Hey, Skinny!

From the Slope of Hope: I wanted to do a post that had nothing to do with Greece or charts, just for a change of pace. Because I don’t know about you, but after the past 72 hours, I’m exhausted!

One of my favorite “fun” books is a 1995 offering called Hey Skinny!, which is a collection of full-page color ads that were published in comic books in the 1940s and 1950s. I’ve thumbed through the book many times, but it dawned on me that even though we live in an age where a product released a month ago is “ancient history”, these artifacts from six decades ago still speak to the same immutable human desires (which are basically to acquire resources and protect them). There are analogs for just about every product in this thin volume.

Take this little gem, for example:

Boys like so shoot stuff. They always have. Back in those days, blasting your friends with a machine gun assured you “sure ’nuff action”. In the modern era, we have offerings like Call of Duty (and dozens of imitators).

Well, how about uber-modern stuff, like 3-D Printing? Being able to create your own plastic products at home is something unique to our time, right? Those primitive kids back in the 50s weren’t so lucky, right? Well, not so fast……..

So being able to crank out worthless little knick-knacks could be done during the Obama administration or the Harry Truman one. (And be sure to check out the chart of DDD to see how well the 3d printing fad is doing).

Chief among all desires among adults, however, is to be able to earn money and then keep it away from the tyranny of that sumbitch boss of yours, right? These days, you can find dozens of books about making money with Etsy or YouTube or any other creative outlet. The cold reality is that, as with musicians, authors, or any other creative folk, a tiny handful of them make really good money while the overwhelming majority scrape by on next to nothing (or less).

So what was the “Make Your Fortune on YouTube” sixty years ago? I’m glad you asked:

I suppose if we have to point to any progress we’ve made, one can at least take comfort that I won’t be knocking on your door any time in the near future, trying to sell you a cheap pair of shoes from a catalog. You’re welcome.

Reprinted with permission from Zero Hedge.