Market economy got us into the situation where the most brilliant minds in the world are researching best ways to make internet advertisements as addictive as they can be.
Very cool innovation, indeed. Ever read The Space Merchants?
They're doing a great job, ads are so addictive I've even turned off my Ad blocker so I can get more of them! Won't someone save me!
Ads would always exist, but think about how many great (even lifesaving) solutions we're missing out on because market decided they aren't worthy of pursuit.
"Nobody is addicted to ads" is true if you think only about the pop-ups and couple-second videos as "ads" - but the concept of advertisements is much wider than that. Some adverisements may not even be presented as such - they may be presented as "useful content", but which is chosen above other such useful content by the virtue of being paid for to the advertising company.
I recently turned off tracking, and suddenly started getting served ads for 'green cremation'. I guess statistically few people are interested in that, but conversions are lucrative, although the 99% of users who don't want to see it probably get mildly annoyed.
Liquidity and price discovery are useful things. Nobody would pay them otherwise.
Is there any other evidence of their usefulness beyond "people pay for it"?
"People pay for [that]" because it's a genuinely useful property of an investment vehicle.
We don't really though. There are companies, and individuals, with enough wealth and influence to compete with entire markets. A well-funded startup can undermine whole industries by spending VC money to run at a loss long enough that the rest of the market fails (Uber, AirBNB) or they can become so massive that there's absolutely no possibility of competing (Amazon). People can start private companies that do things only governments have done before (SpaceX, Palantir). These businesses are not influenced by pricing, because they're either too well funded to care, or too influential for others to get a foot in the door.
Free market economics is a beautiful idea, but every big business (and some small businesses) do all they can to subvert the market and hold a monopoly on something. Heck, Peter Thiel literally wrote a book about how to do exactly that - Zero To One.
Scale has no value unless it offers something to your customer base. What you're ignoring is that Uber, Amazon et al are so huge and dominant because customers flock to them. I can summon a taxi to my location in most cities in the world with a single app. I can have pretty much any item delivered to my door within one or two days. These were unfathomable 10-15 years ago.
Amazon has huge amounts of competition, as does Uber. I have absolutely no idea where you get this idea they are not influenced by pricing. Uber hasn't made any money in its entire existence. That is not characteristic of a monopoly.
Whether or not a functioning market economy could ever exist in reality if of course another question.
Anyway, the promise of a market economy is that it selects the "best" by competition. The fact that companies like Uber survive for decades while making losses and destroying potential competitors shows that this promise of the market economy does not stand in reality.
It's not exactly news that the market throws off price signals, the question is whether those signals are the correct signals.
After all, the market also decided it wanted opioids, slaves, and a betting shop on every high street in the UK. Are we wrong to question whether Mr Market is right?
What we absolutely don’t need, is autocrats dictating what society needs.
Luckily we already have this cool innovation called a market economy. It’s not perfectly efficient (especially in the short term), but pretty damn efficient.
By throwing off price signals, the market allows us to allocate efforts to things society wants more of. Unfortunately, contrary to the wishes of the King, it turns out society wants more tech companies.
But sometimes we do indeed over-allocate resources to tech companies! Luckily we have the hedge funds incentivized to make profit by arbitraging those prices back to reality (As we’ve just witnessed in tech). I guess we also need more hedge funds!