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Comment by robotpepi | Hacker News Reader

it's already been explained in other comments: companies spend a shit ton of money to trick you (via storytelling, branding, slogans, influencers, psychological manipulation, etc) into buying shit. moreover, this is structurally necessary because a company without marketing is outperformed by one with it.

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None of that is "inefficiency." In fact, since it's so successful at making people buy things, as you seem to state, given no proof, then you're just proving the parent's point, that it's very efficient. An inefficient process wouldn't be this good at making people buy stuff. I think you're confusing efficiency with value judgments of good and bad.

A slaughterhouse for example is very efficient at processing animals from living beings into mass produced meat, however you want to feel about the ethics of that.

we are talking about different things. you're confusing the efficiency of current marketing at making people buy stuff with the efficiency of the economic system. the economic system is here for us to satisfy our needs (although of course the current economic system has a different purpose). marketing has orthogonal goals.

Satisfying needs and wants, which marketing does very efficiently. You're just in the bubble of HN where no one clicks ads, everyone runs ad blockers, and people think ads are literally evil. The vast majority of people don't care and will even click on ads and buy products they want, otherwise ads would not work so well.

what bubble are you talking about? you don't know what webpages I frequent.

and you're still missing the point. I'm not saying that marketing has no effect on people (on the contrary, that's the problem, and it affects me too). my point is about the absurdity of basing our social organization on this. marketing only has perverse motivations, then you see the effects on people. tobacco is the classic example. this is an inefficiency of the system.

There is no social organization where ads and marketing would not exist, even if by force. Even mercantile economies had advertising.

there have been social organizations where it doesn't have the prominent role it has now, this is a 20th century phenomenon.

And I would not want to live in those societies where new products aren't made because they can't sell because no one knows about them.

you keep changing the goalpost...

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