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I've got a favorite hobby horse which is an example of this dynamic: The competing administrative bureaucracies in the health care administration, and health insurance, industries.

Both of these classes of (so I claim) drones think they're doing good work: health care drones are trying to navigate the regulations and get care for their patients. Insurance drones are trying to navigate regulations and keep costs down.

But if you zoom out a bit, so your domain of analysis is "The Health Care System", you find that these so-called competing bureaucracies are a large organ whose function is to make it difficult to accurately assign costs to services. As long as those prices are hard to know, they are impossible to optimize, and so the prices stay exorbitant.

That is absolutely a great example of bullshit jobs. It gets even worse when each side outsources this function to other companies. If they outsourced to the same company, then maybe some genuine efficiencies could be realized.

When single payer healthcare comes up, free marketeers ask, "Do you want an unelected bureaucrat to decide if you get healthcare?" They must have never been in the situation where someone at the insurance company my employer picked - an unelected bureaucrat with a profit incentive - has denied coverage.

> The competing administrative bureaucracies in the health care administration, and health insurance, industries.

Our company once was in the same office building as another company that specialized in billing for health care.

They would look at the services provided by a doctor's office, and figure out ways to code the procedures performed so that it would maximize the payout from the insurance.

Doctors liked it because it was easy to sign up and just increase their revenue without doing any additional work.

That's one of the reasons why insurers are moving away from the fee-for-service model toward value-based care. So those bullshit jobs at least will eventually disappear.

The prices will stay hard to know because middlemen don’t like to be cut out.

If the advertising competition you mention didn't exist, for example competitors closing shop and not playing the zero sum game, then you'd have a monopoly company, which would also be bad.

So in that case, it's good to play the zero sum game since it's a redistribution of income.

Of course, it's wasted labour, and so what you really want is for the government to step in and extract more in taxes and simply hand over the money as welfare or invest in more fruitful pursuits such as scientific research, rather than redistribution of income coming from zero sum games.

I fail to see why not having advertisement would lead to monopolies.

Burger King stops advertising on Tv and loses even more market share to McDonalds. McDonalds then spends less on advertising because it realizes it doesn't need to because Burger Kind gave up. You're left with a "monopoly", McDonalds whose shareholders/top management make even more money, rather than it being redistributed to employees of Burger King.

The premise was not having ads at all, not one company giving up on ads.

That's why such change needs to be enforced simultaneously and externally.

As an example, I recall reading that tobacco companies were actually very happy about regulations limiting the marketing of tobacco products - by themselves, those regulations didn't change anything about their market share (the market was already saturated), but everyone got to stop spending so much on advertising.

Oh I'm sure Marlboro, who spent decades building a brand, wouldn't really care about newcomers not being able to advertise. That makes sense.

I don't think Marlboro cared about newcomers, a big company can usually buy out the small one if it gets dangerous. Consumers usually don't even notice.

Unrestricted advertising is basically Red Queen's race; capping it levels the playing field, so it's better for newcomers as well.

They especially don't care when they have no chance of growing to a level where they can get dangerous (because they can't advertise).

How much evidence* is there that "stopping advertising [on TV]" necessarily causes a loss of market share?

* specifically evidence not funded by the ad industry

Feels like a chicken and egg problem.

McDonalds would only have that dominance thanks to years of advertising. If the mass advertising game never existed, those companies would have to have grown through their own merits instead of advertising dollars, and BK might have a chance (opinions of their food nonwithstanding). I think that's what the person meant by "but they can't [agree not to advertise]", because now we're at a point where removing advertising from the equation would favor those who have already advertised the most.

> I think that's what the person meant by "but they can't [agree not to advertise]", because now we're at a point where removing advertising from the equation would favor those who have already advertised the most.

That's not what I meant. What I meant is that neither BK nor McD can risk cutting advertising efforts, because if either one does, the other automatically starts winning market share. They can't agree to it together, because the first party to defect from the agreement will win (not to mention a third party could swoop in and (excuse the pun) eat their lunch).

This is a prisoner's dilemma situation, and as we all know, the optimal solution for prisoner's dilemma is to have a mob boss proclaim that he'll kill any prisoner that rats others out to authorities. Similarly, either there's a way to punish defectors, or McD and BK will forever be stuck in the loop of ever growing advertising expenses.

Removing advertising would definitely benefit both BK and McD, as both could be able to stop spending money on advertising just to protect their market share.

I'm not saying the competition shouldn't exist - just that we should put brakes on some of the negative-sum games it causes, once the market is saturated and things turn into a fight for a fixed pie. As you say, at this point it's all wasted labour, and it can eat pretty much all your profits.

I tried to refrain from mentioning government regulation here, but the brakes need to be put on everyone simultaneously - deciding to just stop all advertising expense for yourself is a competitive suicide.

I get what you're saying, but I wanted to point out that lower profits can be better for society if due to competition. Every dollar a company earns in profit is a little more of efficiency that could be eked out of the business

I think we need to be cautious here, though. A perfect market would bring perfect efficiency, but perfect efficiency is a disaster for humans who depend on the market to live. Happiness and quality of life today happen in places where market is not efficient yet.

To live in a world where markets can be perfectly efficient and everyone happy because we stop staking the lives of people to their worth as determined by the market.

The external point of view is dubiously helpful.

Lions eat antelope; when they die their bodies become grass; the antelope eat the grass.

Suppose they all agreed not to do this.

Antelope eat grass and breed. If they eat faster than the grass can regrow, they starve and die, and their bodies become grass.

Death through starvation is unpleasant. Suppose they could agree to breed less, as to not expand beyond carrying capacity of the place they live in. They would lead a happier life.

Point being, some feedback-driven systems are good, and some are bad.

Good being, a smaller number of happier lives? Huh. Anyway,

Optimizing for the whole is different than optimizing for the parts.

What seems redundant on a high level can be critical on a lower level.

To each antilope eating grass is purposeful. As may be the work of each Department in your original example.

Why is the supposition that fewer lives is good controversial? What do we owe the unborn and non existent? Surely in any moral framework, if one could prove that additional organisms in an environment degrade the quality of life for all organisms, then it would be a moral decision (in principle) to reduce by attrition the number of new organisms? I am not arguing for population control as the mechanisms to achieve it are themselves morally dubious, but surely in principle we can agree that there is no moral imperative to grow a population, or alternatively that is not immoral to advocate for preventing population growth where it would reduce quality of life and lead to environmental degradation?

A moral framework is inherently subjective, so it should be no surprise that the rights of the unborn are considered more important in some than others.

Christianity arguably disagrees with you - see the tale of Onan. Buddhists likewise consider all life as sacred, in that an animal may previously/subsequently be a human soul. Lastly, many atheist progressives would argue that preservation of the human race is a moral imperative, and having more total humans rather than less ensures preservation in at least a simplistic mathematical sense.

I would argue that a strictly rationalist or at least secular morality should be applied given the sheer religious or spiritual diversity of the global population.

And regarding your latter point,it is as you say simplistic - much like the proverbial bacterium on an agar plate, our growth imperative will destroy our future if we overrun the bounds of our environment. I think we will see the issue become more important as the consequences of overpopulation (with respect to resource consumption and carrying capacity) begin to bite.

How do you arrive at an acceptable secular morality, especially since science claims that it cannot speak to morality?

Science cannot speak to general morality, as an abstract set of axiomatically good values, because it tends to tell us that those are completely arbitrary.

But science also teaches us that humans have a set of common, shared values, and while they may be arbitrary in general, they're not arbitrary to us. And they're shared, because humans are not isolated minds, each coming to existence ex nihilo, but in fact are connected through the process of reproduction. All of us have brain architecture we've inherited from a common ancestor.

This is how science can point us where to look for some practical morality.

> Lastly, many atheist progressives would argue that preservation of the human race is a moral imperative, and having more total humans rather than less ensures preservation in at least a simplistic mathematical sense.

It doesn't, because what I've essentially explained in my example. Too much population, and you collapse the environment, and human race suffers and then dies. I hope even smart atheist progressives would realize that meaningful ways to preserve human race are things like building a Mars colony, or ensuring the Earth's ecosystem does not collapse (such collapse would likely lead to great wars, possibly nuclear).

> Christianity arguably disagrees with you - see the tale of Onan

"Be fruitful and multiply" is Genesis 1:28.

Onan is, per Jermone and canonical discussions, about spilling seed unnecessarily, but is more about not raping your sister-in-law and betraying dead family than it is about having many children. Nothing in there about the sacredness of babies or anything.

Onan's brother died and by tradition Onan entered into a Levirate marriage with his dead brother's wife, Tamar, to continue the brother's line. If Onan fathered a child by Tamar the child would inherit all of the dead brother's possessions and rights; if there were no sons Onan would inherit everything. So Onan pulls out, meaning he gets to bang the widow, and still gets to keep everything -- which is pretty sleazy.

God isn't really a fan of this, and punishes him accordingly.

I agree with the first loop. I think there are very few markets where the 2nd loop actually exists.

1. There is constant innovation, even in the most established areas people are always trying new things. 2. Advertisement is an education campaign. There are always new people that have a problem to solve and they may not be aware of what exists.

> 2. Advertisement is an education campaign. There are always new people that have a problem to solve and they may not be aware of what exists.

That's motte-and-bailey defense of advertising. Yes, it also serves to help people discover off-the-shelf solutions to their problems. But that's not its primary function, nor it's where most money is being made. The discovery part is easy - in fact, most of the times it's best done in pull fashion ("I have a problem, let me look for solutions") instead of push ("here is a solution for the problem you didn't know you had"). Most of advertising is about misleading people to make suboptimal choices - choosing the product whose vendor is best at advertising, instead of the one best suited for the need - and about fighting for a fixed-size pie of customers in a given market.

What you call 'negative sum' some of us call 'competition' and it's healthy considering the alternative dynamic of monopoly.

All corporate systems could be described as various intertwining loops (that intertwine with other corporate loops), it's really a matter of efficiency of those individuals and loops as a system.

Sometimes loops seem wasteful ... like lawyers ... until you actually do get sued or need to sue etc..

I'm not criticizing competition itself. It's wasteful, but it's also necessary because this is how we solve resource allocation problems - we're too dumb to do it directly, so we use market dynamics to implicitly compute it for us.

I'm criticizing runaway negative-sum games. Like where companies are competing for a fixed-size market - any marginal effort to win more of the market will be cancelled out by equivalent effort of the other party. The end result is the same, only both companies just wasted money fighting.

I don't think it would be. I think if everyone stopped advertising unit sales would crash.

Coke vs Pepsi is much less of a thing than the constant reinforcement that you would really, really enjoy one or the other right now. The constant reinforcement drives absolute sales, not just relative market share.

I think the problem is more that a lot of heavily advertised products are incredibly harmful to personal and environmental health. Sugar is unbelievably toxic over the longer term (weight gain, diabetes, etc) but the canonisation of the profit motive means that market morality rewards the creation and promotion of these toxic effects.

You could argue that if people want to poison themselves they should be allowed to. But even ignoring the direct social costs of the medical care required to clean up the effects of Type II diabetes and heart disease, the argument is patchily applied.

Some poisons (sugar, alcohol, tobacco) get a pass, while others (psychedelic drugs) don't. A few like cocaine remain in limbo, with nominal disapproval but tacit - and sometimes not so tacit - covert political support.

It's not just about bullshit jobs but about bullshit consumption, and the curious moral frameworks that support it.

> I think if everyone stopped advertising unit sales would crash.

It did not happen when some countries switched to much more strict advertising rules.

People don't stop eating, drinking and buying medicines. Or start saving money that will never be spent.

> It's not just about bullshit jobs but about bullshit consumption, and the curious moral frameworks that support it.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Many jobs seem to have a net negative value for society - soda, highly processed food, credit cards, car dealerships, (most) sales people, etc. We'd probably be better of as a society paying these people to do nothing than to do what they do now; we'd be even better off if we paid them to do something actually productive. There might not be a perfect solution for this problem, but we don't seem interested in having a discussion about any solution to it.

Like you said, we have a curious moral framework at play here. For instance, a highly paid person who has a job with a net negative impact on society is often considered more moral than a beggar on the street (and it should be noted that the former is going to be consuming more resources from society as well). Because most people will calculate someone's worth by having a job, not by judging its impact on society (at least, most of the time).

> Like you said, we have a curious moral framework at play here. For instance, a highly paid person who has a job with a net negative impact on society is often considered more moral than a beggar on the street (and it should be noted that the former is going to be consuming more resources from society as well).

More than that, we also have very peculiar standards between jobs. I like to pick on marketing/advertising, because I'm absolutely baffled by it. Somehow the profession that often dabbles in lying, scamming and generally making other people's lives worse off (by dragging them towards suboptimal choices) became a respectable occupation, even though if a typical salesman applied their skills to their friends and family, he'd eventually end up punched in the face. It's not even an issue of impact on society at large - we've legitimized, and even glorified, acting maliciously towards random strangers.

Also: the mortgage industry as arms dealers in a bidding war -- and the proceeds of the bidding war don't even go to the counterparties of the contract being sold!

People marvel at how successful the greedy optimization algorithm of our economy is at finding local optima, but when you take a step back the emperor has no clothes. Sigh.

Credit cards definitely provide value, the anti-every-using-credit crowd seems to not understand how they work. If my pet ever needs thousands of dollars of emergency vet care, I can now pay for that using my credit, and then spread my payment of that bill over a longer period.

Expedited access to a shitty line of credit is worth 5% of every transaction you ever make (or whatever they skim these days)? Please.

"Many jobs seem to have a net negative value for society - soda, highly processed food, credit cards, car dealerships, (most) sales people, etc."

Rubbish.

Soda taste great, I love it. Don't tell me what is 'good or bad for me' - I can figure that out.

'Processed Foods' feed the world. They're not fundamentally unhealthy, can can absolutely be part of a decent diet.

Credit Cards - are an amazing financial innovation. Consumer credit is a really big deal that helps grease the wheels. Wherever there is no good consumer credit system - the economy is crap.

Car Dealerships and Salespeople - they definitely serve a function and it's why they are among the highest paid. Most people still like to test cars. The car industry relies on the model of dealerships and Tesla riding without is just like a new airline entrant just running only the profitable routes, and not carrying the longer tail ones. Also society has changed a little bit so admittedly the model could adapt.

All of those thinks you mentioned could be improved, and can be risky, but without them we'd be much worse off.

> competition itself. It's wasteful, but it's also necessary > we're too dumb to do it directly

citation needed.

Humanity is planning the colonization of Mars, nuclear fusion and so on and yet, somehow, managing our own resources is always an unsolvable problem?

> I'm criticizing runaway negative-sum games.

They are inevitable with competition.

> citation needed.

Every attempt of doing it in the past, like e.g. centrally planned economy? Internals of every large company? Self-evident if you look around?

Also http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/. In a way, coordination problems are the root of all problems of human society. We're planning Mars colonies in spite of that, not thanks to it.

> They are inevitable with competition.

They can be limited, though. Think of market economy as internal combustion engine. Burning fuel is inevitable - because that's how the engine works. But that doesn't imply you have to set your gas tank on fire.

> Humanity is planning the colonization of Mars, nuclear fusion and so on

You mean those 50-year old fantasies that are better described in science fiction novels than being anywhere close to reality?

You're the one that needs to provide a citation.

Yes, we're too dumb to do resource allocation directly, and maybe irreparably so. Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

> What you call 'negative sum' some of us call 'competition'

The broken windows fallacy doesn't suddenly become net-positive when renamed. Perhaps humans are not capable of improving interaction outcomes any further than we've gotten and humanity has reached peak efficiency re: transaction costs and firm-size, but I have a hard time believing that.

> Sometimes loops seem wasteful ... like lawyers ... until you actually do get sued or need to sue etc..

That 'actually getting sued' part is your induction in to the loop. It doesn't justify the bullshit, it is an object lesson in how it works.

Kafka is still required reading.

If it wasn't 'net positive' not only would we not be having this conversation over the 'internet' - we'd still be in the dark ages.

"That 'actually getting sued' part is your induction in to the loop."

No, it's not. It's not always clear what is illegal, what is not, what is infringement, what is not.

Rather than having a totalitarian authority create, divide and control IP etc. we have adversarial law and companies can file suit and work it out in court.

When there isn't overt corruption in the system, it works reasonably well.

That we're even having this conversation over the internet in 2018 is evidence that it's not 'negative sum'.

> If it wasn't 'net positive' not only would we not be having this conversation over the 'internet' - we'd still be in the dark ages.

The internet was developed by Darpa so I'm not sure what you're trying to imply here. Competition did not produce the internet, and the telecommunications industry, which came about after as a commercialization project, has serious issues which make this an even harder argument to make.

Competition definitely created the telecommunications industry and by the way most of the electric grid as well.

'The internet' as we know it was not created by DARPA.

DARPA created some protocols - of which there were many, private and public.

It just so happens that a certain version of it got a critical mass - it didn't have to be that way. And a lot of private interests were involved, particularly private universities.

The network over which the internet was overlaid is entirely commercial - and of course most of the variation of it has been commercial, or non-governmental type NGOs, i.e consortiums.

Nobody is going to argue that some projects, particularly long-term/pure R&D, or projects that literally require a scale that's out of reach of even the largest private entities, are not going to require some kind of collective participation.

But the argument that competition is kafkaesque or inherently problematic because of entities competing for the same turf is short sighted.