A landlord or a holder of IP can and will arrange deals that have negative value for society because of the fact it attracts monetary value for them.
A client paying for a service, is this done 'willingly' when it is needed and no other choice exists? If someone wants to compete, can they navigate the moats companies are so fond of?
Agreed on landlords -- this is a rather unique but huge failure case. My comment history is full of harping on this particular point :)
> A client paying for a service, is this done 'willingly' when it is needed and no other choice exists?
Yeah obviously you can do the work yourself.
By analogy, good engines produce power. A speedometer measures the engine's power under a set of conditions. However, a speedometer is not (by itself) a good way to measure an engine because there are other factors you care about. The fact that a speedometer is a bad measure of engine power does not mean that engine power is unimportant or bad.
If I said, "high max speed means good engine," or "high GDP means economy is working well," your comment would be relevant.
I did not say that. I said "the overwhelming majority of transactions in an economy are of mutual benefit to the transactors."
Consider FooCorp paying an advertiser to convince people to buy its gizmos rather than the market leader Bar Inc.'s widgets. This is then followed by Bar Inc. paying the same advertiser to convince the same people to go back to buying widgets again. Each transaction is to the benefit of both the advertiser and the respective manufacturer, but taken together leaves the world in the same state as it was to begin with. No value was created. In fact, value was destroyed (the opportunity cost of labor by the advertiser).
An example of a transaction that is not to the mutual benefit of the transactors, yet increases value is the levying of fines against behavior which has externalized costs greater than their internalized gains. The fine is not to the benefit of the party it is levied against, but the effect of deterring negative-total-value behavior is equivalent to creating value.
I'm not convinced >99% of people's jobs are of the value-creating kind but it's certainly well above 50%. Several of the largest companies in our industry are arguably of the negative value kind. Insurance companies that accept premiums but deny legitimate claims certainly are.
Consider the counterfactual. In order for it to be true that many people are paid for work that isn't valuable, it'd have to be true that many people are willingly parting with their money for no reason at all.
That does happen, of course, and it's so special we think highly of people when they do it (it's called charity).
Just because people can't reason about the transmission of value throughout a complex economy doesn't mean it's not happening. In fact that's the beauty of currency and market economies: it doesn't need to be comprehensible to anyone outside of the transaction.