The Men Who Made Us Spend

KennyT · 05/07/14 - 21:00

available as a premiere on iPlayer (all 3 eps available) or watch when it's broadcast next Saturday 12th.

Very interesting!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01zxmrv/the-men-who-made-us-spend-episode-1

K

RoseAnne · 06/07/14 - 03:10

I'll be watching this when it's shown on BBC2. I like business documentaries like this.

woofwoof77 · 06/07/14 - 07:40

Yes very interesting programme.

I only discovered it on I player the other day.
I like Jacques Peretti's documentaries .
I was surprised when they were talking about the light bulbs and when manufacturers make things that deliberately break !! I never knew that.

Fieldmouse83 · 06/07/14 - 08:11

Yes i love this sort of documentary, like The Men Who Made Us Fat. I will be gasping with shock horror and outrage during this series too no doubt.

RoseAnne · 06/07/14 - 14:16

woofwoof77 wrote: »

Yes very interesting programme.

I only discovered it on I player the other day.
I like Jacques Peretti's documentaries .
I was surprised when they were talking about the light bulbs and when manufacturers make things that deliberately break !! I never knew that.

I'm not surprised. I digress slightly, but there's a classic 1951 satirical Ealing film called "The Man in the White Suit" which stars Alec Guinness as a scientist who creates a fabric which resists wear and tear, which is rather apt. I heartily recommend it.

KennyT · 06/07/14 - 14:42

RoseAnne wrote: »

I'm not surprised. I digress slightly, but there's a classic 1951 satirical Ealing film called "The Man in the White Suit" which stars Alec Guinness as a scientist who creates a fabric which resists wear and tear, which is rather apt. I heartily recommend it.

and it features in the first episode!

K

RoseAnne · 06/07/14 - 14:49

KennyT wrote: »

and it features in the first episode!

K

Wow, does it?! I didn't know!

KennyT · 06/07/14 - 19:44

2nd episode, also excellent.
3rd episode, starts slowly, but gets more interesting as it goes on.

All in all 9/10...

K

Blister · 10/07/14 - 21:38

An interesting show. I think this (along with The Men Who Made Us Fat) could be called "How America ruined the world".

It's really disturbing how people saw the danger in advertising sugary foods to children and tried to put a stop to it when it started, but "liberty" won out. And now we are paying the price for it. At least a third of adults obese, very high childhood obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, putting a strain on health services and productivity, high levels of personal debt and a very consumerist society.

Now governments are being forced to take action, like not allowing advertising of sweets during children's shows, maybe taxing sugar in the future, limiting credit availability. What a shame the right decisions hadn't been made when it would have counted, in the 70s and 80s.

For some reason I seem to be immune to all of this - the advertising and marketing, the urge to buy new things or have the latest model, the inability to stop eating delicious foods, the inability to control your spending or buying on credit instead of saving. I guess with enough intelligence and willpower it's possible to resist.

1Mickey · 10/07/14 - 21:44

Cheers OP, love his documentaries. Miles better than the junk the BBC churns out on a regular basis.

Blister · 10/07/14 - 23:27

1Mickey wrote: »

Cheers OP, love his documentaries. Miles better than the junk the BBC churns out on a regular basis.

You know this is a BBC documentary?

chestfield · 14/07/14 - 17:14

woofwoof77 wrote: »

Yes very interesting programme.

I only discovered it on I player the other day.
I like Jacques Peretti's documentaries .
I was surprised when they were talking about the light bulbs and when manufacturers make things that deliberately break !! I never knew that.

Oh, the only surprise to me about that was that it dates back to the 1920s; I'd had said the 1970s at the earliest, if pushed

roddydogs · 16/07/14 - 08:44

Wow, we live in a throw away society, who ever knew it? Load of lefty nonsence.

1Mickey · 16/07/14 - 10:52

Blister wrote: »

You know this is a BBC documentary?

Yes but its one of the better ones.

TYCO · 16/07/14 - 10:58

The very latest advice from big pharma stating that all people at risk of HIV should be taking preventative drugs is a shining example of how they want as many people on medication as possible. I'm starting to believe the conspiracy theorists when they say that HIV was a deliberate invention in the first place.

Tassium · 16/07/14 - 11:37

The tendancy of the left is to excuse the individual from all responsibility.

The tendancy of the right is to excuse big business from all responsibility.

I didn't watch this programme, did it excuse the individual from all responsibility?

Shrike · 16/07/14 - 13:07

TYCO wrote: »

The very latest advice from big pharma stating that all people at risk of HIV should be taking preventative drugs is a shining example of how they want as many people on medication as possible. I'm starting to believe the conspiracy theorists when they say that HIV was a deliberate invention in the first place.

Not sure I'd go so far as HIV being deliberate, but its certainly likely big pharma will look to develop treatments rather than cures - after all if you cure someone, you've lost a regular customer!

KennyT · 16/07/14 - 13:21

Tassium wrote: »

The tendancy of the left is to excuse the individual from all responsibility.

The tendancy of the right is to excuse big business from all responsibility.
I didn't watch this programme, did it excuse the individual from all responsibility?

Why not watch it and make up your own mind? You should be able to decide after about half an hour of ep1...

K

[Deleted User] · 16/07/14 - 13:36

Jacques Peretti is obviously a highly intelligent guy who has made a well-researched and interesting documentary. But does nobody else find his voice over delivery really irritating? It's not what he says, it's the repetitive and sing songy way his voice goes up and down.

Obviously he doesn't normally talk like this, as you could hear on sections where he was talking to someone else on camera. So why does he need to declaim everything on the voice over, just speak to the viewer normally FGS. Someone should tell him, because it is bloody annoying!

td1983 · 16/07/14 - 13:46

Annabee wrote: »

Jacques Peretti is obviously a highly intelligent guy who has made a well-researched and interesting documentary. But does nobody else find his voice over delivery really irritating? It's not what he says, it's the repetitive and sing songy way his voice goes up and down.

Obviously he doesn't normally talk like this, as you could hear on sections where he was talking to someone else on camera. So why does he need to declaim everything on the voice over, just speak to the viewer normally FGS. Someone should tell him, because it is bloody annoying!

Agreed, but he does make good documentaries despite this. I first heard his voice on one of those sex documentaries Channel 4 and Channel 5 used to show a lot of years ago. Back then, I just thought it was a deliberately sarcastic voice in step with the lighthearted tone of the programme, but he really does narrate this way, all the time! Like you say, when he talks to people on camera, you can hear a more ordinary tone coming out of him, why can't he apply the same logic to the narration? You can't take what he says entirely seriously because of it! Jeez! I just wish he could do a "planned obsolescence" of his voice!

[Deleted User] · 16/07/14 - 14:19

Maybe we could stage an intervention? Does he have his own website I wonder?

I can't believe that none of the TV professionals he is presumably working with have said anything, though.

It's a shame, as it really puts me off, and yet the programmes are very interesting.

njp · 16/07/14 - 18:56

woofwoof77 wrote: »

I was surprised when they were talking about the light bulbs and when manufacturers make things that deliberately break !! I never knew that.

chestfield wrote: »

Oh, the only surprise to me about that was that it dates back to the 1920s; I'd had said the 1970s at the earliest, if pushed

The trouble with the light bulb narrative is that it's mostly nonsense. As I said in another thread some time ago:

njp wrote: »

It's not talking from a position of ignorance to tell you that it's easy to make a light bulb that lasts essentially for ever, but that is extremely inefficient. All you need to do is to use a very mechanically robust filament and run it at a much lower temperature than a normal incandescent bulb. But the price you pay is that you will get much less useful light (look up "black body radiation" and Wien's displacement law, if you want the gory details).

So it is immediately obvious that there is a tradeoff here. If you make the filament thinner, and run it hotter, much more of the energy emitted will be in the part of the electromagnetic spectrum to which the human eye is most sensitive. So now you will get much more light for the energy used by the bulb. The price you pay for doing that is that it is now so hot that some of the metal will boil off and be lost to the filament. That's why old standard (non-halogen) incandescent bulbs go black, as the tungsten from the filament condenses on the cool glass envelope. And as the filament loses metal, it gets thinner, and develops hot spots, and eventually one of these will cause the filament to break - usually at the point of maximum thermal stress, when you switch the bulb on. End of bulb. So another way of prolonging the life of a bulb is never to switch it off - but of course that will cost you far more in electricity than you would save by simply replacing the bulb.

So the only real question is what the optimum life is, not that there should be one, and whether the "Phoebus cartel", which existed between 1924 and 1939, managed to stitch that up for all time to the detriment of the consumer, as the conspiracy theorists claim.

The manufacture of incandescent bulbs involves a lot of different patents, and the Phoebus cartel seem to have agreed to share ownership of some of them, to give them a commercial advantage over independent manufacturers, who were in some cases protected against litigation for patent infringement by agreeing to comply with sales quotas and pricing restrictions. So that was probably bad for the consumer, but does it justify the conspiracy theorist's lifespan claims?

Well, I found a Monopolies and Restrictive Practices Commission "Report on the supply of electric lamps" from 1951, which includes this paragraph:

"285. As regards life standards, before the Phoebus Agreement and to this day the general service filament lamp was and is designed to have, on average, a minimum life of 1,000 hours. It has often been alleged—though not in evidence to us—that the Phoebus organisation artificially made the life of a lamp short with the object of increasing the number of lamps sold. As we have explained in Chapter 9. there can be no absolutely right life for the many varying circumstances to be found among the consumers in any given country, so that any standard life must always represent a compromise between conflicting factors. B.S.I, has always adopted a single life standard for general service filament lamps, and the representatives of both B.S.I, and B.E.A., as well as most lamp manufacturers, have told us in evidence that they regard 1,000 hours as the best compromise possible at the present time, nor has any evidence been offered to us to the contrary. Accordingly we must dismiss as misconceived the allegation referred to above."

However, there was a type B lamp:

"281. E.L.M.A. provides in its rules for members to make, if they wish, general service filament lamps called " Type B " for sale at lower prices than E.L.M.A. lamps proper. For these lamps, which do not bear the usual trade marks of E.L.M.A. members, a maximum efficiency and a maximum life are laid down by E.LM.A., and each member's sales are limited in quantity. The fixed prices of 'these lamps have not been changed since before the war, while the prices of E.L.M.A. lamps proper have been (see Appendix 15 (Table 6)), and production is now very small, being practically entirely confined to Crompton's " Kye " lamp. We recommend that E.L.M.A.'s rules should be altered so as to remove both the limitation on the quantity allowed and the upper limits on efficiency and life of these lamps. No doubt the lower limits of efficiency and life would have to be below the limits for E.L.M.A. lamps proper, but upper limits are contrary to the public interest."

KennyT · 16/07/14 - 19:51

So, is this a faked document?

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=phoebus+cartel+myth&start=20&client=firefox-a&sa=N&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=sb&tbm=isch&imgil=H1CLGAFrPJWotM%253A%253Bhttps%253A%252F%252Fencrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com%252Fimages%253Fq%253Dtbn%253AANd9GcQ429gXRM_7a8tvCmBcMJptLDZ85AaYA7zPjRw1jL4Awn66cri7IA%253B1114%253B735%253BnQy4zDTAzGDcYM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fphoenixaquua.blogspot.com%25252F2013%25252F04%25252Fconsumption-vanity-disorder-cvd.html&source=iu&usg=__rXjQGI-g2fCmD0KMxTQ5uAQ0ato%3D&ei=KMTGU8ngEcjQ7Abf1oGgCg&ved=0CEwQ9QEwBTgU&biw=1920&bih=958#facrc=_&imgdii=_&imgrc=rRgodyTyeP7YYM%253A%3BJGyRt8wZBwd_xM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252F4.bp.blogspot.com%252F-Cftlw53sgEY%252FT6WVocWvV9I%252FAAAAAAAAAoM%252Fv4RHmXRifDU%252Fs1600%252Flightbulbconspiracyletter_725_850.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Ffreedomlightbulb.blogspot.com%252F2012%252F05%252Flightbulb-conspiracy-documentary-by.html%3B725%3B850

K

njp · 16/07/14 - 21:12

KennyT wrote: »

So, is this a faked document?

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=phoebus+cartel+myth&start=20&client=firefox-a&sa=N&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=sb&tbm=isch&imgil=H1CLGAFrPJWotM%253A%253Bhttps%253A%252F%252Fencrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com%252Fimages%253Fq%253Dtbn%253AANd9GcQ429gXRM_7a8tvCmBcMJptLDZ85AaYA7zPjRw1jL4Awn66cri7IA%253B1114%253B735%253BnQy4zDTAzGDcYM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fphoenixaquua.blogspot.com%25252F2013%25252F04%25252Fconsumption-vanity-disorder-cvd.html&source=iu&usg=__rXjQGI-g2fCmD0KMxTQ5uAQ0ato%3D&ei=KMTGU8ngEcjQ7Abf1oGgCg&ved=0CEwQ9QEwBTgU&biw=1920&bih=958#facrc=_&imgdii=_&imgrc=rRgodyTyeP7YYM%253A%3BJGyRt8wZBwd_xM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252F4.bp.blogspot.com%252F-Cftlw53sgEY%252FT6WVocWvV9I%252FAAAAAAAAAoM%252Fv4RHmXRifDU%252Fs1600%252Flightbulbconspiracyletter_725_850.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Ffreedomlightbulb.blogspot.com%252F2012%252F05%252Flightbulb-conspiracy-documentary-by.html%3B725%3B850

K

That's a rather bizarrely constructed google image search, which returns many results, none of which seem relevant. Perhaps a direct link to the document in question might help.

Edit: A scripting issue was stopping me seeing the image I assume you wanted me to see, which is a 1929 letter about a particular lamp having its design life changed from 300 hours to 200 hours.

So how does this support the 1000 hour conspiracy? It concerns a low voltage (6V) automobile headlamp, and we don't know why the design life was changed.

KennyT · 16/07/14 - 22:08

njp wrote: »

That's a rather bizarrely constructed google image search, which returns many results, none of which seem relevant. Perhaps a direct link to the document in question might help.

Edit: A scripting issue was stopping me seeing the image I assume you wanted me to see, which is a 1929 letter about a particular lamp having its design life changed from 300 hours to 200 hours.

So how does this support the 1000 hour conspiracy? It concerns a low voltage (6V) automobile headlamp, and we don't know why the design life was changed.

it was the "keep it secret" bit that I thought "interesting" and that it came from the 1920's from GE, which illustrates that the practice of "lowering the bulb life" was an actuality, albeit not necessarily widespread at that time. Had the letter included something along the lines of "in order to increase the brightness to improve safety" as a justification, I would have found it less "interesting"...

K

njp · 16/07/14 - 23:09

And that's your best evidence for a global light bulb conspiracy extending from the 1920s to the present day?

Hey there!

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The Men Who Made Us Spend

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