"It has been shown that, in contrast to everything which classical national economy has hitherto taught, not the producer but the consumer is the ruling factor in economic life"
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A neat little coup against the priesthood of “classical” economics: Schacht flips the altar from the producer to the consumer and calls it empirical fact. The phrasing matters. “It has been shown” is bureaucratic authority disguised as modesty, a way to smuggle a political conclusion in under the coat of neutral science. And “ruling factor” is doing ideological heavy lifting: markets aren’t just systems, they have sovereigns. If the consumer rules, then mass demand becomes a mandate, and those who can shape demand can claim to be obeying “economic life” rather than directing it.
The subtext is a rebuke to the supply-side moralism embedded in older political economy, where production, thrift, and the discipline of labor look like the engine of prosperity. Schacht’s inversion flatters the modern age of mass society: what matters is purchasing power, confidence, and the psychological weather of the crowd. That’s not merely a theory; it’s a policy opening. If consumers are the pivot, then stabilizing wages, credit, and prices isn’t meddling, it’s realism. “Ruling” also implies volatility: the ruler can panic, stampede, withhold.
Context sharpens the edge. Schacht’s career sits inside the upheavals of Weimar and the Nazi-era economic machine, where technocrats learned that demand management, public works, and monetary choreography could outrun textbook constraints - until politics and militarization swallowed the ledger. Read this way, the line is less a timeless insight than a credential: the expert announcing that old doctrines have failed, and that a new managerial economics - one comfortable steering consumption - has arrived.
The subtext is a rebuke to the supply-side moralism embedded in older political economy, where production, thrift, and the discipline of labor look like the engine of prosperity. Schacht’s inversion flatters the modern age of mass society: what matters is purchasing power, confidence, and the psychological weather of the crowd. That’s not merely a theory; it’s a policy opening. If consumers are the pivot, then stabilizing wages, credit, and prices isn’t meddling, it’s realism. “Ruling” also implies volatility: the ruler can panic, stampede, withhold.
Context sharpens the edge. Schacht’s career sits inside the upheavals of Weimar and the Nazi-era economic machine, where technocrats learned that demand management, public works, and monetary choreography could outrun textbook constraints - until politics and militarization swallowed the ledger. Read this way, the line is less a timeless insight than a credential: the expert announcing that old doctrines have failed, and that a new managerial economics - one comfortable steering consumption - has arrived.
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| Topic | Marketing |
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