Keep your money. Stick it in an index fund. It'll get invested in Google, Facebook, Apple who make money from ... advertising their own or other people's products.
To really be minimalist I think it's better (if less lucrative on average) to start your own business that takes a small chunk of business away from the giants, that you have ethical control over.
It's getting harder to do that without needing help from Google, Facebook etc. though, and definitely hard to do without advertising. But there's simple advertising "Painter for hire" and then there is the manipulative advertising based on spying on people etc. I think they are two different things.
Take our humble 'Painter for Hire' - an honest business looking to do real valuable work for people who genuinely want to pay for that service. That's the kind of advert we all want to see, when we need it.
To the painter, and perhaps even to the customer, it's just all round better if their straightforward advert can be targeted at people who are very likely to need the service, on demand. They can spend the same and reach some multiplier X more warm leads, or spend 1/X on the same amount of warm leads. Warm leads being people who genuinely need the service and are happy to pay for it. There's no real manipulation going on at that level - both advertiser and customer are basically better off for the targeting, with respect to that genuine painting service being facilitated more efficiently and therefore likely more cheaply.
The manipulation in this case is more at the level of the advertising platform itself - i.e. how is the targeting achieved (spying, etc), and what potential negative externalities might that have.
It's an open and interesting question if the ends justify the means in cases like this. I think I err towards saying they don't, but still at the end of the day the positives are undeniable. That is all basically a long winded way to say, I don't necessarily think it's a question of simple vs manipulative ads per se, I think the more important difference for the majority of ads is naive & expensive vs manipulative & cheap ad platforms, with a lot of tradeoffs in place between the two that are really hard to balance for both advertiser and customer.
This specific painter pays the ad platform to be the one that comes to you, when you're busy with all the other things on your todo list, so that you choose them and not one of the other 10 painters in your area.
It still doesn't make them bad, or manipulative. You actually want this service and not having to do the search yourself is a bonus, all things being equal (price and service level is in line with the local market etc).
I don't see why not. Ads have negative externalities, for example: now everybody sees the ad (not only people in need of a painter), and also now the painter with the largest advertising budget will get more customers (not the best one), and finally the advertising costs will eventually be paid by the client (the client pays for being manipulated).
But you did say "I view advertising as a form of pollution. In many cases, it erodes the human experience. It is abusive to families with children creating strife where there was none."
So I took that as caring about the macro level.
Ok, what's your business? I'll gladly check it out! I'm open-minded, love new ideas, and admire integrity and good founding principles!
Your spending is someone else's income.
It's sounds a little nutty to say you're depriving someone else but it's kind of true.
If you see products and or services you like and they have some value to you - and you can reasonably afford - it's good to spend in many ways.
I'm party from a small town, my grandfather was notoriously thrifty (and a little wealthy) and he would never eat out. A dinner at the local diner would be a 'big thing' for him. Coffee shops and little such things are impossible to take hold in this small town because people are like this. They are not poor. Just thrifty. Which is fine ... but it means no secondary economy. The only thing that survives is the gas station / resto out by the highway for passers through.
The town is definitely large enough to accomodate 1 or 2 small places, but due to the culture, it's not going to happen.
It wasn't until later on in life (studying econ) did I realize the 'other side' of savings, and real value of money: When you buy something, you generally value it more than the money, ergo, you make a profit, we call this 'consumer surplus'. It increases the quality of your life by some nudge. Buying things that can improve your life, even if it's a coffee ... has many positive effects. Without consumption most of us would be out of jobs.
Popular culture in 2019 is worth opting out of. It brings no value, erodes humanity, and pollutes our minds. “And nothing of value was lost.”
Recently while waiting to board a plane, I saw a kid browsing instagram. The speed at which they were consuming content actually shocked me. They were rapidfire scrolling through pages and pages of the same kind of junk that's been in tabloids for decades. ~5 pictures a second. For half an hour, almost non-stop. I'm not sure why, but it really stuck out as deeply unsettling to me. I can't imagine that being healthy.
At least rap's woke now. Back then, it encouraged criminal behavior and discrimination[0]. D:
That said, I think I turned out okay.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIeSGUK-Lyo&feature=youtu.be...
The theory behind free markets requires that voters are more or less rational and well informed. That they will never spend more on an inferior product. Advertisement distorts that.
I suspect that banning advertisement altogether would make the economy gain a lot in terms of market efficiency. Can you imagine a world where pricing and quality would be highly correlated? A world where information on a product would be, if not correct, at least made in good faith?
I'd love to see that happen.
In practice, I think the problem that creates advertising is that humans have limited bandwidth for ingesting information in general, so we have tons of tools to compile more information into less information, such as news, books, statistics, reviews, etc. (For example, how many people really entirely understand their health insurance plans? It's not for lack of trying.) Advertising is sort of an arbitrage of that communication bandwidth based on the fact that some actors (companies) really want you to see their information more badly than others.
That problem doesn't go away just because you ban advertising, it just moves the arbitrage opportunity elsewhere.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir
https://mises.org/library/what-do-austrians-mean-rational
> The rational being practicing rational-expectations theory only makes behavioral economists laugh. And the neoclassical construct of equilibrium prices requires assumptions that only tenured professors who don't get out much could believe, like perfect competition, perfect information, and perfect rationality.
Would consumers be allowed to recommend products to each other?
What about design and product packaging? Isn't that essentially a form of advertising?
At paying platforms to advertise your product.
>How would producers expect for consumers to find their product?
How about typing "insert product here" into a search engine?
>Would consumers be allowed to recommend products to each other?
Yes, as long as there is nothing of value changing hands.
>What about design and product packaging?
Fine, as long it ends at the store shelf/online product-listing.
Take my suggestions with a grain of salt, because they come from a person who ranks advertising as one of the top three problems facing humanity.
But new products don't show up in search engines.
Quite. If (which is now for obvious reasons somewhat unlikely) our global civilisation manque struggles on for another century, it will look back on the overconsumption propaganda industry very much like we now see slavery. Ogilvy, Saatchi et al are the Goebbels' of our age.
Sorry, but that is waaay over the top. It makes you sound a bit nutty. A "Truther" of sorts, that dangerously believes too profoundly in his own ideology.
However the notion that the current so-called 'growth' oriented global order threatens the very fabric of our living planet, while not yet quite mainstream in corporate media, is gaining currency fast. It's well inside the fringe in academia and on the streets.
And the notion that marketing's most fundamental aim is to create desires for more consumption (hence more fake 'growth' aka ecosystem destruction) isn't a conspiracy theory (contra your 'Truther' jibe). It's quite open: philosophically-inclined marketers have understood this for a long time. They even used the term 'consumer engineering' in the early 20th C.
- Advertising is a major driver of material consumption, much of which is unnecessary.
- Material consumption drives economic growth. There's also intellectual property, and there's the service industry, but even those contribute indirectly to material consumption.
- Economic growth and socioeconomic growth are unquestioned foundations of virtually every "civilized" society, but they make no sense. Growth works great... until at some point it doesn't.
Obligatory Albert Bartlett video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4
Obligatory Eric Weinstein video segment, focusing more on what he calls "EGO"s... embedded [unacknowledged] growth obligations. (Ignore the other three people in the video... even Jordan Peterson is completely out of his league in this "discussion".)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PagNM_oxssE#t=27m47s
The only criticism I'd make against GP's claim is that the advertising industry is just one spoke in the global wheel of impossible growth and consumption. GP's claim is not nutty, it's too narrow and limited. Ogilvy and Saatchi are only footsoldiers.
The only way this game of musical chairs ends without tears is if we luck into some awesome technology that leads to post-scarcity economics. That doesn't seem very likely from my perspective, except if we create AGI and AGI figures it out, but then AGI is an existential risk while economic collapse is just at worst a 100-200 year setback.
Sure - guilty as charged. I was making a pretty limited somewhat rhetorical gesture.
> The only way this game of musical chairs ends without tears is if we luck into some awesome technology that leads to post-scarcity economics.
I don't believe this to be possible, because the global ecological crisis (of which economic crashes are minor phenotypical efflorescences) doesn't have the kind of simple single causes that short-term big-bang technological innovation can fix. It's the progressive erosion of hundreds of complex evolved systems whose components are being broken at multiple levels. The kind of technology required to 'fix' this would have to have similar types of complexities at multiple scales as are found in those complex evolved systems. That may be achievable, but given the crudeness of our current technology, surely over a timescale of centuries, not the decades we have available.
The one possibility would be to slow so-called 'growth' down dramatically enough to allow evolved systems to recover, and in the meantime develop complex technologies on a slow, centuries-scale, burn. But obviously that's politically infeasible, so global ecological collapse it will be.
If we had had a century of relentless propaganda installing onto young brains stereotypes of the glories of a clear night sky, or clean healthy rivers (instead of trivial comforts & consumer gewgaws), do you think people would still 'want' the things that destroy our natural rights to experience those things quite as much as they do?
I'm reading Edward Bernays' 1928 book Propaganda [0]. Bernays was an advertising and public-relations guy who wanted to rehabilitate the term "propaganda" and rid it of its negative connotations.
Ultimately, advertising, public relations and propaganda are about agitating and motivating people to do things that they wouldn't ordinarily do, and Bernays believes it's all for the benefit of the public.
Crucially, Bernays argues that it's not so much about the ad you see, it's about the social cues that have been engineered into your family, education, employment and political system that predispose how you consume.
Turning off the TV and Instagram are good starts, but I wonder what media you and your children consume that is immune to the methods of Bernays and those who followed him.
I moved to the US from a society where for almost any service or product, if there was a realistic option for the consumer to do their own thing and avoid spending money they would most definitely do so (even if that meant doing a worse job, wasting a lot of time on it). In the US I was surprised by the opposite attitude, if one affords to pay some money to avoid putting in the work they'll do it (and many times even when they don't have the cash for it and have to get credit). There are advantages and disadvantages for both approaches I don't think it's a clear win.
I'm in the US, and this is the predominant attitude amongst my friends and family -- so it's not unheard of here.
You can't really just walk in and say "Well, no, guys, listen, let me tell you how it really is" and just dismiss the whole basic notion of the paper without giving sources.
EDIT to add: The blurb says that the author "finds much lacking in the business's importance and effectiveness and much that is problematic in advertising's social impact." (my emphasis).
Once the Depression was over, the trend line does not appear to be unaffected, though the reasons it trended as it did aren't simple to attribute. Cigarette companies were already advertising to women before Bernays' PR campaign, but they increased their advertising afterwards as a response to it.
If the OP study found the opposite, it wouldn't have made it to the top of HN, and if it did, every comment would mock it for using correlation and would be pointing out other explanations.