Dec. 24, Michael Davis, economics professor at the Cox School of Business, SMU Dallas, for a nostalgic read at the intersection of a Letter-To-Santa and a child’s lack of information about brand names because — well, commercial influencers are mostly missing from contemporary kid media culture. Published in USA Today with the heading A Christmas story — with no commercial interruptions: http://bit.ly/34H91X8
I’m not going to tell you this is the best holiday season ever. COVID-19 has killed more than 1.7 million people around the world, nearly 11 million Americans can’t find work, the U.S. national debt will soon exceed $30 trillion and our politicians claim that their opponents hate puppies. I’m an economist. I know these things.
But here’s something I’m very thankful for: Our 5-year-old had a hard time writing her letter to Santa Claus. I know it seems weird, but it turns out her struggle is a happy reminder of how modern life can be better. Here’s why.
Despite what her grandmother and aunts think, she’s not that different than other kids. She’s not some emerging saint, selflessly spreading holiday cheer to all. She likes stuff. More toys and candy are better. She is what in economics we call a “rational consumer.”
My 5-year-old daughter is as rational a consumer as they come. But even she doesn’t have specific, brand-name toy suggestions for Santa Claus.
By Michael Davis
I’m not going to tell you this is the best holiday season ever. COVID-19 has killed more than 1.7 million people around the world, nearly 11 million Americans can’t find work, the U.S. national debt will soon exceed $30 trillion and our politicians claim that their opponents hate puppies. I’m an economist. I know these things.
But here’s something I’m very thankful for: Our 5-year-old had a hard time writing her letter to Santa Claus. I know it seems weird, but it turns out her struggle is a happy reminder of how modern life can be better. Here’s why.
Despite what her grandmother and aunts think, she’s not that different than other kids. She’s not some emerging saint, selflessly spreading holiday cheer to all. She likes stuff. More toys and candy are better. She is what in economics we call a “rational consumer.”
And she believes in Santa Claus — which is adorable. She was excited about dictating her letter to the Big Guy — the one beginning with her case for why she belongs on the Nice List and finishing with some tips about what Santa can do for her. She thought it would be easy.
Commercial-free entertainment
It wasn’t. She had no trouble making the case for her niceness — she is genuinely kind to her friends, brushes her teeth and only needs, say, five reminders before she’ll pick up toys. Her problem was deciding what exactly to ask for. After a fair amount of prompting, she came up with a few things, but they were generic items that we already knew would make her 5-year-old Christmas morning special: a dollhouse, dress-up clothes, puzzles, that sort of thing. But what she didn’t do was give us … I mean Santa … the all-important details of style, brands and so forth.
This is different.
A generation ago, most 5-year-olds knew exactly what they wanted for Christmas. If they wanted dolls, they wanted a very specific doll — Cabbage Patch Kids, the latest must-have American Girl, Astronaut Barbie — it varied from year to year.
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I can’t come up with details, but I remember my Best Christmas Ever involved some sort of battery-powered jet that was constantly being advertised — it didn’t actually fly but it sounded like an F-15 on takeoff (yes, my parents were saints). In the 1983 movie “A Christmas Story,” Ralphie doesn’t want just a BB gun; he wants an “official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot, range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time.”
Why is our kid different from kids in earlier generations? Because she doesn’t watch commercials on television.
It’s not that we’re these prissy, pretentious parents who curate our kid’s every waking moment. We’re at least as lazy as the average mom and dad. If we need to distract our daughter, we’ll flip on the TV. But it’s incredibly easy to control the content.
We’ve got Disney+. Our DVR has hours of programming from PBS Kids. HBO Max offers the “Looney Tunes Cartoons” catalog (which is as good as you remember, by the way). All of this happens without commercial interruption. When you and I were kids, if we wanted to watch Bugs Bunny on Saturday morning — and who wouldn’t? — we got about eight minutes of advertising for every 22 minutes of cartoons. Our daughter gets almost the full half hour of what is often very good programming.
Choices: Some good, some bad
Technology can, of course, be very bad for kids. Violent imagines and sexual content are never more than a few mouse clicks away. And last spring, as we struggled to keep our kid learning from home, we came to realize that a disturbingly large amount of “educational software” is total garbage.
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Innovative technology, though, doesn’t just give us lots of cool stuff along with the smattering of genuinely bad stuff. It gives us choices. Some of those choices are huge — about 90 years ago people were first given the choice about whether to take a shot of penicillin or to die from an ordinary bacterial infection. The fact that we now have the choice to let our kid watch fun stuff on TV without exposing her to manipulative ads isn’t that big. But it’s pretty great.
Whatever normal looks like next summer, we will still have those choices. Smart people will still be working to come up with new ways of giving kids even better choices. Don’t forget that.
Happy holidays.
Michael L. Davis is an economics professor in the Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom in the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.