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Your argument is essentially "marketing is bad". Which is a shadow argument for "capitalism is bad". Take an ad for the Macbook Air. It shows a stylish person

Your argument is essentially "marketing is bad". Which is a shadow argument for "capitalism is bad". Take an ad for the Macbook Air. It shows a stylish person happily using the Air to do something fun. Now consider an ad for a private school that shows a child happily benefitting from something he/she learned at the school being advertised. Maybe the ad shows a graduate getting accepted into a prestigious college or even YC. Ads are often aspirational and emotional, and do not necessarily contain false information. Sure, paying tuition at a school won't get you into a prestigious school and owning a MB Air won't make you happy. But an ad communicating the virtues of a great product is a good thing if it informs consumers of the product. Let's face it, no matter how you view ads, if you think ads are bad then the only solution is for the government to start its own version of 'consumer reports' and to publish a simple list of products ranked according to attributes. Hardly a remotely practical or plausible solution.

jshen 15y ago
I don't think it's a binary choice. I think capitalism is great for most things, and bad at some things. Education happens to be one of those things. If I buy a $30 bottle of pills that are supposed to make me lose weight, well I lost $30 and I learned my lesson. If I send my kid to a fucked up school it might take years for me to realize it was fucked up, and the stakes are much higher. A bit of back story. I'm the only person in my immediate family to finish high school, and I was raised by my grandmother who is not educated at all. She would have been completely unequipped to make a good decision about such things. Yet here I am, a successful software engineer, due in large part to a good public education. I can't see how I would have been better served by a private system.
- grandalf 15y ago
  Fair enough, but many US colleges and universities are private and are the best in the world. I think your worry about someone starting a school that is actually a sham are very much out of proportion. In today's public schools, many kids can't read or do basic math, so it's hard to imagine something worse. Also, the monopoly system is the only reason parents can't easily switch their kid to a different school. If this were an option, parents would be much more critical. Most parents today just settle for whatever is publicly available b/c it's "free" to them and they'd have to move to a different district to put their kid in a different school.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    I think your worry about someone starting a school that is actually a sham are very much out of proportion. The only concern I'd have would be with religious schools which might teach BS instead of real stuff. But an appropriate level of government intervention in setting the curriculum and standard examinations would hopefully negate this problem. "Final question for one million points: roughly how old is the Earth, anyway?"
    - jshen 15y ago
      If the government sets the curriculum and standards then why have private schools? They will just cost more because they need to make their 15% margin.
      - hugh3 15y ago
        Because the standards are minimum standards, and the private schools will endeavour to teach it better. Let me explain how schools work where I come from. The final year of high school is spent largely doing a series of examinations standardized across the state, called the Higher School Certificate. (It's a bit more complicated than that, there's a school-based contribution to the exams which gets normalized with another set of exams, but let's just pretend it's one big set of exams now, which tests everything you learn in your last two years of school.) The marks are all tallied up, and every student in the state recieves a grade between 0 and 100 which ranks exactly how well they did in their exams (if you get 95.4 then you did better than 95.4% of the state, et cetera). These numbers (called Tertiary Entrance Rankings when I went through, though I think they've changed name several times since then) determine what courses and universities you can get into (none of this namby-pamby admissions essay slash extracurricular bullshit stuff like in the US)... or for those who don't go to university it will be a major line item on your CV when you start looking for work, so obviously all students are very keen on making sure they get a high TER. This provides an obvious point for competition between schools -- schools will compete between themselves to get the largest number of high TERs, and parents choosing schools for their children will look at this information when choosing schools. It's heartless, and it's cut-throat, and it's incredibly stressful for the students, and it works great.
- hugh3 15y ago
  If I buy a $30 bottle of pills that are supposed to make me lose weight, well I lost $30 and I learned my lesson. If I send my kid to a fucked up school it might take years for me to realize it was fucked up, and the stakes are much higher. Or you could send your kid to a public school which is also fucked up, but not have any other options because, hey, there aren't any other schools around, and nobody has any real incentive to fix it up.
- Daniel_Newby 15y ago
  Yet here I am, a successful software engineer, due in large part to a good public education. But were you given a good education, or were you smart enough to educate yourself given a modicum of education and a structured environment? The problem is that half of people are not smart enough. If you teach them to read using word recognition, they will not deduce phonics on their own, so their reading ability is permanently capped at a level suitable for a dull 8 year-old. The problem with zero-competition government schools is that when they get captured by a fad (word recognition, new math, no student left behind, etc.), it happens everywhere. There is no escape. And then 20 years later you get a new generation of teachers that are the product of bad teaching. The result is a 50 year cycle of mini dark ages. ... I was raised by my grandmother who is not educated at all. She would have been completely unequipped to make a good decision about such things. But would she want to make a good decision? Or to avoid a horrifically bad decision? The latter does not require education or sophistication, just the ability to ask about the relative rank of the nearby schools.
  - jshen 15y ago
    "But were you given a good education, or were you smart enough to educate yourself given a modicum of education and a structured environment?" I didn't care about education until i was in my 20s. I would not have educated myself as a child or teenager. "The problem is that half of people are not smart enough" That sounds like a number you pulled out of your butt. Do you have any real statistics on that? "The problem with zero-competition government schools is that when they get captured by a fad (word recognition, new math, no student left behind, etc.), it happens everywhere. There is no escape. " I'm not sure I understand, but I'm pretty sure it's not true. Our schools are becoming more federalized, but that hasn't always been the case. States once had a lot of leeway in their education systems. "The latter does not require education or sophistication, just the ability to ask about the relative rank of the nearby schools." This isn't true. She'd have no idea what graphs mean, and even if she got it to some degree it would be very easy to mislead her. Think about it. Have you ever watched infomercials with absurd assertions that have graphs and numbers on them? You and I realize they are absurd, but most people don't. Think about it.
    - 15y ago
mkn 15y ago
Your argument is essentially "marketing is bad". Which is a shadow argument for "capitalism is bad". While your formulation is deliberately obtuse, the underlying sentiment can be quite damning for a certain kind of free market fan-boy, the kind who insists that buyers in a market are rational in some individual or even collective sense, that they somehow optimize their own happiness or utility function. That notion is patently absurd, and is actually flatly and irrefutably countered by the mere existence of marketing. If the decision-making process is rational, then there is no need, nor even ability, to forge emotional connections with brands through marketing. This is a plain fact that you do not seem to get. To wit: Ads are often aspirational and emotional, and do not necessarily contain false information. Sure, paying tuition at a school won't get you into a prestigious school and owning a MB Air won't make you happy. But an ad communicating the virtues of a great product is a good thing if it informs consumers of the product. You've cited two examples where ads are certainly misleading, and then seemed to imply that those ads "do not necessarily contain false information," as if they were therefore not deceptive. By attempting to short-circuit the decision-making process, by putting the emotional cart before the rational horse, the ads you describe are fundamentally deceptive. That ads like that exist, that they are paid for by people with skin in the game, and that they work, are all testament to the fundamental irrationality of market players on both an individual and aggregate level. Namely, they can be swayed by a manufactured emotional response before even having gone through the rational decision-making process. So, the argument for which your reduction ad absurdum is actually a shadow is, "Marketing exists, therefore there is a fundamental problem with the underpinnings of free market theory. It does not match reality in one of the important ways that it purports." You conclude: [I]f you think ads are bad then the only solution is for the government to start its own version of 'consumer reports' and to publish a simple list of products ranked according to attributes. Hardly a remotely practical or plausible solution. I have to say, that's quite a gem. In reverse order, I guess, is the best way to address it. Last, your point about it being impractical or implausible is vacuous and, further, not germane. How would the impracticality of any given solution affect the existence or nature of the underlying problem? Second-to-last, if you really believe that the solution you offered is the "only solution", then that is a failure only of your own imagination. One could at least imagine a tighter regulation of advertising claims, for example. (It's suspicious that the "only solution" you offer is the most oppressive and impractical one. Triumphalism like this is rarely the hallmark of independent thought, but often stems from having swallowed someone's propaganda whole.) Third-to-last and finally, the "if you think ads are bad" remark is hardly the most charitable characterization of the author's original point, and is in fact what is termed an "overgeneralization," a kind of straw man. Some more charitable attempts might be, "If you think that advertising about such important and life-changing things like which school to go to will carry unsustainable hazards,..." See how much closer we are to a solution just by framing the question fairly? Granted, the solutions one might come up with from there are perhaps less simplistic and less susceptible to vilification on ideological grounds, and that might not suit your rhetorical purpose. However, I submit that this approach has a countervailing good quality that ultimately recommends it. It shows good manners, maturity, and a willingness to actually further the discussion.
jholman 15y ago
For myself, I think advertising as it currently exists is a massive negative for society, and I think capitalism is a net win (perhaps marginal). So I insist that "marketing is bad" is NOT a shadow argument for "capitalism is bad". You do a fine job of describing what I think is wrong with ads (that most ads consist primarily of false information, often conveyed via subtle signals that the consumer processes non-consciously). I also absolutely agree that making the consuming public aware of the options open to them in the market is beneficial to society. I agree that there's a tension here: if you want to absolutely ban all of the downside of the former, you also lose the upside of the latter. Thank god my disgusting bathwater is gone, but where's my baby? However, it's completely preposterous to say that the only alternatives are completely unrestrained advertising on the one hand, and a government-sponsored consumer-reports on the other. The latter sounds like an experiment I'd like to see run, actually, but not enough to endorse it in my own economy, so I guess that shows how much faith I have in it. But we already live in a compromise: manufacturers of known social ills like tobacco, alcohol, and gambling, have restrictions placed on how they can advertise. We already have laws on false advertising, especially around food and drugs, and also laws on clarity in packaging (which is a form of advertising). I think that if there were public will to do so, we could iteratively, gradually, over years and years, successively tighten the requirements for truth in advertising. I think it's plausible and practical that this might get us to a societal state where the standard for advertising is informative, useful, and much much less manipulative. Or maybe it wouldn't get us there, because getting legislation right is a bitch (especially in the US, apparently). But I see no support for your out-of-hand dismissal of the existence of practical, plausible alternatives to laissez faire.
- klbarry 15y ago
  Please see my above post on persuasion as a rebuttal, it also applies in part to this post.
  - jholman 15y ago
    Forgive my density, but I actually fail to see how.
timsally 15y ago
> Your argument is essentially "marketing is bad". Which is a shadow argument for "capitalism is bad". That's an outrageous claim. Take marketing of pharmaceuticals directly to patients. Unconscionable in my opinion (and many other first world countries agree). There are many limited cases where marketing is quite harmful. Indeed, we have reason to believe education is one of those cases. You simply need to examine the current state of law schools in the United States to see where marketing gets you. People fresh out of undergrad taking out six figure loans and being told the median salary at their law school is also six figures. Which it is. But what they aren't being told about is the bimodal distribution of law salaries and only the top of the class has any chance of paying back their loans. And let's not even get into those ads you see on TV from third rate schools trying to convince you to go back to get your "MBA".
- grandalf 15y ago
  Where do you draw the line on pharmaceutical marketing? Is it OK to market antidepressants? What about blood pressure or cholesterol medicine? Heartburn medicine? Asprin? Sunscreen? Toothpaste? Dentil floss? Athlete's foot spray? Prescription meds are controlled such that a doctor must agree that the prescription is a good idea before the patient gets the drug. There have been instances found of conflict-of-interest-inducing quid pro quos between pharmaceutical companies and doctors, but it seems silly to blame the ad a patient saw for this. Most ads I've seen say "ask your doctor about x". So what is the harm? What classes of remedies (drugs, procedures, OTC items) result in harmful ads? Your complaint about education ads is interesting b/c you're bemoaning the phenomenon of people with a freshly minted college degree foolishly pursuing more education. If you are seriously worried about a highly educated segment of society being misled by a simple numerical trick like the one you describe, there must be no hope whatsoever for humanity if the only people we can trust to watch commercials are people with a Ph.D in stats. If someone has not become well acquainted with the sorts of semi-misleading things mentioned in ads by the time he/she is an adult, something is seriously wrong, and the sort of paternalistic society needed to protect this person from him/herself is unacceptably oppressive to everyone else's freedom.
  - timsally 15y ago
mikeash 15y ago
> Let's face it, no matter how you view ads, if you think ads are bad then the only solution is for the government to start its own version of 'consumer reports' and to publish a simple list of products ranked according to attributes. Hardly a remotely practical or plausible solution. That is an extremely black-and-white view of the world. I think ads are generally not useful, and the small use they do provide is vastly overwhelmed by their negative attributes. I fully support truth-in-advertising laws, but I would never go as far as your proposed solution. Poor, emotion-laden advertisements are really due to fundamental flaws in human psychology which will be there no matter what we do.

jshen 15y ago

I don't think it's a binary choice. I think capitalism is great for most things, and bad at some things. Education happens to be one of those things. If I buy a $30 bottle of pills that are supposed to make me lose weight, well I lost $30 and I learned my lesson. If I send my kid to a fucked up school it might take years for me to realize it was fucked up, and the stakes are much higher. A bit of back story. I'm the only person in my immediate family to finish high school, and I was raised by my grandmother who is not educated at all. She would have been completely unequipped to make a good decision about such things. Yet here I am, a successful software engineer, due in large part to a good public education. I can't see how I would have been better served by a private system.

grandalf 15y ago
Fair enough, but many US colleges and universities are private and are the best in the world. I think your worry about someone starting a school that is actually a sham are very much out of proportion. In today's public schools, many kids can't read or do basic math, so it's hard to imagine something worse. Also, the monopoly system is the only reason parents can't easily switch their kid to a different school. If this were an option, parents would be much more critical. Most parents today just settle for whatever is publicly available b/c it's "free" to them and they'd have to move to a different district to put their kid in a different school.
- hugh3 15y ago
  I think your worry about someone starting a school that is actually a sham are very much out of proportion. The only concern I'd have would be with religious schools which might teach BS instead of real stuff. But an appropriate level of government intervention in setting the curriculum and standard examinations would hopefully negate this problem. "Final question for one million points: roughly how old is the Earth, anyway?"
  - jshen 15y ago
    If the government sets the curriculum and standards then why have private schools? They will just cost more because they need to make their 15% margin.
    - hugh3 15y ago
      Because the standards are minimum standards, and the private schools will endeavour to teach it better. Let me explain how schools work where I come from. The final year of high school is spent largely doing a series of examinations standardized across the state, called the Higher School Certificate. (It's a bit more complicated than that, there's a school-based contribution to the exams which gets normalized with another set of exams, but let's just pretend it's one big set of exams now, which tests everything you learn in your last two years of school.) The marks are all tallied up, and every student in the state recieves a grade between 0 and 100 which ranks exactly how well they did in their exams (if you get 95.4 then you did better than 95.4% of the state, et cetera). These numbers (called Tertiary Entrance Rankings when I went through, though I think they've changed name several times since then) determine what courses and universities you can get into (none of this namby-pamby admissions essay slash extracurricular bullshit stuff like in the US)... or for those who don't go to university it will be a major line item on your CV when you start looking for work, so obviously all students are very keen on making sure they get a high TER. This provides an obvious point for competition between schools -- schools will compete between themselves to get the largest number of high TERs, and parents choosing schools for their children will look at this information when choosing schools. It's heartless, and it's cut-throat, and it's incredibly stressful for the students, and it works great.
hugh3 15y ago
If I buy a $30 bottle of pills that are supposed to make me lose weight, well I lost $30 and I learned my lesson. If I send my kid to a fucked up school it might take years for me to realize it was fucked up, and the stakes are much higher. Or you could send your kid to a public school which is also fucked up, but not have any other options because, hey, there aren't any other schools around, and nobody has any real incentive to fix it up.
Daniel_Newby 15y ago
Yet here I am, a successful software engineer, due in large part to a good public education. But were you given a good education, or were you smart enough to educate yourself given a modicum of education and a structured environment? The problem is that half of people are not smart enough. If you teach them to read using word recognition, they will not deduce phonics on their own, so their reading ability is permanently capped at a level suitable for a dull 8 year-old. The problem with zero-competition government schools is that when they get captured by a fad (word recognition, new math, no student left behind, etc.), it happens everywhere. There is no escape. And then 20 years later you get a new generation of teachers that are the product of bad teaching. The result is a 50 year cycle of mini dark ages. ... I was raised by my grandmother who is not educated at all. She would have been completely unequipped to make a good decision about such things. But would she want to make a good decision? Or to avoid a horrifically bad decision? The latter does not require education or sophistication, just the ability to ask about the relative rank of the nearby schools.
- jshen 15y ago
  "But were you given a good education, or were you smart enough to educate yourself given a modicum of education and a structured environment?" I didn't care about education until i was in my 20s. I would not have educated myself as a child or teenager. "The problem is that half of people are not smart enough" That sounds like a number you pulled out of your butt. Do you have any real statistics on that? "The problem with zero-competition government schools is that when they get captured by a fad (word recognition, new math, no student left behind, etc.), it happens everywhere. There is no escape. " I'm not sure I understand, but I'm pretty sure it's not true. Our schools are becoming more federalized, but that hasn't always been the case. States once had a lot of leeway in their education systems. "The latter does not require education or sophistication, just the ability to ask about the relative rank of the nearby schools." This isn't true. She'd have no idea what graphs mean, and even if she got it to some degree it would be very easy to mislead her. Think about it. Have you ever watched infomercials with absurd assertions that have graphs and numbers on them? You and I realize they are absurd, but most people don't. Think about it.
  - 15y ago

mkn 15y ago

Your argument is essentially "marketing is bad". Which is a shadow argument for "capitalism is bad". While your formulation is deliberately obtuse, the underlying sentiment can be quite damning for a certain kind of free market fan-boy, the kind who insists that buyers in a market are rational in some individual or even collective sense, that they somehow optimize their own happiness or utility function. That notion is patently absurd, and is actually flatly and irrefutably countered by the mere existence of marketing. If the decision-making process is rational, then there is no need, nor even ability, to forge emotional connections with brands through marketing. This is a plain fact that you do not seem to get. To wit: Ads are often aspirational and emotional, and do not necessarily contain false information. Sure, paying tuition at a school won't get you into a prestigious school and owning a MB Air won't make you happy. But an ad communicating the virtues of a great product is a good thing if it informs consumers of the product. You've cited two examples where ads are certainly misleading, and then seemed to imply that those ads "do not necessarily contain false information," as if they were therefore not deceptive. By attempting to short-circuit the decision-making process, by putting the emotional cart before the rational horse, the ads you describe are fundamentally deceptive. That ads like that exist, that they are paid for by people with skin in the game, and that they work, are all testament to the fundamental irrationality of market players on both an individual and aggregate level. Namely, they can be swayed by a manufactured emotional response before even having gone through the rational decision-making process. So, the argument for which your reduction ad absurdum is actually a shadow is, "Marketing exists, therefore there is a fundamental problem with the underpinnings of free market theory. It does not match reality in one of the important ways that it purports." You conclude: [I]f you think ads are bad then the only solution is for the government to start its own version of 'consumer reports' and to publish a simple list of products ranked according to attributes. Hardly a remotely practical or plausible solution. I have to say, that's quite a gem. In reverse order, I guess, is the best way to address it. Last, your point about it being impractical or implausible is vacuous and, further, not germane. How would the impracticality of any given solution affect the existence or nature of the underlying problem? Second-to-last, if you really believe that the solution you offered is the "only solution", then that is a failure only of your own imagination. One could at least imagine a tighter regulation of advertising claims, for example. (It's suspicious that the "only solution" you offer is the most oppressive and impractical one. Triumphalism like this is rarely the hallmark of independent thought, but often stems from having swallowed someone's propaganda whole.) Third-to-last and finally, the "if you think ads are bad" remark is hardly the most charitable characterization of the author's original point, and is in fact what is termed an "overgeneralization," a kind of straw man. Some more charitable attempts might be, "If you think that advertising about such important and life-changing things like which school to go to will carry unsustainable hazards,..." See how much closer we are to a solution just by framing the question fairly? Granted, the solutions one might come up with from there are perhaps less simplistic and less susceptible to vilification on ideological grounds, and that might not suit your rhetorical purpose. However, I submit that this approach has a countervailing good quality that ultimately recommends it. It shows good manners, maturity, and a willingness to actually further the discussion.

jholman 15y ago

For myself, I think advertising as it currently exists is a massive negative for society, and I think capitalism is a net win (perhaps marginal). So I insist that "marketing is bad" is NOT a shadow argument for "capitalism is bad". You do a fine job of describing what I think is wrong with ads (that most ads consist primarily of false information, often conveyed via subtle signals that the consumer processes non-consciously). I also absolutely agree that making the consuming public aware of the options open to them in the market is beneficial to society. I agree that there's a tension here: if you want to absolutely ban all of the downside of the former, you also lose the upside of the latter. Thank god my disgusting bathwater is gone, but where's my baby? However, it's completely preposterous to say that the only alternatives are completely unrestrained advertising on the one hand, and a government-sponsored consumer-reports on the other. The latter sounds like an experiment I'd like to see run, actually, but not enough to endorse it in my own economy, so I guess that shows how much faith I have in it. But we already live in a compromise: manufacturers of known social ills like tobacco, alcohol, and gambling, have restrictions placed on how they can advertise. We already have laws on false advertising, especially around food and drugs, and also laws on clarity in packaging (which is a form of advertising). I think that if there were public will to do so, we could iteratively, gradually, over years and years, successively tighten the requirements for truth in advertising. I think it's plausible and practical that this might get us to a societal state where the standard for advertising is informative, useful, and much much less manipulative. Or maybe it wouldn't get us there, because getting legislation right is a bitch (especially in the US, apparently). But I see no support for your out-of-hand dismissal of the existence of practical, plausible alternatives to laissez faire.

klbarry 15y ago
Please see my above post on persuasion as a rebuttal, it also applies in part to this post.
- jholman 15y ago
  Forgive my density, but I actually fail to see how.

timsally 15y ago

> Your argument is essentially "marketing is bad". Which is a shadow argument for "capitalism is bad". That's an outrageous claim. Take marketing of pharmaceuticals directly to patients. Unconscionable in my opinion (and many other first world countries agree). There are many limited cases where marketing is quite harmful. Indeed, we have reason to believe education is one of those cases. You simply need to examine the current state of law schools in the United States to see where marketing gets you. People fresh out of undergrad taking out six figure loans and being told the median salary at their law school is also six figures. Which it is. But what they aren't being told about is the bimodal distribution of law salaries and only the top of the class has any chance of paying back their loans. And let's not even get into those ads you see on TV from third rate schools trying to convince you to go back to get your "MBA".

grandalf 15y ago
Where do you draw the line on pharmaceutical marketing? Is it OK to market antidepressants? What about blood pressure or cholesterol medicine? Heartburn medicine? Asprin? Sunscreen? Toothpaste? Dentil floss? Athlete's foot spray? Prescription meds are controlled such that a doctor must agree that the prescription is a good idea before the patient gets the drug. There have been instances found of conflict-of-interest-inducing quid pro quos between pharmaceutical companies and doctors, but it seems silly to blame the ad a patient saw for this. Most ads I've seen say "ask your doctor about x". So what is the harm? What classes of remedies (drugs, procedures, OTC items) result in harmful ads? Your complaint about education ads is interesting b/c you're bemoaning the phenomenon of people with a freshly minted college degree foolishly pursuing more education. If you are seriously worried about a highly educated segment of society being misled by a simple numerical trick like the one you describe, there must be no hope whatsoever for humanity if the only people we can trust to watch commercials are people with a Ph.D in stats. If someone has not become well acquainted with the sorts of semi-misleading things mentioned in ads by the time he/she is an adult, something is seriously wrong, and the sort of paternalistic society needed to protect this person from him/herself is unacceptably oppressive to everyone else's freedom.
- timsally 15y ago

mikeash 15y ago

> Let's face it, no matter how you view ads, if you think ads are bad then the only solution is for the government to start its own version of 'consumer reports' and to publish a simple list of products ranked according to attributes. Hardly a remotely practical or plausible solution. That is an extremely black-and-white view of the world. I think ads are generally not useful, and the small use they do provide is vastly overwhelmed by their negative attributes. I fully support truth-in-advertising laws, but I would never go as far as your proposed solution. Poor, emotion-laden advertisements are really due to fundamental flaws in human psychology which will be there no matter what we do.