I wish it were merely a way to avoid taking personal responsibility. There's much more to it than that.

Read "The Psychology of Influence" along with some of the stuff by, e.g, Kahneman and/or Tversky on behavioral economics and the various cognitive biases humans have that lead them to make poor decisions. I assure you that corporations have read all of this and are taking advantage of it to part you from your money, selling you products that they make you think will increase your happiness. Another resource on this would be Robert Shiller's book "Phishing for Phools, The Economics of Manipulation and Deception".

This isn't about taking personal responsibility. Even when you become fully aware of the insidious way in which our culture works, it's impossible to entirely avoid being taken advantage of by marketing and advertising. We humans are made to think in certain ways, our brains have evolved in a way that gave us cognitive biases we can't escape, even when we're aware of them. Being aware can motivate us to change the culture itself (and its laws), though, so in the future people are less affected by corporate deceit and greed. Yes, this would likely mean lower corporate profits. (Question how we're conditioned to think of lower corporate profits as a bad thing.)

What is wrong with corporate greed?

I want the best returns out of the corporations I invest in.

> Question how we're conditioned to think of lower corporate profits as a bad thing.

Perhaps it is my neoliberal worldview, but I think most people are like "corporate profits can go down" for <my cause>. People think that corporations are owned only by billionares.

Lower corporate profits are a bad thing for shareholders.

Why don't we just take poor people's money since they're so greedy for wanting money? Most of the arguments against excess wealth can be used against many first-world people including HNers.

Take it further. Why are you a shareholder? Why are so many people shareholders? Investing for retirement is pushed heavily and incentivized by the government but is it for our own good or is it to provide liquidity in the financial game? If you are pushed to invest then you have skin in the game and are a shareholder who wants to increase corporate profits. This puts you almost directly at odds with all non-shareholders who are negatively affected by increasing profits.

People are shareholders to make money.

> This puts you almost directly at odds with all non-shareholders who are negatively affected by increasing profits.

Economics is not zero-sum. Few people such as competitors will be negatively affected, but for the average person there will be little impact. For example, if Google makes more profits I am hardly impacted.

So what exactly are you saying these influences can do? If you tell me that they're going to make me slightly more likely to buy one brand of soap than another, I can accept that. If you tell me that they're going to make me buy diamonds when I have no conceivable use for diamonds, I'm gonna have to call BS.

Well, people buy diamonds and they're basically useless, other than signalling that the purchaser has a certain amount of money. The price for them is much inflated over what it would be if priced purely for their practical value. Artificial diamonds are identical to the naked eye, yet the diamond industry somehow influences our culture to make people think they need to spend many thousands of dollars on useless "real" diamonds.

On a (somewhat) related note, this conversation reminded me of a George Carlin routine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac

It is funny you mention diamonds, since they are the epitome of marketing a valueless product into something everybody (except you) wants to buy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo...

'In its 1947 strategy plan, the advertising agency strongly emphasized a psychological approach. "We are dealing with a problem in mass psychology." '