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from the ad-viewing-quota-enforcement dept.
The University of Warwick's Andrew Oswald and his team compared survey data on the life satisfaction of more than 900,000 citizens of 27 European countries from 1980 to 2011 with data on annual advertising spending in those nations over the same period. The researchers found an inverse connection between the two. The higher a country's ad spend was in one year, the less satisfied its citizens were a year or two later. Their conclusion: Advertising makes us unhappy.
Oswald: We did find a significant negative relationship. When you look at changes in national happiness each year and changes in ad spending that year or a few years earlier—and you hold other factors like GDP and unemployment constant—there is a link. This suggests that when advertisers pour money into a country, the result is diminished well-being for the people living there.
HBR: What prompted you to investigate this?
[ . . . ] I can't help noticing the increasing amount of ads we're bombarded with. For me, it was natural to wonder whether it might create dissatisfaction in our culture [ . . . ] In a sense they're trying to generate dissatisfaction—stirring up your desires so that you spend more
[ . . . . ] exposing people to a lot of advertising raises their aspirations—and makes them feel that their own lives, achievements, belongings, and experiences are inadequate.
[ . . . . ] we controlled for lots of other influences on happiness. Second, we looked at increases or drops in advertising in a given year and showed that they successfully predicted a rise or fall in national happiness in ensuing years.
So always take two ad blockers before bedtime.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @04:03AM
> So now we are told that double glazing is rubbish and we should rip it all out and replace it with triple glazing.
The increase in insulation from the third pane is primarily from the extra air space. We added a layer of plastic window film inside our old double pane windows (Anderson wood frame windows, from the 1960s). While the instructions on the 3M film package say to remove the film every spring, we have found that the film is good for five years or longer if we carefully clean the area where the double stick tape is laid down.
After a few years, some of the film loosens up (wrinkles) and we take five minutes to tighten it with a hair dryer. We also tried an off-brand film kit, but concluded that the extra price for 3M was worth it--lasts longer so we don't have to re-install so often.
The advantage is obvious on cold days when cooking (high inside moisture) -- the double pane windows formed condensation (and started to mold), windows with the extra layer mostly stay dry.
If I was building new, I'd probably future-protect (against high heating costs) with triple pane from the start, perhaps with suitable IR reflecting coatings. For our 50+ year old house, the plastic film is a useful improvement, without throwing away perfectly good windows.