Daily Inspiration Quote by Sinclair Lewis

Lewis snaps the line like a mousetrap: “valuable economic factor” arrives dressed in the respectable language of business textbooks, then gets knifed by the punchline “particularly if the goods are worthless.” The intent is not to debate marketing theory but to expose a modern alchemy: advertising’s power to turn absence (thin quality, inflated claims, moral emptiness) into presence, into desire, into sales. It works because the sentence mimics the cadence of institutional approval before revealing the scam inside it. You can almost hear the boardroom nodding along right up to the moment it’s indicted.

The subtext is harsher than a simple anti-ad jab. “Cheapest way” implies a warped efficiency: why invest in making something good when you can invest in making it seem necessary? Lewis is pointing at a culture where persuasion outcompetes substance, where the economy rewards not production but performance. Worthlessness here isn’t just shoddy merchandise; it’s the whole genre of aspirational emptiness - status, identity, belonging - repackaged as consumer goods.

Context matters: Lewis wrote in the age of mass production, national brands, and the rise of professional persuasion, when the American marketplace started selling lifestyles as aggressively as soap. In novels like Babbitt, he skewers the boosterish middle-class faith that commerce equals virtue. This line fits that project: a cynical, surgical observation that in a society built on selling, the most profitable product may be the story told about the product.