| I agree with this but think you've missed what I think of as 2nd and 3rd order effects. So 1st order problem: Adverts are harmful in that they distort markets increasing the effort required by consumers to make good decisions & increasing poor decision making. But they also create a whole bunch of activity that is now not a buyer / seller interaction. Why do you get click bait and fake news? If the viewers had to choose to pay for it then this would never occur but with advertising the viewer is the product. So you get content that is compelling but worthless. Fake news & clickbait. You even get HSBC dictating content to the Telegraph [1]. I honestly think Google originally had good intentions "Don't be evil" but their business model is fundamentally at odds with the wellbeing of their users. If you have a market optimizing for user manipulation you will evolve effective manipulators. So the 2nd order problems of advertising are that advert supported activity doesn't have it's interests aligned with it's users. Even if the people in these industries want to do good the market will eventually evolve corporations that harm their users since the more efficient the harm the greater the profit. But the biggest problem in my mind is the 3rd order effect of wasted human capital. Much like the biggest problem with wall street is all our gifted peers who ended up doing zero sum bullshit for banks. Advertising, regulatory capture and other corporate innovation that isn't making a better product signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. [1] - https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/17/peter-oborne-t... |
You correctly point out that the human waste caused by ads, like our banking industry, is monumental. What fascinates me about your view, though, is that I have always viewed the cause for US banks' human waste factor to be the absurd regulatory environment and the close ties it maintains to the upper echelons of government.
Media/Advertising, on the other hand, feels much more sparsely regulated at the government level, but it does maintain its own absurd regulatory environment in the private sector, and its own ties to the upper echelons of government. I think it's hard to deny that this industry's self-regulatory environment is as ineffective and chaotic as the politically-instituted regulatory environment enjoyed by the banks. But little research has been done into the impact of the media industry's self-regulation. Makes me wonder what exciting secrets may be out there to uncover.