How Luxury Changes People
Sarah Jane Gilbert published an article on the Harvard Business School website today titled “The ‘Luxury Prime’: How Luxury Changes People”. In this article she interviews HBS professor Roy Y.J. Chua on the effects that luxuries have on a person.
HBS professor Roy Y.J. Chua and Xi Zou, an assistant professor at London Business School, suggest that luxury goods have an important effect on human behavior that is only now becoming clear—and that may have implications for addressing the continuation of objectionable choices among, for example, high-flying executives on Wall Street.
According to Chua, their research found that “people who were made to think about luxury prior to a decision-making task have a higher tendency to endorse self-interested decisions that might potentially harm others.” Their findings are detailed in the HBS working paper “The Devil Wears Prada? Effects of Exposure to Luxury Goods on Cognition and Decision Making” [PDF].
Read the full article here. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on this article’s subject. Do you think certain luxuries change people?
According to an article written by Jack Loechner baby boomers (adults born between 1946 and 1964) have become the new social media mavens. Loechner states that, “…social media has significantly carved out time generally reserved for traditional media”. I see this trend growing on a daily basis. Think how many boomers you know who are using Facebook and Twitter. How many of them own an iPhone or a BlackBerry? How many shop on Amazon.com or read books with a Kindle? The numbers continue to grow.
Lori Bitter, President, Continuum Crew, concludes that “With more time being spent online, and the emergence of the new Social Media Mavens among Boomers… for companies targeting the mature consumer… online media should be at the core of an integrated marketing campaign… ”
And, supporting the findings that Boomers lives are in transition, a recent survey by the Pew Research Center finds that 13% of parents with grown children say one of their adult sons or daughters has moved back home in the past year. Social scientists call them “boomerangers” — young adults who move in with parents after living away from home. This recession has produced a bumper crop.
One-in-ten adults ages 18 to 34 (10%) say the poor economy has forced them to move back in with Mom and Dad. An additional 12% say they acquired a roommate. Hard times are leading young adults to put their lives on hold in other ways as well. For example, some 15% of adults younger than 35 say they have postponed getting married because of the recession; an additional 14% say they have delayed having a baby.
According to the survey, nearly half of all adults (46%) have children ages 18 or older. Among these parents of adult children, some 13% say at least one of their grown sons or daughters had returned home in the past year for any reason. The proportion of “boomeranged parents” increases to 19% among those ages 45 to 54 and declines sharply in later age groups.
Loechner’s full article can be found here.
Brandstorm Solutions is making a donation to Partners In Health to aid in relief being sent to Haiti. Partners In Health has spent the last 20 years working in Haiti. Partners In Health urgently need your support to help all who have been affected by the recent earthquake.
PIH has been working on the ground in Haiti for over 20 years. We urgently need your support to help those affected by the recent earthquake.
Partners In Health (PIH) works to bring modern medical care to poor communities in nine countries around the world. The work of PIH has three goals: to care for our patients, to alleviate the root causes of disease in their communities, and to share lessons learned around the world.
Based in Boston, PIH employs more than 11,000 people worldwide, including doctors, nurses and community health workers. The vast majority of PIH staff are local nationals based in the communities we serve.
To donate online, visit http://standwithhaiti.org or click here.
To donate by mail, send a check made out to Partners In Health to: Partners In Health | P.O. Box 845578 | Boston, MA 02284-5578
Just before Obama took office, PolitiFact combed through campaign documents, speeches and debate transcripts to see what promises he had made. They found more than 500 individual promises and put each of them into a database to be monitored closely.
Of those 500 individual promises PolitiFact reports that
- 91 have been kept
- 33 have been compromised
- 87 have been stalled
- 14 have been broken
The remaining 275 promises are in the works. Read full article reported by NPR.
