I think this is only true when you abstract things away from their spatiotemporal context and treat market information as a snapshot. The art market thought Van Gogh was a weirdo with bad brush technique until after he died and people began to recognize how innovative his work was.

Naturally many a startup has also failed due to similar factors (only for the core idea to be resurrected some years later to great success).

"Finding a way to correct for this is a really big deal."

But aren't you now feeding back to the system? Why would there need to be a financial reward and incentive for everything?

I do realize "contributing free value" is perceived by some as free value a third party can capture and financially profit from" which might the reason for thinking of how to then cycle some of that value back?

Thinking about the three examples I gave, I think it's more that the externalities of not doing these activities aren't priced in.

Tabloid press is fantastically profitable, but fake news over time will erode a great deal of social trust.

Closed source software might be individually advantageous but collectively holds back industrial progress. It's a similar reason to why patents were first introduced for physical goods.

And yes people voluntarily without kids should have to pay significantly more social contributions.