[infecto]

How is it different? We could make an argument that the efficient allocation of capital is what drives the rapid expansion of solar. It provides loans for businesses and individuals, it helps investors raise money, it rewards companies for doing well, it allows farmers to hedge crops. It is not perfect but it helps facilitate most of our modern society. Not perfect but which system would be better?

[nemomarx]

If you could either improve hft by some percentage, which slightly increases market liquidity and has downstream impacts, or you could work on making the manufacturing cost of solar panels the same percentage cheaper or making then some percentage more efficient, the latter option is more direct.

I think it would be good if our best minds went to work on directly creating better things instead of indirectly moving money around efficiently so that other people might eventually find success.

[infecto]

I get the intuition, making solar panels cheaper feels more “direct” than making markets more liquid. But that framing underestimates how much “indirect” efficiency matters.

Capital has to get from savers to builders. Liquidity, tighter spreads, and efficient pricing lower the cost of capital for all projects, including the ones building better solar panels. If financing those projects is cheaper and faster because markets function well, more of them get done.

It’s easy to glorify the visible widget (solar panels) and discount the invisible infrastructure (capital markets), but the latter is what makes scaling the former possible. The system needs both.