Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley

>If you believe it doesn't, then you should probably tell that to the trillion dollar industry.

The advertising industry is profitable because it's an arms race. Companies have to advertise because their competitors already are doing.

If all industries agreed to limit their ad spending, those trillions could become mere billions overnight, and the marginal revenue decreases would be more than offset by the decreased spending. But such coordination is impossible in a competitive economy, because any defector will reap huge rewards.

In the absence of advertising very few people are educated enough to more productively use their wealth. Principally, you must also consider that almost no dollars today are hoarded - even if you place them in the "slowest" place you can, your bank, that is still a fractional reserve bank that will loan all that out to drive economics in the same way buying goods would. Very, very few people who are saving are going to just hide cash under their bed if psychologically manipulative advertising was coercing them into buying things they did not want or need. And besides that, most of any money held in reserve would go into investments, which can drive much more social utility than buying unecessary crap.

But in reality that does not actually matter either. Like I said, there is very little fiscal responsibility in people - at least in the US - predominantly a product of culture. The money people would have spent on random useless object advertised on TV 1 would instead be spent on personal want 2. The practical effect of advertising is that it is simply redirecting dollars that would have gone to those with smaller advertising budgets to those with larger budgets. The trillion dollar industry exists as an arms race where increasing product quality or diversifying is less effective - because people are already broke, and net wealth is declining, you cannot compete honestly as effectively in product anymore. If you try that, you simply lose to the guy who had more advertising out there using psychological techniques to manipulate people into buying the inferior product over yours, and that is where the wishing comes in, people wish people were more rational, but we are not, and constant bombardment of advertising only wastes money to let the fattest cats maintain sales margins.

Congrats to the Norwegian people for making better use of their oil money. I read this article about how an Iraqi engineer named Farouk al Kasim helped them get their priorities straight [1] :

> After growing up watching the benefits of Iraqi oil elude the Iraqi people, a young executive insisted that Norway do things differently.

For initial expansion of industry, I always felt that command and control economy works to an extend. Even the early soviet union was an example of rapid modernisation of an agrarian country to an industrialised one [2]. There are also examples of South Korea and how its government helped make them one of the best in the ship building [3].

To kickstart an industry government involvement is good to keep the pace and for the introduction of interlinked systems necessary for production where none had existed earlier, but there is no question the human cost soviet people had to pay and there is no justification to it. To keep people and companies from becoming complacent, the accountability and the skin-in-the—game feeling that capitalism brings is equally good. Little bit of both is what is good for developing economies and developing industrial sectors but we are still learning on where to draw the line on how much is too much but there is a lot to be learned yet.

[1] : http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/iraqi-vikings-far...

[2] : http://www.voxeu.org/article/stalin-and-soviet-industrialisa...

[3] : http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_business/72...

Yes, if you hand over the choice of "limit all possibilities down to a few I can choose from" to another party, then yes, you are handing them a lot of power over you.

However, you are probably going to hand that power to someone - there are just too many products to research them all. I am arguing that you are probably better off if you hand that power off to an entity who's only revenue source is you and people like you, than if you hand that choice off to conventional advertising agencies.

> The right answer to the research problem is a digest of research results? I think you are overestimating greatly how much people care about most purchasing decisions. A false positive in my almond milk is not going to make a bit of difference, and a true positive will slightly please me for a week.

I don't know if limiting consumer choice to a few of the massive number of alternatives is the right answer. It's probably not the optimal answer, but it is the current answer. Right now, most consumers are exposed to 2 or 3 brands of a thing, and which two or three brands is controlled through advertising. What sorts of things a consumer is exposed to is also controlled by advertising.

The problem with advertising, from the consumer's point of view is that the people paying for the advertising have interests that conflict with the consumer's interests.

But yes, right now, advertising serves the product discovery function, and the product discovery function is important.

My argument is just that the consumer would be better off if they paid someone to research the available brands and present them with a manageable number of choices, and with interesting new types of products rather than allowing the people selling them stuff to do that. My argument is that organizations structured like consumer reports, that is, organizations that only accept money from the consumers they are doing research for, would have the fewest conflicts of interest, and thus would probably provide better results (for the consumers) on average.

> For this, I would go consult Consumer Reports? And how do I know that Customer Summaries isn't more aligned with my values anyhow?

The consumer, of course, would still need to choose which consumer research group most closely matched their needs and values, which in and of itself is a hard problem. But, I think if done properly, and conflicts of interest avoided, it is an overall better product discovery system than advertising.

Also, you'd clearly need to figure out some way of making it easier. Following the recommendations of the research agency I have hired needs to be as easy for me as following the recommendations of advertisers is for me right now, at least if we are to use this for things like milk.

(Also, the more I think about it, the more I think what I said about integrating it with a store is a bad idea; it introduces conflicts of interest. But it would be the easiest way to reduce the cost in terms of checking with my research company before buying.)