Yesterday, while I was watching and listening to this video posted at the Mises Blog my daughter stepped in my room and yelled, “don’t watch it, Pa, it’s a lousy video!”
Initially the rap pop music sounding video indeed seemed quite unimpressive. And for that moment I agreed with my daughter. Yet, instead of leaving the page, I marveled at the 86 million hits!
More interestingly, the video showed a lopsided number of dislikes compared to the likes by almost 6:1. And this has even been reflected on the comment page where many, if not the majority, of the audiences were shouting pejoratives such as “BACON!” (I really don’t know what this idiom meant.)
Wikipedia has even a short history of the viral propelled popularity of Rebecca Black’s Friday music video.
What struck me is that if the video has it so bad as critics (as my daughter and even my youngest son) would have it, what could have prompted 80+ million people to watch it or to keep watching it???!!!
Fittingly, Jeffrey Tucker at the Mises Institute cleared these puzzles in my mind with his article. An excerpt, (bold emphasis mine)
The astonishing popularity of Rebecca Black's "Friday" video — which became the YouTube meme of all memes in the course of a wild six weeks — has mystified many critics.
Was it shared and watched so wildly because it was so bad? Certainly the overwhelming judgement on the part of viewers is that it is atrocious — and yet it is hard to know what that means, since 85 million people not only watched the video but also downloaded the song, bought the ring tone, and devoured every available bit of news about the singer and the song.
Using the principle of "demonstrated preference," this music video ranks as the most popular in human history.
Perhaps it is the digital-age version of Mel Brooks's smash Broadway play The Producers, a story about an attempt to write a play so bad that it flops on the first night. But, in Brooks's hilarious telling, the results were the opposite: the play was so bad that it was brilliant, and it became a smash success, however inadvertently.
Lovers of liberty are often drawn to such scenarios because they highlight the unknowability of the future, the unpredictability of human choice, and the way in which the intentions of the planners (in this case, the producers and writers) are easily upended by consumer choice, which is the driving force of economic progress.
The concept of Demonstrated Preference, according to Murray N. Rothbard, is simply this: that actual choice reveals, or demonstrates, a man’s preferences; that is, that his preferences are deducible from what he has chosen in action. Thus, if a man chooses to spend an hour at a concert rather than a movie, we deduce that the former was preferred, or ranked higher on his value scale. Similarly, if a man spends five dollars on a shirt we deduce that he preferred purchasing the shirt to any other uses he could have found for the money. This concept of preference, rooted in real choices, forms the keystone of the logical structure of economic analysis, and particularly of utility and welfare analysis.
In other words, demonstrated preference applied to this case means that there may have been many critics alright, but apparently there have been more admirers, who may not have been as vocal as these critics.
Besides, one can't claim disliking the music video but keep returning to it as there are thousands of video to choose from. The marginal effort to keep going back simply means that there is a demonstrated preference for this video relative to others.
And perhaps most of these admirers were expressing their tacit approval by clicks (or views) to this music video. Simply said, they voted with the mouse clicks. (It’s now 87.4 million and growing as of this writing!).
This simply signifies the free market process (as expressed by the silent majority) at work!
Nevertheless Mr. Tucker expounds on the music’s allegory for libertarianism. Read the entire article here.
Bottom line: What people say can always be tested by their actions!
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