Stuart Chase
Engineer and economist who, with Frederick Schlink, published Your Money's Worth in 1927. Their argument was that mass production had severed the buyer from any means of knowing what they were buying, which is the condition economists later formalised as credence goods.
Who they are
Chase trained as an accountant and worked as an investigator before turning to popular economics, and the book's method shows it: it is an argument from the structure of the market rather than from the morality of advertisers.
The claim is that a hundred years earlier you bought flour from the person who milled it, and by 1927 you bought a branded tin whose contents you could not assess, from a shop that had not made it, on the strength of an advertisement. The information had been removed from the transaction.
The book concedes something most critics of advertising will not, that people enjoy being sold to, and that concession is part of why it has aged better than its contemporaries. It launched Consumers' Research and the product-testing movement that followed.
Key papers
Chase, S., & Schlink, F. J. (1927). Your Money's Worth. Read in full in this vault, 20 September 2026, from a paginated scan.
Key ideas
The condition before the name. Fifty years before economists formalised credence goods, two engineers described the same structure. See Credence Goods.
His remedy was the weak one. Independent testing and publication is verifiability, and the experimental evidence finds verifiability barely disciplines these markets while liability does.
The concession about enjoyment is the reason to take the rest seriously.
Sources
- Chase, S., & Schlink, F. J. (1927). Your Money's Worth. Read in full in this vault, 20 September 2026. No external verification pass has been run on this text.
- Dulleck, Kerschbamer & Sutter (2011), American Economic Review, 101(2), 526-555, for the remedy ranking his proposal is measured against.