A pox upon the editor who gave this piece such a poor title. This is an economic critique of advertising, it is notably dispassionate, and in fact carefully contains precisely zero moralizing whatsoever.
Sadly there is a notable amount of posts to hn that get close to zero attention due to bad titling. Though at least the hn crowd doesn't favour miserably bait focused social media style titling as strongly.
Section 3, How economists defend advertising and why it isn't enough is interesting. For a while, I had casual access to economics academics. When I asked how economists treated advertising, they either looked baffled, or said it basically didn't matter.