How America was Shaped by Multilevel Marketing71%
12/16/2025, 7:27:52 PM
Keywords: Multilevel Marketing
BS Summary: This article contains 12 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Availability Heuristic, and Hasty Generalization, with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 38.4% saturation with 78 hits. Analysis detected 250 faulty-reasoning hits from 203 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 63.9% and a BS Rank of 71% (5,012 of 16,813 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 70.20% of the article peer group.
How America was Shaped by Multilevel Marketing
Multilevel marketing is something of an American tradition.
Journalist Bridget Read tells the story of the money-making schemes that continue to ensnare people today.
Multilevel marketing as we know it dates back to the 1940s, with a vitamin company called Nutrilite.
If you worked for Nutrilite, you didn’t just sell vitamins — you were supposed to recruit other salespeople to buy your supply of vitamins and sell it for you.
They, in turn, could do the same.
The pyramid scheme was born.
Since then, this tactic has made a very small number of people extremely rich, and made a far, far larger amount of people hemorrhage money.
Why do people keep falling for it?
Journalist Bridget Read says it has something to do with the very American idea of being your own boss.
She’s joining us to talk about how pyramid schemes defined the nation.
GUEST —
Bridget Read | Features writer for New York Magazine.
Her book is called “Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America.”
Amazon | Bookshop
Airdate: Weds., July 30, 2025, at 9 a.m. and 7 p.m.
Rebroadcast: Thurs., Dec. 18, 2025, at 9 a.m. and Sat., Dec. 20, 2025
Analysis
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