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A market can be perfectly competitive and still revolve around the buying and selling of bullshit. For instance, the financial markets are extremely competitiv

A market can be perfectly competitive and still revolve around the buying and selling of bullshit. For instance, the financial markets are extremely competitive, but they are largely based around marketing bullshit products to more clueless people. Just because something is bullshit doesn't mean it's useless. For example, selling you overpriced insurance enriches me and makes you feel better. Win-win!

TeMPOraL 5y ago
My favorite go-to example is advertising industry. It's a highly competitive market sector that's also thoroughly bullshit in at least two ways: - Advertising is mostly zero sum; if you have competition fighting over the same pool of potential customers, any marginal dollar you spend will work mostly to offset the marginal dollar your competition spends. - Ad attribution - figuring out who should be rewarded for getting a customer to buy something - is a really tough problem. On the Internet in particular, you probably shouldn't even try to do it without some skilled statisticians on the team. Which hardly anyone has. What happens instead is, people bullshit each other. An ad agency will prepare a report about their effectiveness, using data they're not capable of actually understanding, and give it to a client, who's also not capable of understanding the data. Said data came from a platform the agency uses, that's often bullshitting them on purpose. Whether or not the ads were effective, or any value to the end-customer was created, is immaterial - no one in the chain is capable of truly determining it. Instead, everyone just tell each other stories about a job well done, everyone is happy, money changes hands. And yet it persists and grows, because there's still money to be sucked out of legitimate economy, to fuel a legion of companies competing and cooperating to run in circles, bullshitting each other.
- danaris 5y ago
  It's worth noting that this isn't unique to online advertising: the quote "Half of all advertising is worthless; the trouble is, we don't know which half" is over a century old.
- falcor84 5y ago
  >Advertising is mostly zero sum I'm not an economist, but I think this is very incorrect if you include the higher-order effects. It would seem to me that advertising is a massive driver of increased consumption and production, causing people to work more to buy things they otherwise wouldn't. As such, depending on which metric you measure (e.g. productivity vs. wellbeing), advertising is either strongly positive sum or negative sum.
  - SyzygistSix 5y ago
    Sao Paulo banned billboards and public advertising for over a decade. It's certainly an interesting idea. I'm very grateful for the lack of billboards and advertising in my town, as well as the rest of my life due to using adblocking software and extensions. I realize that it's still endemic in media but appreciate the visual sanity in my life. This article has more info and some revealing pictures. https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
- gruez 5y ago
  >- Advertising is mostly zero sum; if you have competition fighting over the same pool of potential customers, any marginal dollar you spend will work mostly to offset the marginal dollar your competition spends. wars are zero sum too (the land up for grabs is fixed). does that mean armies are bullshit?
  - handrous 5y ago
    Yes, and for that very reason. Graeber puts armies and advertising in the same category in his Bullshit Jobs book, in fact, which was a lot more interesting a read than I was expecting from the title. IIRC he considers that one of the easier-to-understand categories and doesn't spend a ton of time on it. One side spends, so then the other side has to, now both are about as well off as if neither had increased spending.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Wars are strictly negative-sum. Nothing is made, much is destroyed. Armies are as bullshit as anything ever. The only reason you have one is that they have one too, and vice versa.
    - gruez 5y ago
      They're bullshit in the sense of overall human progress (ie. we'd be better off if we could all get along and never have wars), but that doesn't answer the original question of whether it can exist in competitive markets.
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      >Nothing is made, much is destroyed. A huge amount of technological development occurred during WW2. The jet engine, rocket and nuclear energy all spring to mind.
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        All were thought of before, and just got funded during. A lot of people now dead would punch you in the nose for suggesting those things justified their suffering. Creation of nuclear weapons does not go on the plus side of the ledger.
gruez 5y ago
>For instance, the financial markets are extremely competitive, but they are largely based around marketing bullshit products to more clueless people. [...] For example, selling you overpriced insurance enriches me and makes you feel better. Win-win! It goes beyond making people "feel better". It's about variance and/or managing risk. eg. so if you die of cancer with a wife and 3 kids they won't end up in the poor house.
- incrudible 5y ago
  To be clear, I'm not saying that every single financial/insurance product is bullshit. However, those that are not bullshit are relatively straightforward, they don't need an army of salespeople. They wouldn't support an industry of the size that it is now. You may see it as a variant of Parkinson's law: Bullshit expands so as to use up all the resources available for its consumption.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >However, those that are not bullshit are relatively straightforward, they don't need an army of salespeople. They wouldn't support an industry of the size that it is now. What are some examples? Maybe with adblock I'm missing all the complex derivatives being peddled to people these days, but the financial products I know of are pretty straightforward.
aabhay 5y ago
This is not Graeber’s argument. Most people responding to the survey talked about the role itself, not the overall ethics of their profession. A society of writers still needs someone to sell the pencils. What’s crazy is how many people are in vestigial make-work roles, divorced from any kind of meaning or even commercial transactions.

TeMPOraL 5y ago

My favorite go-to example is advertising industry. It's a highly competitive market sector that's also thoroughly bullshit in at least two ways: - Advertising is mostly zero sum; if you have competition fighting over the same pool of potential customers, any marginal dollar you spend will work mostly to offset the marginal dollar your competition spends. - Ad attribution - figuring out who should be rewarded for getting a customer to buy something - is a really tough problem. On the Internet in particular, you probably shouldn't even try to do it without some skilled statisticians on the team. Which hardly anyone has. What happens instead is, people bullshit each other. An ad agency will prepare a report about their effectiveness, using data they're not capable of actually understanding, and give it to a client, who's also not capable of understanding the data. Said data came from a platform the agency uses, that's often bullshitting them on purpose. Whether or not the ads were effective, or any value to the end-customer was created, is immaterial - no one in the chain is capable of truly determining it. Instead, everyone just tell each other stories about a job well done, everyone is happy, money changes hands. And yet it persists and grows, because there's still money to be sucked out of legitimate economy, to fuel a legion of companies competing and cooperating to run in circles, bullshitting each other.

danaris 5y ago
It's worth noting that this isn't unique to online advertising: the quote "Half of all advertising is worthless; the trouble is, we don't know which half" is over a century old.
falcor84 5y ago
>Advertising is mostly zero sum I'm not an economist, but I think this is very incorrect if you include the higher-order effects. It would seem to me that advertising is a massive driver of increased consumption and production, causing people to work more to buy things they otherwise wouldn't. As such, depending on which metric you measure (e.g. productivity vs. wellbeing), advertising is either strongly positive sum or negative sum.
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  Sao Paulo banned billboards and public advertising for over a decade. It's certainly an interesting idea. I'm very grateful for the lack of billboards and advertising in my town, as well as the rest of my life due to using adblocking software and extensions. I realize that it's still endemic in media but appreciate the visual sanity in my life. This article has more info and some revealing pictures. https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
gruez 5y ago
>- Advertising is mostly zero sum; if you have competition fighting over the same pool of potential customers, any marginal dollar you spend will work mostly to offset the marginal dollar your competition spends. wars are zero sum too (the land up for grabs is fixed). does that mean armies are bullshit?
- handrous 5y ago
  Yes, and for that very reason. Graeber puts armies and advertising in the same category in his Bullshit Jobs book, in fact, which was a lot more interesting a read than I was expecting from the title. IIRC he considers that one of the easier-to-understand categories and doesn't spend a ton of time on it. One side spends, so then the other side has to, now both are about as well off as if neither had increased spending.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Wars are strictly negative-sum. Nothing is made, much is destroyed. Armies are as bullshit as anything ever. The only reason you have one is that they have one too, and vice versa.
  - gruez 5y ago
    They're bullshit in the sense of overall human progress (ie. we'd be better off if we could all get along and never have wars), but that doesn't answer the original question of whether it can exist in competitive markets.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    >Nothing is made, much is destroyed. A huge amount of technological development occurred during WW2. The jet engine, rocket and nuclear energy all spring to mind.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      All were thought of before, and just got funded during. A lot of people now dead would punch you in the nose for suggesting those things justified their suffering. Creation of nuclear weapons does not go on the plus side of the ledger.

gruez 5y ago

>For instance, the financial markets are extremely competitive, but they are largely based around marketing bullshit products to more clueless people. [...] For example, selling you overpriced insurance enriches me and makes you feel better. Win-win! It goes beyond making people "feel better". It's about variance and/or managing risk. eg. so if you die of cancer with a wife and 3 kids they won't end up in the poor house.

incrudible 5y ago
To be clear, I'm not saying that every single financial/insurance product is bullshit. However, those that are not bullshit are relatively straightforward, they don't need an army of salespeople. They wouldn't support an industry of the size that it is now. You may see it as a variant of Parkinson's law: Bullshit expands so as to use up all the resources available for its consumption.
- gruez 5y ago
  >However, those that are not bullshit are relatively straightforward, they don't need an army of salespeople. They wouldn't support an industry of the size that it is now. What are some examples? Maybe with adblock I'm missing all the complex derivatives being peddled to people these days, but the financial products I know of are pretty straightforward.

aabhay 5y ago

This is not Graeber’s argument. Most people responding to the survey talked about the role itself, not the overall ethics of their profession. A society of writers still needs someone to sell the pencils. What’s crazy is how many people are in vestigial make-work roles, divorced from any kind of meaning or even commercial transactions.