You're begging the question. Are they a net good? Do they make us prosperous? Do they create jobs, etc?

Because there's a strong case to be made that they:

- exploit the credulous, mentally-deficient and emotionally unstable

- carry significant externalities in the form of personal data collection & malware

- contribute to psychological distress (anxiety, degraded sense of self-worth, poor body image, etc)

- cause financial distress by encouraging unnecessary spending

- act as a vector for selling harmful products (tobacco, predatory loans, etc.)

etc.

If you want to take the consequentialist approach, you have to contend with these questions as well. You'll also have to admit that the net balance is unclear at best.

The point, which you (deliberately?) miss, is that you have simply declared ads to be worthwhile, and are now working backwards to argue your conclusion. You are begging the question.

I gave the reasons why I think ads are good.

Jobs are not necessarily good for society, nor are cheaper goods. We could have dirt cheap asbestos and cigarettes, that's not good for society. We can have billions of jobs making and filling dirt holes, that's also not good for society.

That aside, the effectiveness of ads are orthogonal to the quality or "good"-ness of jobs and products. They just seem, to me, like more of an amoral thing that can be used to sell something else, good or bad.

Free markets don't work like that. We would only be having billions of jobs filling dirt holes if it produced more value to the society than it extracted it from.

I'm mainly responding to the part of your comment noting jobs created and cheaper goods as an intrinsically net positive ("good") for society. I agree that the free market does not tend to create completely useless jobs, but such jobs can and do exist in a society. Most economies are not simply free markets, many are partly directed or interfered with (depending on your perspective) by governments. This can result in some pointless jobs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make-work_job) or mis-allocation of resources toward less productive work (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra).

Or, let's say the jobs created are for producing more cigarettes and asbestos. Do you think that producing more cigarettes and asbestos, which requires more jobs, is "good" for society?

No, we would have those jobs if they produced more value to whoever is asking for those holes to be dug.

And that's the reality we presently live in. It's not holes, it's watching ads and reading things that aren't worth our time and buying things that don't provide us value. Click on a link, dig a hole. Read the mindless alarm-inducing article, fill the hole in.

> No, we would have those jobs if they produced more value to whoever is asking for those holes to be dug.

Can you provide example of businesses where employees produce value just for the owners of the business but not the society in general?

> And that's the reality we presently live in. It's not holes, it's watching ads and reading things that aren't worth our time and buying things that don't provide us value. Click on a link, dig a hole. Read the mindless alarm-inducing article, fill the hole in.

What are you proposing? That some entity tells what to read, what to buy, what to do? Why not just leave it to individuals to figure it out?

> Can you provide example of businesses where employees produce value just for the owners of the business but not the society in general?

Much of the financial sector. M&A firms. Lobbying. SEO. Fake web traffic generators. App/game companies that only clone others. Content mills. Collection agencies. Old growth loggers. Ticket scalpers.

It's a little tricky because the most common scenario provides benefit to somebody, even if the overall social cost is far higher than that benefit. The customers of drug dealers want the product. Sleazy personal injury lawyers' clients gain from their services. Crypto miners.

>> And that's the reality we presently live in. It's not holes, it's watching ads and reading things that aren't worth our time and buying things that don't provide us value. Click on a link, dig a hole. Read the mindless alarm-inducing article, fill the hole in. > What are you proposing? That some entity tells what to read, what to buy, what to do? Why not just leave it to individuals to figure it out?

Uh, I'm not sure how you got there from what I said. I could make an argument for regulation, but I didn't.

We live an existence of partial information, and that's very exploitable. "Clickbait" is pejorative because it works but the expected payoff is not there. We are where the "free" market put us, though the market is not very free -- there's regulatory capture, information inequalities, and massive externalities that would not exist without the previous two.

I don't need to propose a guaranteed-effective fix in order to make the point that much economic activity provides zero or negative value.

If I had to point in the direction of a solution, I'd say that antitrust laws are vaguely the right idea, except they are based on very outdated notions of harm to consumers, and are also subject to regulatory capture. We need to make serious attempts at capturing more externalities. Even something as straightforward as a carbon tax is hard to define and implement, but it's the right idea; we need something similar for the massive damage done to people's time and attention, to civil society, to the commons. Capitalism got us here; it won't get us out. Although it's one of the tools that can and should be used.

How did you come to the conclusion that people get cheaper goods? Cost of ads has to be included in the product pricing.

Effective ads lead to better margins and easier to conduct mass production.

It's a zero sum game. Effective ads steal leads from technically better products.