to the emotion-laden tsunami of marketing messages we swim in daily, a flood that only keeps increasing in intensity. To ignore the role of an unharnessed public relations industry when discussing the hows and whys of our choices is to ignore a much more insidious, and remediable, cultural problem.

Yosef Brody
New York, July 23, 2008

Note from KBJ: The devil made me do it!