[charcircuit]

You are underestimating the importance of efficient allocation of capital and and attention. What use is discovering a way to improve harvesting efficiency if there is no money to develop it into a product or inform customers of its existence. It might as well not exist without there being a way to finance, make people aware of it, and reward the creator.

[janalsncm]

The problem with this line is that there is social value to things aside from their standalone ability to generate revenue. Essentially every publicly funded thing derives from this philosophy. In fact the social utility of a thing and its profitability probably aren’t that tightly coupled.

If you buy that (not everyone does) then it follows that an industry can be compensating beyond its social value.

That is, the value of providing market liquidity is not zero. The value of figuring out the optimal next video on YouTube is not zero. But in my opinion there is also social value in making sure poor kids can read.

[robotpepi]

it seems to me that the problem is quite the opposite. people believe that the "importance of allocation of capital" (good euphemism by the way) is WAY more important that it really is. do we need extra personalized ads in each of our machines? do we need instant financial trades and people optimizing instant transactions? We don't need a sophisticated AI to "inform" the customers.

there is a ton of things that are there simply because at some point people made money out of it, and then lobbied politicians to death to avoid regulation.

[charcircuit]

>do we need extra personalized ads in each of our machines?

If we want local, small, or niche businesses to exist.

>do we need instant financial trades and people optimizing instant transactions?

If we want people to easily get a fair price when they want to buy or sell something.

[robotpepi]

we had local, small and noche business before. and even today.

the point again is that nobody says that certain mechanism of the market can have positive effects. the point is that way overestimated. we have extremely complex procedures that cost insanely amounts of money for stuff like ads. we could have a fraction of that power and people would still know about the products they need, etc.