-CindySherman-

I don't believe this will have a meaningful impact on society without advertising at the same level as state lotteries. It is so obvious that states should replace their lotteries with your no-lose lottery, but this will require reversing the vested interests and status quo. Will this just be another scheme to make the Freakonomics listeners feel smart and morally superior, or do you think it can be scaled to have impact?

Has anyone studied the economic cost of the Youtube algorithms? I kind of wonder if they have a disproportionately negative effect on a subset of people (or children) who suffer all the losses, but these people maybe have little economic resources. The analogy would be with alcohol or gambling profits which are primarily derived from a subset of the population. Anyway, it would be interesting to describe the direct impact of these algorithms (advertising profits to Youtube) and the externalities (costs to individuals or societies in the form of lost opportunity cost).