Advertisers should pay you.

 Advertisers should pay you

Advertising isn't only a waste of our time and attention, our ultimate scarce resource. It is also intensely annoying. So why do we have so much of it?

It is a classic case of market failure. The advertising industry consists of the buying and selling of your attention between 3rd parties without your consent. That means that the cost of access to your attention doesn't reflect its full social cost. Movie theatres, cable channels, phone apps, and so on price the sale of your attention at what it takes to extract it from you - i.e. how easy it is for you to escape their predations - and this is often much lower than the value to you of directing your attenti­on to something else. Since advertisers pay less to access your attention than your attention is worth to you, an excessive - inefficient - amount of advertising is produced. We are all continuously swamped by attempts to distract us from what we actually want to do, like watch a movie or listen to a song, with messages we don't want or need.