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> You're way off the mark with your examples. More appropriate ones would be military weapons, multi-level marketing, payday loan firms with ridiculous interest rates, scummy advertisement firms. Agreed. Modern economics encourages waste, such as multi-level marketing, payday loans, advertising, etc. Hell, I'm sure most people's jobs here, indeed, most jobs would fall under David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs". > You might not remember that in the Middle-Ages a large portion of intellectuals were spending most of their time debating religion such as is God really omnipotent and what a specific verse in Bible meant.
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> Now sure you can argue that they were doing only what the society and themselves considered valuable. But one can only wonder if those smart people had been putting their best effort into other things, say developing agriculture or better industrial processes. ... I cannot agree. A few years ago I picked up Anthony Kenny's "A Brief History of Western Philosophy", and "A New History of Western Philosophy". What these "useless" debates about knowledge got us were considerable changes in morality, metaphysics, and helped us create things that were useful in the long run. Indeed, the only reason formal 'science' is around is because of those changes in thought and reasoning. Bertrand Russell has another sort of argument in the same direction, that I quite like. You can find it here: https://books.google.no/books?id=CnlbMP_vBmgC&pg=PA16&dq=use... > I myself did a little day-trading at one period in my life and while I made money, I thought it was the most useless thing I could spend my life in. Agreed. |
Correct in one sense, but assumes we know in advance what will be waste and what won't be. Central planning has shown itself to be far less effective, both in overall quality of life and in meeting specific demands, than more wasteful competitive economies. So although its easy to point to retrospectively wasteful activities, life without them would be objectively worse.
Tangentially, when covid was in early days and people were beginning to develop vaccines, I saw someone comment asking who was going to coordinate the many disparate development efforts to make sure resources were being effectively used. I can't think of a more starkly absurd idea - it's only by allowing free activity, incentivized by some external, real forcing function, that we can expect to see consistent success. Any central definition and sanction of what should and shouldn't be done instantly distorts incentives towards pleading some central arbiter, and fails.
So all the scuzzy businesses and pursuits that the GP thinks are wasteful, are part of the rich tapestry that overall feeds us and keeps lifting us up. The only way we'd should be signaling they are not helpful is by not using them (and just for greater certainty I'm not talking about tolerating things that are exploitive, harmful, etc, just "wastful")