Where is anyone pontificating about what people should have?

I also don't see any mention of whether people's preferences are coherent or not.

I didn't use the words 'genuine demand', but I did talk about genuine need. This isn't a true Scotsman fallacy because I am talking about the buyers ability to get their needs met, and not debating what qualifies as a genuine need - which is as you say, a revealed preference.

What is the difference between need and want? Economically, there is no difference - there are simply goods that have less elastic demand curves and goods that have more elastic demand curves. The elasticity value that distinguishes "need" from "want" is totally arbitrary.

Fair point, but it doesn't really affect the sense of what I said in my original comment.

Also, just because economists haven't found a bright line between concepts doesn't mean they aren't distinct. I think there's a distinct difference between needing food, and wanting an xbox.

If you start with that assumption, you immediately confront the issue that you may 'need' food, but you don't need tasty food, or much food, or even "easily digested" food. One does not even 'need' "clean" food, as humans are easily able to tolerate being ill most of the time; and, unfortunately, many people worldwide operate with this constraint their entire lives.

In fact, we didn't even really 'need' food at all: what we needed were a few nutrients, maybe in the form of a pill. Food is a luxury, and if our stomachs disagree we can always get stomach-ectomies.

Until, of course, you find that one guy who defines the point of his existence to be the very first guy to get a billion points in Halo: a person might be in a hospital, dying anyway, and while eating may prolong his life another month, he will consider his whole existence to be a waste if you take away his Xbox; at this point the concept of objective needs totally disappears, and you end up back in the land of "differently elastic demand curves".

I didn't say everyone's needs are the same.

Ok: I think one easily gets the other impression from your want/need distinction. Regardless: the first two paragraphs do not even touch on that: that person might 'need' an Xbox, but not one that has a working blue video composite. The point is that there is an elasticity to the demand curve for everything that the person might 'want', but there is no obvious breaking point where you suddenly end up with a 'need': and a great example is that you do not really 'need' food, you just want it very very badly.

That's fair enough. I think this explains the reactions of others in this thread. The distinction between want and need isn't important to my original point, and I certainly wasn't intending to claim them as objective. It was a careless choice of words.

> I am talking about the buyers ability to get their needs met

so a 'genuine need' being met is a conversion, right? isn't that what google's algorithms and advertisers optimize for?

i think in your framework of evaluation, that makes better advertisement inherently more moral, and thus, working for a company that's trying to increase conversions an inherently moral task.

preferences are subjective. If someone is buying something you claim they don't need you need to, at the very least, get them to agree with you before you have a plausible case.

you aren't being trolled, get an introductory microecon text.

If the way that Google shows ads was entirely driven by the needs/wants of the ad viewers, then it's easy to make a case that the ad viewers are being served. But Google doesn't only have the ad viewers in mind; the interests of advertisers are also being served.

And where the interests of advertisers and those of the ad viewers conflict, who wins? To the extent that advertisers ever win in those conflicts, then the interests of the ad viewers are not being served. And in that case, it's perfectly reasonable to question the social utility of Google's ad-serving.

But it's hard to define exactly how and when the interests of the ad viewers aren't being served. And that's where this thread gets bogged down a bit, on the question of what the ad viewers' "genuine" wants/needs are.

But I don't think we need to nail that down before we can question the social utility of the ads, because the system accommodates a set of interests (those of the advertisers) that often conflict with the interests of the ad viewers. Now, if you can reduce those conflicts, that's great, but is it really controversial that they exist?

why do you continue to deny your parent post?

QUOTE: "the sellers have to be meeting genuine needs, or the buyers have to have the information necessary to make good determinations."

both of your assertions are false. markets tend toward equilibria you disagree with. that you disagree with them doesn't make the needs "non-genuine", nor does it mean information asymmetry is a barrier to efficient markets. correcting information asymmetry is itself subject to market forces.

I haven't denied my parent post. You are quoting me out of context - it doesn't make sense if you don't include the full sentence, and you aren't explaining why you think I'm claiming needs are not subjective.

Where have I said anything about me agreeing or disagreeing with people's needs? Certainly not in that quote. My position is simply that Google's advertising doesn't necessarily serve the function of matching people with suppliers of what they want or need because it's an attention auction which is agnostic to the idea of need or want.

You also haven't addressed what part of what I've said is 'pontificating' or why I don't have the right to express my views.