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This is part of why the concept of the free market economy makes little sense to me. The free market revolves around the idea that eventually bad players lose
by aylmao 8y ago
This is part of why the concept of the free market economy makes little sense to me.
The free market revolves around the idea that eventually bad players lose and good players selling what's best for the consumer win. Rational buyers buy what's best, so producers have to adapt to that.
But if the sale of your product depends not on its quality, or its benefit, and is so influenced by a "gut feeling" and irrational association of your brand to an idea, then what gives? The whole thing devolves into "who can advertise best" instead of "who can build the best thing".
Which is actually largely what we are seeing is happening. Both in industry and in politics.
In industry some of the biggest companies in the world live off of ads. This is crazy if you think about it. So much of the internet, TV, radio-- these huge infrastructure and production projects employing thousands upon thousands, producing billions of dollars. Google, Facebook, other SV companies employing some of the brightest minds solving some of the biggest SW engineering challenges-- exist off of the value people put to ads.
In politics, it's all increasingly about advertising a feeling and less about the product (policy). Is it that strange that the guy who had the most air-time, shook people the most, and has most experience with being a screen personality won the last US presidential elections, when the population has, thought the years, learned to be susceptible to gut-advertising via constant, steady bombardment from the advertising industry?
I've concluded this is what a free market economy gets you, because as a company or producer optimizing for survival doesn't mean optimizing for being the best out there, just "seeming" the best.
- bcgraham 8y agoIn every economy, companies optimize for survival by "seeming" the best. The only part that changes is the audience to which it seems.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoThis is a reason to keep iterating on and fixing "economies" until we can get as close match as possible between "seeming" the best and actually being the best.
- bcgraham 8y agoThe "best" by which metric and whose evaluation? This is another way of asking, "Who are we going to forbid from determining for themselves these answers?"
- TeMPOraL 8y agoIn this case, by universal metric of honesty. The evaluated party is the one both creating their product and telling about it; it would be nice if that party was incentivized to create a) quality products, that b) work as advertised.
- andrepd 8y ago>But if the sale of your product depends not on its quality, or its benefit, and is so influenced by a "gut feeling" and irrational association of your brand to an idea, then what gives? The whole thing devolves into "who can advertise best" instead of "who can build the best thing". Ding ding ding. Advertising is deception. Arguments otherwise are dancing around the issue. The whole point is to make you do or buy something that you otherwise wouldn't, and the ways they resort to to make you do this are getting ever more insidious. When you see beer ads, they don't actually advertise beer. Their job is to implant the idea that beer will make you fun, attractive, that without it you're missing out on incredible life experiences. That if you just go out and get some you will leave your drab miserable life behind and dance with a smoking hot girl in a sunset. That all those beautiful, young, fun, attractive people are laughing and having fun and having beer. It's all about manipulating your weak mammal brain to make you buy stuff. It's manipulative and immoral.