Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

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I really hope so. Excepting the fact that it'll probably be bad for the economy as a whole, I can't wait for it to pop and for most ads to be eliminated from my life. It's miserable to be surrounded by constant reminders about a million corporations trying to persuade me I need to give them money.

And it seems like advertising is yet another industry (alongside payment processors, legal services, and real estate) that have managed to 'insert themselves' in the middle of all other commerce, skimming vastly outsized portions of profit off of the entire economy, by being intrinsically 'needed' to do business.

It seems to me that all of these things should be driven by competition to infinitesimal profit margins, because everyone needs them and there should be a big payoff in undercutting each other to take everyone else's business. In practice that's not true at all, which I think means that 'everyone else' severely lacks high-level bargaining power to force these industries down to reasonable cuts.

I fantasize about a scandal in which it emerges that click-through rates all lies and advertising barely actually works and the whole industry goes belly-up as a result.

... okay that's enough cynicism for today.

A market correction is not bad for the market. Think of it like the symptoms of a cold - your body is fighting an infection, so you'll feel unwell for a while, but ultimately you'll be healthier for it.

This is one of the many reasons that interfering in an economy to prevent "recessions" is a bad idea. It prolongs the problem and worsens the inevitable side effects.

Adjustment is probably a better word to use here - correction implies that the previous state of a naturally fluctuating system was "right".

Tell that to Larry Page (in regards to having a cold); not trying to be snide, just never been a fan of the "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" argument

Yeah except that "feeling unwell" is code for a ton of human misery as people lose jobs, lose healthcare, go broke, some even die. And it's disproportionately the working class that feels the effect of recessions.

"Market corrections" might be less of a tragedy if societies like the USA could muster the moral courage to pick up the slack for the market and make people's lives not literally depend on it.

All a market for is to determine the price of a resource, so that people can choose where to spend their money.

Looking after people who can't look after themselves - be it for reasons of market correction, injury or infirmity - is an entirely orthogonal concern.

In other words yes, I agree with you - but think that picking up the slack is the job of charity, and shouldn't involve interference with the market just because it's giving you prices you don't like.

> In other words yes, I agree with you - but think that picking up the slack is the job of charity, and shouldn't involve interference with the market just because it's giving you prices you don't like.

This is fundamentally the reason I (cynically) cannot trust charities (especially religious charities) long-term. The charity machinery requires people to be poor and miserable. Poor and miserable people are the products a charity sells (to donors)! We are the product. A charity is a band-aid. It cannot be as long-term infrastructure.

I agree that we should not prop up failing industries for fear of layoffs. That's just kicking the can down the road. However, I strongly believe a charity has no place in a functioning society.

I don't understand your position here.

If you're opposed to charity but also opposed to market manipulation, how do you propose to support people who can't support themselves?

The only alternative is forcing people to do it.

> The only alternative is forcing people to do it.

Yes, this is a pretty common position: govt charity funded by taxes is precisely forced charity, which many people are in favor of (myself included).

Forced charity is an oxymoron. What you're talking about is socialism, which is not charity (at least, when practised at a scale above that of a family or voluntary commune).

> Forced charity is an oxymoron

Yes, I know. I thought my meaning was obvious, but I'll be clearer: "Forcing" people to provide an alternative to charity is simply called "taxation" (to the extent that taxes are spent on things whose benefits are not distributed in proportion to taxation).

My point was that I don't understand your claim that you don't follow the GP comment's point, since you're surely aware that taxation and gov't spending are well within the Overton Window.

I'm thinking a general increase in income tax (won't happen though sadly enough).

I feel like it's hard to say that it's orthogonal when people not being able to look after themselves is pretty highly correlated to these people losing jobs.

The market exists for us, we don't exist for the market. If distortions are all that's needed to make sure we have the society we want, then that's great! Nothing inherently just about a market.

Gravity makes things fall, but it doesn't mean that we let everything crash to the ground because we don't want to mess with the laws of physics.

I think, again, you're agreeing with me.

There's no need to let people suffer because the market has judged their labour now to be worthless. That's what charitable support is for.

But arguing that we shouldn't let the market deem someone's labour worthless is like arguing that we shouldn't let physics determine g to be 9.8ms2.

It is 9.8ms2, just like the value of a skilled buggy whip maker is now $0/hr.

The question in both cases is, now what do we do about it? Presumably, we give to charity to support the buggy whip makers, and we build our buildings such that gravity doesn't cause them to come crashing down.

> The market exists for us, we don't exist for the market

And we are also the folks who create the market - deliberately or not. Its our collective decisions which results in corrections. We need a safety net for the people - the jobs however, are lost for the rest of eternity.

Nobody worth their salt cares about click-through rates. As long as people get positive return on ad spend, they'll buy advertising. It just works. When people stop making money using advertising, they'll stop using it.

The fact that all your other examples are heavily legally encumbered should be a hint that your explanation is missing something. Ads aren't just valueless middleman enterprises for those purchasing them: they provide concrete competitive advantage. Their existence is negative-sum, for sure, but they're still individually rational decisions, in a local sense.

It's simply a collective action problem, in which there's a global equilibrium that is effectively unreachable (outside of legislation, which has its own complications in the case of advertising because of 1A protections).

In what sense are you claiming advertising is negative sum? Who is meant to come out behind? The business buying advertising is ahead, the ad company is ahead and the consumer has something they decided they wanted. I see a lot of ads that are a mild waste of time because what they are selling isn't something that I'm buying, but that isn't negative sum. They are usually present in the context of free or subsidiesed services.

Advertising isn't a crazy form of mind control where people are hypnotised into handing over money. Sure that might happen, but the vast majority of people I've met don't know they have a problem until it is pointed out to them.

For example, in '07 I didn't find out about smartphones by word of mouth. I found out because Apple put a lot of effort into some very effective marketing. And there is pretty good evidence that the advertising industry is one facet of a larger apparatus developed to make sure that messages make it to the local word-of-mouth circles.

Run an ad-blocker, use Netflix/Prime and don't have cable, work from home if you really hate billboards or whatever.

I see so little advertising these days that I don't care at all anymore.

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