Comment by lordnacho

> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow. We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making.

We would no longer be tricked into buying a bunch of crap that doesn't make us happy.

But because GDP is what it is, we will have a recession. Quite a big one, because a lot of the economy is reliant on selling people stuff they could do without. Perhaps people would be happier once things settle down, but we have locked ourselves into measuring things that are easy to measure, and so we're all going to think it was a failed experiment.