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!
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.
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.
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.
>- 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?
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.
Yes, of course. The only excuse the world government has for not banning them is that it doesn't exist. Actual governments have no excuse for permitting advertising as it currently exists.
The question whether wars actually improve our technological knowledge is fascinating and complex.
There is no doubt that the threat of being murdered by another bunch of people concentrates the minds a lot. You will do your utmost not to get yourself and your loved ones killed, which means a lot of technological improvements in order to win the war, or at least force the enemy to negotiate a ceasefire.
On the other hand, several future Einsteins, Flemings and Korolevs might just get flattened to bloody pulp in the trenches at the age of 18, before they even had a chance to show their intellectual capacity. That is a major loss, too, and one whose true dimension cannot be guessed.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
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.
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!