Wealth & Money Quote by Daniel Starch

Starch opens with a sly bit of triangulation: he doesn’t defend advertising outright, he inventories the suspicions people already carry. By calling them “common conceptions” held by “a considerable number of people,” he frames the public as a data set - measurable, persuadable, and, crucially, correctable. That’s the psychologist’s move. Before he offers proof, he diagnoses perception.

The sentence is built to look neutral, but it quietly shifts the burden of argument. “Enormously large sums” concedes the sticker shock, then “economic waste” introduces the moral charge that advertising isn’t just expensive, it’s socially irresponsible. Starch’s intent is to set up a controlled experiment in rhetoric: name the critique in the language of the critic, then reclassify it as a belief - a conception - rather than a settled fact. Once it’s a belief, it can be tested, segmented, and reframed.

The context matters. Starch was part of the early 20th-century push to make advertising scientific: attention, recall, and persuasion treated as quantifiable outcomes. In that era, mass media was scaling fast, and so were ad budgets; the public’s unease tracked the sense that modern life was being colonized by messages. Starch’s subtext is pragmatic, not utopian: if advertising looks like waste, that’s a measurement problem and a credibility problem. He’s not just defending an industry; he’s legitimizing a profession - the expert who can translate public resentment into metrics, and metrics into justification.