I thing the argument is more along the lines of:

1. Observed value drives innovation.

2. Profit / profit-motive is one of the most straightforward / most efficient means we have to observe value.

You’re probably right and my counter argument would be:

1. Human [curiosity, desire, necessity] drives innovation.

2. Profit mandate suppresses most of those innovations by promoting the few money making ideas (however beneficial or harmful they may be).

I think the issue with that response is that [curiosity, desire, necessity] are all just specific versions of "observed value" which you are then applying to oneself. Sure, you'll have a lot of innovation if everyone is trying to satisfy their own curiosity, desire, or necessity. But you'll drive far more innovation if you have individuals who are also concerned with satisfying those needs for other people. And the easiest proxy for "someone else desires or needs this" is pricing mechanisms. Luckily, the internet / better communication methods are making it much easier to determine what is valuable to others without pricing mechanisms, but I would argue that profit motive is still the most effective method.

Yeah, I mostly agree. Profit motive is not a terrible method on average. I just get a bit worked up when I encounter any variant of “a corporations only duty is to create shareholder value”. :)

Curiosity does not provide funding in the quantities needed. Nor does it allocate resources towards maximizing the benefit to the maximum number of people.

But neither does profit motive. Is facebook maximizing the benefit of their users? It’s more like maximizing benefits to the minimum amount of people at the expense of the maximum number of people.

> But neither does profit motive.

Sure it does. Developing a cure for 100 people will generated far less profits than a cure for 100,000 people.

It's why you see cars get better every year and constant attempts to appeal to the widest customer base possible. (That didn't happen with Soviet built cars, which tended to never improve.)

As for advertising platforms, the customers are the advertisers.

I don’t dispute that.

But in the first paragraph, the side effect is that developing a not-quite-cure treatment for 50,000 people is more profitable than both the others.

As for the last paragraph, this is perhaps the essence of the problem. The motive is profit, so we only care about the advertisers. But the users are real people too, and they are getting screwed.

> the side effect is that developing a not-quite-cure treatment for 50,000 people is more profitable than both the others.

Until someone else develops a cure and takes all your business away.

Recall that a company blinded by greed developed a cure for Hepatitis C, not a treatment.

The US leads the world in pharmaceutical innovation. Hepatitis C cure, for example. Treatment for rheumatoid arthritis (Enbrel), for another.

Socialist funded research is driven by politics, not maximizing the benefit to the maximum number of people.

Note that a lot of university research is funded by corporations.

I await your list of medical advances from the USSR.