“The Perception Economy”

Yes, shit on a silver platter shines, and quality of marketing may be uncorrelated to product quality (as I've had the pleasure to experience multiple times).

But is this the right thing to indulge in?

> Imagine creating billions of dollars of value...

You're getting money, not creating value, sacrifing real progress for perceived one.

You need not cater to faulty perception. You should improve it or, if that's not possible, design with it in mind.

My discontent with this article is more fundamental.

> If our perception of the world is more important than the world itself, then we can create immense value by simply modifying perception.

When I think of value creation I think of how fertilizer increased food output per plot and time or how mechanical looms did the same with textiles and weavers. Same with chemistry, medicine, etc ("hard value").

Necessarily statements that encourage making money without actually touching the real world catch me the wrong way.

You can lose yourself in a web of virtual improvements based on (fallible) human perception without ever touching the real economy. There are myriad of those soft value propositions and the market rewards them.

But I fear they keep society from progressing to the next level of economic sophistication; that in which all the window dressing takes the back seat and the sum of scientific/technological achievement is widely appreciated at full scale.

Or we'll drown in a sea of perceptively optimized but inferior consumption garbage. Our choice.