Buyer Beware in the Celebrity Age

The efficacy of celebrity endorsement, if it truly exists, is enough to make one despair of humanity. Such endorsement is so patently insincere, or irrelevant even if sincere, that no thinking person could or should be influenced by it.

Clearly, producers wouldn’t pay huge sums unless they thought that endorsement by celebrities and stars had a positive effect on sales. We know that there are upticks in the rate of suicide, especially among the young, if someone is portrayed in a soap opera as having committed suicide, so obviously there’s a tendency to imitation, even unto death. In Sweden, a young man committed suicide live, so to speak, on Facebook and, without necessarily having intended to do so, took several people with him thereafter.

In practice, no doubt, it’s often difficult for the buyer to beware. Recently, for example, I hired a car for a few days in Barcelona. If I had read all the small print of the contract, as well as that of the insurance, I should probably still be in Barcelona airport. If in addition I had sought the most advantageous contract among all the car-hire companies, I should have undertaken a lifetime’s work akin to reading the regulations relating to Medicare.

But investing large sums of money in an ethereal product because a diamond ear-studded billionaire footballer with four or five hundred million followers on social media says it’s a good thing to do is of a foolishness that exceeds even mine in listening to my financial adviser without investigating how far his recommendations are better for him than for me. In fact, I don’t even know how I would go about doing so.

Would I be better following my own instincts, or following the advice of some different adviser? Are the performances of financial advisers distributed around a mean (as is height)? If so, is that distribution the result of chance or of differences in skill and knowledge? And how long does one have to follow an adviser’s performance before concluding that he’s good, bad, or indifferent? An excellent year may be followed by a catastrophic one, or vice versa, and deciding what part the adviser has played in either by comparison with market conditions or the performance of other advisers is a labor that I don’t have enough time or interest to undertake. All I want is that he should good enough, and that my savings, insofar as is possible, should increase rather than decrease in value. I don’t want him to make me rich; I want him only to help me avoid poverty. But unless he commits outright fraud or theft, I can’t blame him if he fails to do so. It’s I who took his advice.

My next-door neighbor in England is, as it happens, a mortgage broker. He remains astonishingly responsible for the decisions that his clients make for many years after they have made them. They try to make him responsible years afterward for their idiotic decisions and improvident behavior by claiming such things as that they didn’t know that interest rates could rise as well as fall or remain low. My neighbor has to spend hours proving to various authorities that he warned his client sufficiently of this many years before; the aggrieved client, now in a financial fix, believes a gross injustice has been done him. My neighbor now has no right to assume or demand minimal common sense in his clients. On the contrary, he must assume that they’re of defective intelligence and utter ignorance—and this after they have undergone 11 years of compulsory education at the least.

Where people have no sense that the buyer should beware, they have only one protection: the government and the law. Thus, roles are reversed: not a government of the people, but a people of the government; and if people aren’t required to use their faculty of judgment, that faculty will atrophy.

First published in the Epoch Times.