And yet everyone can think of someone who has been handsomely paid for producing no value.

The theory is wrong, basically, if that's what it says.

Just because you don’t see the value doesn’t mean there is none.

Granted bad deals get made from time to time.

No, those bad deals are likely at least 50%, maybe even 80%.

I've seen way too many PMs and middle managers twiddling their thumbs and just inventing tasks and reports just so they are busy and are not fired.

How do I know? We had some of them go to a conference once; they were all gone for two weeks.

Work was going faster and smoother.

And that's not a single anecdote, it's supported by many other programmers.

Truth is, nepotism and "we've been buddies at the uni" is happening much more than you are willing to admit.

Yes, the correct observation is that no economic system operates at optimum across every vector.

> Just because you don’t see the value doesn’t mean there is none.

Sometimes it is absolutely true, which is most often seen in nepotism but also in categorically stupid people (re: Bonhoeffer).

That sounds like a lovely version of capitalism, but the one I've experienced is anything but optimized. There can be incentives to keeping around unproductive jobs, the size and stability of an org can often be used as a basic sign of health.

See: AT&T

In theory reality and theory are the same. In reality they are not. In my org there are a lot of pms who don’t do very much and somehow just happen to be friends and former room-mates of the org head.

I am sure shareholders are demanding that in many places but they are demanding it from the people who provide no value themselves and who are perfectly positioned to inflate their importance and perceived value-add.

That's like asking the corrupt politicians to uproot corruption. Obviously it will never work.

So the shareholders get bulshitted exactly by the people who are very likely superfluous.

This is actually a very well known problem in management,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_prob...

The shareholders are uninformed and disorganized. They might take their money out but that will take a long time. Meanwhile, management and the board control the flow of information and can take decisions together.

The concept of a voting shareholder is a myth. Most shares are owned/managed by funds so they are the true voters. They just vote to make sure the that the boat isn’t rocked too much.

Even in those cases, there are eventual beneficial owners which are indeed real natural persons.

The modern system favors executives as opposed to owners. The executive class has figured out how to extract a significant chuck from to owners share for their own coffers.

Those lovely market forces largely stop applying at corporation boundaries.

Besides, information is so wildly far from perfect in all spheres that we rarely see anything particularly close to the extremes of efficient behavior predicted by spherical-cow market fairy tales anyway, even when market forces are fully in-play.