A friend of mine lives in a block of flats in Oslo. Normal building. Normal entrance. For years, there was a panel of doorbells next to the front door — one button per apartment, each with a name label. You found the name, pressed the button, the door buzzed open. The whole interaction took about three seconds. It worked perfectly. It had worked perfectly for decades.
Then someone replaced it with a QR code.
Now, to ring my friend’s doorbell, I take out my phone, open the camera, scan the QR code, wait for a webpage to load, scroll through a list of residents to find his name, tap it, and wait for the system to connect. On a good day this takes maybe thirty seconds. On a bad day — poor signal, slow page load, wrong browser — it takes a minute or more.
For me, a young-ish man who’s reasonably comfortable with technology, it’s an annoyance. For the eighty-year-old woman who lives on the third floor, I imagine it’s closer to a hostage situation.
Somebody sold this system to the building’s board. Somebody made a pitch about modernization, digital infrastructure, maybe even security. Somebody got paid. An economic transaction occurred. GDP went up by the value of that transaction.
And the end result is that entering the building is now ten times harder than it was before.
This is what I’ve started calling fake economic activity. Solutions that generate revenue without generating value. Products and regulations that create the appearance of progress while making the user’s life measurably worse. And once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere.
Frédéric Bastiat saw this coming in 1850
The French economist Frédéric Bastiat published a parable in 1850 called “The Broken Window.” A shopkeeper’s son breaks a pane of glass. The onlookers console the shopkeeper by pointing out that the glazier will now have work. Money will flow, and the economy will benefit. Bastiat’s point was that this reasoning is insane. The money spent replacing the window can’t be spent on something new. The economy didn’t gain a window; it lost whatever the shopkeeper would have bought instead.
The broken window fallacy is one of the most important ideas in economics, and it describes exactly what’s happening with half the “innovations” being sold to us today. The QR code doorbell didn’t add value to the building. It replaced something that worked with something that doesn’t work as well. But it generated economic activity — a sale, an installation, a subscription fee, maybe ongoing maintenance. By the crude metric of GDP, this counts as growth. By the metric of “does the building work better than it did before,” it’s a net negative.
This distinction between economic activity and actual value creation, is one that mainstream economics is remarkably bad at making. GDP measures movement, not direction. It counts the ambulance ride to the hospital the same as the gym membership that keeps you out of one.
The paper straw that dissolves in your drink
Let’s talk about straws.
In 2019, the EU banned single-use plastic straws under its Single-Use Plastics Directive. The intention was good. Plastic waste is a real problem, particularly in oceans. Nobody with a brain disputes that.
But here’s what actually happened.
Restaurants and bars replaced plastic straws with paper ones. Paper straws cost more to produce. They require different machinery to manufacture. They dissolve in your drink after about ten minutes. They taste like wet cardboard. Every single person who has used a paper straw knows this. It is perhaps the most universally loathed consumer product of the 2020s.
And the environmental benefit? Straws represent approximately 0.03% of ocean plastic waste by mass. Even if you eliminated every straw on earth, you would barely register a change in the actual problem. Meanwhile, a 2023 Belgian study tested 39 straw brands and found that 90% of paper straws contained PFAS — “forever chemicals” — including PFOA, which has been globally banned since 2020. The stainless steel straws? Zero PFAS detected.
So the “green” replacement for plastic straws is a product that performs worse, costs more, contains banned toxic chemicals, and addresses a fraction of a percent of the problem it claims to solve. But it generated enormous economic activity — new manufacturing, new supply chains, new regulations, new compliance costs — and made everyone involved feel like they were Doing Something.
The cap that won’t let go
If you’ve bought a bottle of water or juice in Europe recently, you’ve encountered the tethered cap. Since July 2024, EU regulations require that plastic bottle caps remain attached to the container. The idea is that loose caps get lost, end up in landfills or oceans, and don’t get recycled with the bottle.
Again, the intention isn’t crazy. Bottle caps are a common litter item. But the execution reveals the same pattern.
In Germany, where the regulation was rolled out, ninety-seven percent of plastic bottles were already being recycled, and over ninety-one percent were returned with their caps attached. The problem the regulation targets barely existed in countries with functioning deposit systems. A German MEP formally questioned the regulation’s logic in a parliamentary submission, calling it “illogical.”
Meanwhile, a consumer study by the German Institute for Standardization found that children, elderly people, and people with physical disabilities had serious difficulty opening the new caps. Some couldn’t open them at all. Others experienced spills and minor injuries. The cap that was supposed to help the environment now prevents a portion of the population from drinking their water without assistance.
But somebody manufactured those caps. Somebody retooled the bottling lines. Somebody ran the compliance process. Economic activity was generated. Boxes were checked.
The app that replaced the parking meter
This pattern extends far beyond environmental regulation.
In cities across Europe, simple parking meters have been replaced by apps. To park your car, you now need to download an app, create an account, enter your license plate, select a zone, enter payment details, and start a session. When you return, you need to remember to stop the session or you keep getting charged.
The parking meter required coins. You put them in, you got time. A child could do it. The app requires a smartphone, a data connection, an account, and the patience of a monk.
For the city, the app is cheaper to maintain than physical meters. For the app company, it’s a revenue stream. For the user, it’s yet another account, yet another password, yet another piece of friction added to a task that used to take fifteen seconds.
The same logic has colonized laundromats (apps to start washers), restaurants (QR codes to order), hotels (apps to unlock rooms), and even some public bathrooms (QR codes to enter). In each case, a simple physical interaction — push a button, turn a handle, hand over cash — has been replaced by a digital one that requires more steps, more time, and more dependence on a device that might be dead, out of signal, or running the wrong operating system.
The justification is always efficiency. But efficient for whom? Not for you. For the company that no longer has to maintain the physical thing, hire the person, or process the cash. The efficiency gain is entirely on their side. The friction is entirely on yours.
David Graeber’s ghost is nodding
The late anthropologist David Graeber wrote about a related phenomenon in his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs. His argument was that a huge portion of modern employment consists of roles that even the people doing them believe are pointless — administrators administrating administrators, compliance officers ensuring compliance with compliance requirements, consultants consulting on the need for consultants.
Graeber’s specific numbers are debatable. A YouGov poll found thirty-seven percent of British workers thought their job made no meaningful contribution. Other studies put the figure much lower. But the qualitative observation lands hard: a lot of economic activity exists not because it produces anything useful, but because it employs people and generates transactions.
The QR code doorbell is the product-design equivalent of a bullshit job. It exists not because anyone needed it, but because someone could sell it. The paper straw exists not because it solves the ocean plastic problem, but because it’s a visible, marketable response to a problem that requires invisible, structural solutions nobody wants to pay for.
What GDP doesn’t measure
Here’s the thing that bothers me most about all of this.
We measure economic health primarily through GDP — the total value of goods and services produced. By this measure, replacing every functional doorbell in Norway with a QR code system would be a net positive for the economy. So would breaking every window in Oslo and replacing them. So would making every product slightly worse so people have to buy replacements more often.
GDP doesn’t measure whether life got better. It measures whether money moved. And when your primary metric rewards movement regardless of direction, you get exactly what we have now: an economy that generates enormous activity while making the everyday experience of being a consumer subtly, persistently worse.
This isn’t a left-wing argument or a right-wing argument. It’s an observation about what happens when you optimize for the wrong thing. And it connects to a deeper question about what the economy is actually for.
Is it for producing the numbers that make quarterly reports look good? Or is it for making the experience of daily life — buying things, entering buildings, parking cars, drinking through straws — actually work?
How to think about this
I’m not a Luddite. I love technology. I’m building my own server infrastructure at home. I think automation and AI will make certain things genuinely better.
But I’ve started applying a simple test to every “innovation” I encounter: is this better for me, or is it better for the company selling it to me? If the answer is only the latter, it’s not innovation. It’s extraction dressed up as progress.
The doorbell worked. The parking meter worked. The plastic straw worked. The bottle cap worked. Replacing them generated economic activity, created the impression of forward motion, and made someone money.
None of it made my life better. Most of it made my life slightly, persistently worse.
And the most dishonest part? They keep telling me it’s for my benefit.
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