Wherever you look on Amazon, there are Chinese goods being sold by dropshippers. Middlemen who don't actually contribute anything to the economy. They just buy stuff in China, often on Temu or Alibaba, have it sent to an Amazon warehouse, and then they let Amazon handle all the work of selling and distributing the item. A great number of "how to get rich quick" videos on YouTube describe exactly that process. Getting rich quick is an euphemism for an activity that makes money, while not actually contributing anything useful to an economy.

After some tariff chaos, the US tariff on China has now landed at 30%. That is a problem for the dropshippers. As they don't do anything where they could increase productivity or lower costs to "eat" the tariffs, they have no choice but to add any tariff directly onto the price of the items they sell. And much of the attractiveness of the dropshipped items is that they are cheap, so price increases lose you a lot of potential customers. And tariffs are only part of the problem: Customers like me have increasingly realized that we are paying dropshippers for nothing, and that we can just as easily order the exactly same goods directly from China via Temu. Temu has been growing in the US and Europe at an astounding growth rate, and much of that growth came to the detriment of the dropshippers that used to sell those same goods. Temu simply takes a smaller cut than the combined cut of the dropshipper and Amazon. Nothing changes in the quality of the goods you receive as a customer; instead of getting cheap Chinese junk from Amazon, you get the same cheap Chinese junk for even less money from Temu.

Another middleman business is likewise under a strong threat of disruption: Advertising. Individually, advertising appears like a necessity for any business, getting people to buy your product. At a macro-economic scale, the use of advertising is a lot more dubious. Due to growing inequality most consumers, especially in the US, are already spending all the money they have, and sometimes more. Thus more advertising can't get them to spend even more, collectively, because there simply isn't more. Advertising only determines what exactly the money gets spent on, it doesn't increase the size of the economy or produces anything useful.

The fundamental problem of any advertising is that you know how much you spent on advertising, and you know how much of your product you sold, but you don't know the link between the two. How effective are different channels of advertising? By how much would you increase your sales if you would increase your advertising budget? Is that rise in sales actually due to effective advertising, or was there some other reason?

Internet advertising at first sounded like a great idea, not only because people spend so much time on the internet, but also because you can better measure how many people have seen your advertisement, and how many people clicked on it. Which then pretty quickly led to the next get rich quick scheme on the internet, which basically consists of scamming advertising companies: Fake engagement. Content creators just creating garbage content, and then with the help of AI chatbots or other bots clicking on advertising links creating the illusion that they are very good at advertising your product. This has gotten so bad, that on some social media platforms you can now find AI chatbots being engaged in endless discussions with other AI chatbots over some content that is just AI slop, with no actual human in sight. As economic activity, that makes absolutely no sense at all, if it weren't for the advertising money. Advertising budgets have grown much faster than the economy has grown, but that is obviously not sustainable. Sooner or later the companies paying for the advertising will realize that this is a very bad return on investment, especially if the economy turns sour and heads into a recession. Maybe AI chatbots get so good that we can't tell them apart from actual people actually engaging with content on the internet. But those chatbots sure don't buy any of the advertised products.

To me, all get rich quick schemes are a sign of economic inefficiencies. Whether it is economic value on the internet measured by engagement, then leading to engagement being faked, or it is online shopping platforms enabling dropshippers to insert themselves into the supply chain without contributing anything to it. It all results in some people paying more for no value, and in the long run this isn't sustainable. Amazon shoppers wisen up and buy at Temu instead. Advertisers wisen up and reduce budgets for channels that don't seem to increase sales. Famous internet commerce specialist Abraham Lincoln remarked that "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time". An economy that has too many middlemen that don't actually contribute anything economically is vulnerable to shocks, as downturns make people watch closer where their money is going.