[wharvle]

> Business owners are rewarded for shifting resources away from activities that consumers don't value highly (as evidenced by their willingness to pay for them) to ones that they do. If you feel that businesses are focusing on the wrong things, spend your money differently.

So... that's not blame? Is "businesses only do this because you tell them to, with money, so stop telling them to if you don't like it" not the intended reading of that?

My point is that the modern advertising industry is better classed as a result of large-scale structures and societal-scale rules, the same way bread lines were, than as something explained by consumer choice. I mean, FFS, the point of it is to influence consumer choice. This is like saying if the gas pedal doesn't want the car to go faster, it should stop getting pushed so much.

[nostrademons]

It's consequences, not blame. There's no value judgment in saying "If you do this, it will result in these consequences." You can make your own judgment about which set of consequences you prefer.

"My point is that the modern advertising industry is better classed as a result of large-scale structures and societal-scale rules"

Does this model result in useful predictions that you can act upon? A model that "advertising works because in the aggregate, it alters buying decisions and leads to more spending being directed to the advertiser" is very actionable: it tells you exactly where the money is, why it is being spent, and then gives you leads to areas you might want to study (eg. human psychology and perception, owning a channel, producing content at scale) to make you better at influencing those money flows. A model that "the modern advertising industry is better classed as a result of large-scale structures and societal-scale rules" may be true, but it's pretty useless. It doesn't have enough detail to make specific predictions, and its area of focus is on phenomena that you don't have any agency over anyway.

My physics professors were always very clear that the true value of a theory is "Can you make testable predictions with it?" My English & sociology professors were always very clear that "Society doesn't actually exist. It's just a collection of individual actors." This was pretty eye-opening when I got to college, because it got me to understand the value of thinking in terms of specifics rather grand theories that sound expansive as a soundbite but can't actually be used.