End of the Intermediate Trend?

[Hoofhurr]

It's a bit naive to think that all consumers are going to be informed consumers. If you look at things like credit card contracts, home loans, paint/toys/pet food from china, advanced financial instruments,the actual cost of health care, and subsidized food industries, you can see where even half-way smart consumers like myself might get into trouble.

Imagine a market where the consumer had to understand everything they were purchasing. Much less would be purchased and this is clearly not the case for most purchases. Advertising would take the form of a lesson plan and there would be fewer hot chicks in commercials. Most people take it on faith that reputable companies won't try to screw them and that regulatory agencies are properly motivated and funded to protect us. Unfortunately, neither of these are true and there's not much the average consumer can do about it.

As long as the gap between consumer and product continues to widen we're going to experience more of these boom/bust cycles. I think many of the larger more ingrained problems with our world stem from precisely this issue. The issue that there is this huge, tangible, intellectual, geographical, gap between the consumer and the product. Most consumers have no idea what a product or service really costs because of their obtuseness and complexity. Isn't the market failing to accurately value products if the majority of consumers don't understand the products they are buying?

I've tried to think of a way for the market to self-regulate and competition succeeds fairly well at this but companies competing in a market have already agreed to certain terms. If you're building coal-fired power plants and so is your competitor then you really don't want to call out your competitor on polluting the environment. Or more importantly, it's really hard to convey that message to your consumers in a tangible way.

I'm fairly convinced that prices for something sort of get ingrained in a person's mentality or in the social consciousness and that has much more of an impact on value than the cost of the product itself.