Conversation With A Correspondent

"Sell to the masses, live with the swells; sell to the swells, live with the masses."

Is the implication to live conservatively, or humbly, although you could live w/the swells if you wanted, like Warren Buffet lives with the masses, in his little brick house in Omaha?  

***Well, he owns his first home also...  he has a palace in Santa Monica, home is switzerland, etc...  I mean to saying being absorbed in your work inures you to whatever anyone else has...  you are surrounded by what you love.  (Another way to say it:  first generation makes it, 2nd enjoys it, 3rd loses it)***

I want to sketch briefly the milieu of the start-up company.  I break down in the book, following Drucker, the symbiotic relationship between the innovator and the conservator: the innovator introduces the new, the conservator lowers the cost and eventually makes the product or service available universally.  Thus a free market (not what politicians call a free market) effects the introduction and just distribution of goods and services.

Yes, we studied this in business classes at PSU where I got a minor in business, which focused on the entrepreneur and small business.  I'm going to recommend your book to one of my professors there.

***Very kind...  ***

We expect conspicuous consumption from the celebrity CEO people: car, house, clothes, libraries of leather-bound classic books, transport, exclusive club member ship, and the most conspicuous consumption of all: largesse, that is support of charities  (I have so much money, I can just give it away...)  We judge them by their consumption, our judgment a reckoning as to the alacrity with which they do their conservator job.  We want them to have their private jets, their high level meetings, their vacation Islands, because we want our TV shows and our cool cell phones, and Fritos.  

Not sure how their having their private jets, etc. provides us w/our TV shows, etc.  I'm guessing you mean because we are willing to purchase the commodities they sell, we provide them w/their lifestyle?

***Along those lines...  we get vicarious pleasure seeing them lead lives of rich and famous, we are assured the top is in place, and we below obviously support them in their endeavors to give us more better cheaper faster.  (The French revolutionaries were astonished to see the peasants support the king, Turgenev and Checkov struggled with this fact in the Russian case, Eric Hoffer specifically laid it out in True Believer... the masses want their royalty safe and sound.***

While we judge these people on what they consume, these very people are most concerned about getting the cost of what they produce ever lower than what they consume

I'm not sure I completely understand the point you're trying to make here.  What is the relationship between the cost of what they produce and the cost of what they consume?  Are you saying – and I'm not disagreeing, only trying to get clarity – that we should be less judgmental about their consumption because they provide low-cost commodities to the masses – that although their consumption costs are high, they work hard at lowering their production costs so they can pass on the savings to the masses?

*** I am trying to sketch the paradox that those who we expect (demand?) exercise conspicuous consumption are dedicated to getting us more better cheaper faster.  (Judgment comes later when I argue if the business is based on subsidies, and thus unsustainable, if not unjust, then we have a problem.)

The innovators moves in a circle of other innovators, wearing their clothes, eating their food, reading their works, living in their remodeled quarters, often bartering but in any case far more concerned with immersing themselves in the creativity of what they produce than the cost of what they consume.

Is the implication here that conservators consciously consume expensive products to keep up their image, whereas the innovator doesn't identify himself with what he consumes, but with what he produces?

***yes... if I can get that clear.  "Did you see Jack Welch's chalet at Aspen?" vs. "Thanks for inviting me to your timeshare at Whistler... that was a blast, great idea for a ski helmet, I'll have the factory make one up and you can tell me if it is what you were thinking..."    ...something like that...  ***

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