I would encourage Katja to try to flip some of these negatives of advertising on their head. After all, the growth of advertising is directly related to the greatest of human prosperity ever. The two are connected. For me, personally, the farthest I have ever been from public, corporate advertising was when I toured Havana, Cuba.
Haha, it is definitely both. There’s nothing to advertise! But there’s nothing to advertise because the activities that benefit from advertising are illegal!
Ah, I was looking at your comment in the other direction, do ads cause prosperity or are ads correlated with prosperity (and having a hard time forming a model that ads cause prosperity while not finding ads being correlated with prosperity significant, really). But I guess you were saying more that ads are a sign of prosperity and so even if they’re annoying it’s better than living somewhere that isn’t prosperous enough for ads?
Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Ads are, at the very most basic, just broadcasts of information with the intention of changing some behavior. Prosperity requires different actors in the economy to do what is most efficient, but often it isn’t efficient for actors to actually go and track down their own suppliers. Instead, suppliers go and track down their buyers by broadcasting ads.
The Internet has certainly changed that: my search history and browsing history effectively broadcast to suppliers, “I need a new car”, and then the algorithms present me with information concerning that need (ads on instagram for Jeeps). Yet, the vast majority of people live in a pre-Internet situation for their most basic needs, where broadcasting from the supplier is still important.
Without this mechanism of “supplier broadcast”, a lot of buyers would simply not be able to meet their needs because they don’t have the bandwidth to go and fulfill their needs. The problem that Katja really should be getting at is when the supplier broadcast goes wrong- generating need when there isn’t any, or broadcasting so much that it swamps out more important signals, etc.
I would encourage Katja to try to flip some of these negatives of advertising on their head. After all, the growth of advertising is directly related to the greatest of human prosperity ever. The two are connected. For me, personally, the farthest I have ever been from public, corporate advertising was when I toured Havana, Cuba.
Do you consider this connection to be correlation or causation?
Haha, it is definitely both. There’s nothing to advertise! But there’s nothing to advertise because the activities that benefit from advertising are illegal!
Ah, I was looking at your comment in the other direction, do ads cause prosperity or are ads correlated with prosperity (and having a hard time forming a model that ads cause prosperity while not finding ads being correlated with prosperity significant, really). But I guess you were saying more that ads are a sign of prosperity and so even if they’re annoying it’s better than living somewhere that isn’t prosperous enough for ads?
Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Ads are, at the very most basic, just broadcasts of information with the intention of changing some behavior. Prosperity requires different actors in the economy to do what is most efficient, but often it isn’t efficient for actors to actually go and track down their own suppliers. Instead, suppliers go and track down their buyers by broadcasting ads.
The Internet has certainly changed that: my search history and browsing history effectively broadcast to suppliers, “I need a new car”, and then the algorithms present me with information concerning that need (ads on instagram for Jeeps). Yet, the vast majority of people live in a pre-Internet situation for their most basic needs, where broadcasting from the supplier is still important.
Without this mechanism of “supplier broadcast”, a lot of buyers would simply not be able to meet their needs because they don’t have the bandwidth to go and fulfill their needs. The problem that Katja really should be getting at is when the supplier broadcast goes wrong- generating need when there isn’t any, or broadcasting so much that it swamps out more important signals, etc.