Surely people engaging in unproductive labour is a net loss to the economy? Do you have some odd definition of "value to the economy" that is not the sum of the efficient market price of the goods and services?
A dollar returned to investors and re-invested in a new technology that ends up saving everyone two dollars seems like a pretty effective use of that dollar, much more than putting that dollar in an employee's pocket who intentionally didn't do the most efficient thing.
Now, I'm not sure of the odds of that outcome. Maybe most of the time that dollar ends up getting wasted on funding Theranos or buying Twitter.
Regardless, I wouldn't fault an employee for doing something that's maximizes their own interest over the company's. Just means the company is bad at setting incentives properly. Not saying it's easy to do that, but none of us should value a company's welfare over our own. Sometimes the company's welfare aligns with ours, but not always.
Having more and more money in the coffers of a tiny group of billionaires is actually deeply anticapitalistic because it prevents market forces from working.
Anyway, my point was that Musk, Bezos, Gates, etc. can afford to act freely in ways (constructive or destructive) that violate all the behaviors that economics textbooks posit as being universal.
I'm actually curious about HN posts: has the frequency of Twitter submissions changed since Musk's acquisition? Or, probably more usefully, has the average number of points per Twitter submission (or maybe number that make the front page) changed?
You mean unproductive labour like running a casino, producing tobacco, building superyachts, etc?
> In 2017, clothing worth £28.6 million was incinerated by Burberry to maintain their brand’s exclusivity.
There is a term, "Real Economy". playing on the stock market is not real economy, producing steel is. In the last 30 years, a huge change took place - we had something called Financialization, now the 'real economy' is only a small fraction of actually economy, and is dwarfed by financial markets and various bullshit.