>If you believe it doesn't, then you should probably tell that to the trillion dollar industry.

The advertising industry is profitable because it's an arms race. Companies have to advertise because their competitors already are doing.

If all industries agreed to limit their ad spending, those trillions could become mere billions overnight, and the marginal revenue decreases would be more than offset by the decreased spending. But such coordination is impossible in a competitive economy, because any defector will reap huge rewards.

In the absence of advertising very few people are educated enough to more productively use their wealth. Principally, you must also consider that almost no dollars today are hoarded - even if you place them in the "slowest" place you can, your bank, that is still a fractional reserve bank that will loan all that out to drive economics in the same way buying goods would. Very, very few people who are saving are going to just hide cash under their bed if psychologically manipulative advertising was coercing them into buying things they did not want or need. And besides that, most of any money held in reserve would go into investments, which can drive much more social utility than buying unecessary crap.

But in reality that does not actually matter either. Like I said, there is very little fiscal responsibility in people - at least in the US - predominantly a product of culture. The money people would have spent on random useless object advertised on TV 1 would instead be spent on personal want 2. The practical effect of advertising is that it is simply redirecting dollars that would have gone to those with smaller advertising budgets to those with larger budgets. The trillion dollar industry exists as an arms race where increasing product quality or diversifying is less effective - because people are already broke, and net wealth is declining, you cannot compete honestly as effectively in product anymore. If you try that, you simply lose to the guy who had more advertising out there using psychological techniques to manipulate people into buying the inferior product over yours, and that is where the wishing comes in, people wish people were more rational, but we are not, and constant bombardment of advertising only wastes money to let the fattest cats maintain sales margins.

I didn't say it doesn't work. I said it isn't necessary.

We aren't arguing whether coke tastes nice, we are arguing whether you need to drink it...

I think you need to reread my comments.