[jldugger]

> the bottom 7 lowest-margin industries ... (CRISPR, gene therapy, hydrogen fuel cell, genomics and mRNA therapeutics) arguably have some of the greatest potential to improve quality of life and help the planet.

Critically, all the revenue for things you mention have yet to materialize, so they will show up in this naive analysis as losers. What they really represent is _opportunity_. Some may materialize but others have been around for decades and it turns out the "application for profit" step is much harder than anticipated.

> margin (profit) is inversely correlated with value to humanity.

You say this like it's a bad thing, but arguably the most valuable things to humanity are food, water, and shelter. These are simultaneously so important and so cheap that they embody the term "commodity," and that's a good thing! A _ton_ of human ingenuity from every society and culture has been applied to making these things better and cheaper and more plentiful. The same thing is happening to solar power (mostly for geopolitical reasons), which is conspicuously not on either of your lists.

Shelter is the one bit in the hierarchy of needs that got weird. Since it's not a consumable, there's incentive to treat it as an investment. In theory there's nothing wrong with that, but the incentives combined with local politics can become toxic. So many voters in the US own real estate (with leverage!) that everyone agrees by default that prices must never go down. That leads to a trap where politics revolve around housing prices never falling.