[7thaccount]

Agreed. Complexity could ultimately be our downfall. Everything is drastically more complicated than before and the margins for safety are getting more and more reduced.

Take my own industry of electricity markets for example. It used to be you had large vertically integrated utilities that handled generation of power as well as the transmission of it to the residential grid (distribution). They would run the grid and factor all costs (fixed and variable) into residential and industrial rates. This is easy to explain to someone in a minute or so. In the 1970s and 80s though deregulation took off and you could finally build fairly efficient and smaller gas plants, so there was a push to have these much larger grid operators optimize over a much larger region and introduce competition amongst those in the market, so the public wouldn't suffer from unwise investments from the utilities. This system is more efficient, but is supposed to operate off of a "free market" system. The only problem is that it has never worked very well overall. It does schedule power more efficiently, but you have all these power plants needed for just a handful of events that are no longer solvent as they can't earn enough money in the markets. So the grid operators are dealing with mass scale retirements (some of these would've occured anyway due to EPA rulings) and spending tons of time and money trying to fix a problem that didn't use to exist. These organizations have thousands of pages of legal documents and run enormously complex power auctions and have to employ hundreds of employees to administer all of it. Very few people understand how the cake is made anymore so to speak. Does it save more money? Yes, but the cost is a massive increase in complexity that grows each year as new rules are made. So we took something conceptually simple and made it 10x more complex in order to squeak out more savings. I'm not saying it was the wrong path, but doing this sort of thing all over society/economy has its own costs.

[Gibbon1]

Reminds me before the 2008 financial crisis you used to hear finance types and economists crowing about financial innovation. After that they've been more quiet. But they never exactly came out and said what it was. I can tell you it's about efficiently collecting rents. Being able to pick people pocket faster and cheaper so you can pick more pockets. That isn't most people think of when they hear the word innovation.

(Edgy comment over).

(Less edgy comment begins)

The finance share of the US economy went from 4% 50 years to 17% today. It feels likely that there are been zero or less than zero benefit over all from that.

Everyone has a internet connected doorbell now. 50 Yeah ago my parents never locked their front door.

Lots of complexity that seems to provide no overall value.