How Can One Million People Be This Dumb?
http://www.foxbusiness.com/industries/2012/08/22/how-can-1-million-people-be-this-dumb/
I have been exposed to the MLM (Multi-Level Marketing) industry for most of my life. My parents were quite into various such organizations over the years and I admit to trying my hand a time or twain. In principle it is not a bad thing and legitimate businesses (Amway, for example) are sustainable. To me the major caveat is that it boils down to your sales ability: how good are you at convincing people to buy something from you? If you are good at that then I suggest you can make much better incomes by moving into grander sales environments. If you are not so good, you won’t make much in the way of money and your equivalent hourly rate for the effort you put in will be well below any alternative available to you. It is a great scheme for the company doing the marketing, they get a huge sales force that they pay commission only. The biggest danger is that it is a hugely faith-based approach and if you damage the faith your sales force has in your company or your products then you can be out of business practically overnight.
MLMs (and Ponzi schemes, the difference basically boils down to: can you make more than the person who recruited you, if so, it is an MLM, if not, then Ponzi (and thus illegal)) tend to grow very quickly in the beginning and I have seen quite a few people who make it their mission in life to promote each new MLM to the people in their previous organizations and create, at least for a few months, the Ponzi equivalent. Thus, the Johnny-come-latelys get in just as the growth of the organization plateaus and as a consequence find it nearly impossible to make any significant money (significant, to me, is always measured against your alternatives; if you can make more flipping burgers than you can pushing your wares, then you are wasting your time and money). The ‘smart’ ones keep pushing the new latest thing on their organization and it seems to me that the average person who gets hooked will sign on for several such rounds because they can see the results of success so close (in the person who serially recruits them).
Of course, the person attracted to the MLM/Ponzi to begin with tends to be the person who eagerly seeks the magic bullet that will allow them to achieve wealth without effort (surely this attitude isn’t unique to America, but it seems like it was patented and perfected here). Nothing is free, either you need money and connections (something that requires being born to the right parents), money, connections and huge amount of luck (something that generally also requires the right parents), extensive perspiration, money, connections and huge luck (something that increasingly needs the right parents, but a generation ago was realistic), or win the lotto (but ya gotta play to win). However, people seem very eager to continually believe that they can get something for (next to) nothing without any consideration for what that means. If there is some resource that is available for next to no cost (say, breathable air), then it tends to have next to no value because why pay for something essentially free? In order for anything to be of value there must be some barrier to obtaining the resource and that barrier must be such that someone on the other side will pay to bypass the barrier (too bad you can’t somehow pick your parents!). Ironically, to me, the barriers to knowledge acquisition has dropped so much with the advent of the Internet that I would have thought every one would know everything about everything, but it seems that the desire to know something is not the same as engaging in the effort (no matter how trivial) to obtain it. Of course, along with our anti-science bias it seems we are developing an anti-knowledge bias as well and people are even more likely to believe in something like these Ponzi schemes.
