Start a company selling assassinations, and the wider world will quickly tell you your business isn't socially correct - you will be shut down. Pyramid schemes are another illegal class of business.
There are also businesses that, while legal, do not appear socially useful. There's nothing wrong with disapproving of such businesses.
>You never know how or when your product will be used, or who it will help.
Your argument is: because businesses can yield unanticipated utility, there is no point reasoning about which business is best to spend time on.
Sure, perhaps the cat-pictures business will, through some unexpected turn of events, yield greater social utility than an education startup: Our models of the world are imperfect, and sometimes we mis-predict which actions will be most beneficial.
But that doesn't mean we should give up reasoning about what the most beneficial thing to do is. We should still attempt to reason about relative benefits, and act to maximise our expected future utility.
Which is not to say we should always "focus on shipping all of extra food to those who are starving". Indeed, maybe some technology that looks trivial will yield huge benefits. So we should definitely spend some time exploring new technologies, to try and catch unexpected windfalls. In order words, we have an explore/exploit tradeoff to make.
But: Trading off exploration/exploitation is not the same as just throwing up our hands and saying "do whatever you want, don't attempt to reason about relative utilities".
In reality, the entrepreneur is going to have to make some tradeoff between likelihood of success (given motivation) and utility of success.
But entrepreneurs intuitively make these sort of tradeoffs all the time. This is just another judgement to make.
I'm absolutely in agreement with you about unpredictable markets, the massive power of market forces to effect change and that no one entity has (or should have) control over those forces. No one -- certainly not me -- is advocating any form of socialism and central control over economic resources.
What I'd argue instead, however, is organizations (companies, NGOs, whatever) that create meaningful value for humanity actually create MORE value for themselves. It's really, really hard to foresee what is meaningful value. Facebook was similar to MySpace, but (at least for me) creates infinitely more value. Microsoft was born because IBM miscalculated the value of DOS. The list goes back decades and centuries.
However, I'd wager that today we have more clones than original work. Now, maybe bit.ly 4.0 will be what Facebook was to MySpace, but my guess would be no. Instead, if an entrepreneur chose to work on, say, cheap rockets for space -- something original, regardless of immediate perceived value -- I'd wager that'd create far greater value, probably both for themselves and humanity.
My goal was to less tell an entrepreneur to do something more socially correct -- I'm an entrepreneur myself and I probably wouldn't listen to anyone _telling_ me to do anything -- but rather to try building riskier, original stuff.
This is a particularly good example. People have argued that money spent on a space program is essentially thrown away, when it could have been spent on fixing poverty. But the space program led to a huge number of advancement from telling us about the North Korean famine, to making little lasers that kill mosquitoes, to better refrigeration, to mobile phones currently providing communication in infrastructure-poor areas of Africa.
But there are a striking number of people building "pictures of cats doing x" websites. It's technically easy, which appeals to some people.
But there's nothing wrong with reminding developers that they have the talent to address bigger problems than a shortage of cat meme websites.
Capitalism doesn't work like this. Resources are allocated via crazy, unfair market actions. 300 years ago, most of Europe resembled what we would call the Third World now. Epidemics, warfare, starvation, etc. The big driving force that changed Europe wasn't the generosity of kings, but the base-level trading and investing among the poor and emerging middle classes.
There were a lot of resources being misspent back in those days. Anyone remember a particular Dutch fascination with tulips? Money was spent on doomed voyages of exploration, fake medicines, flower-based stock bubbles, and any number of other "follies" that in hindsight could have been avoided.
But among all the mispenditure of resources over hundreds of years, hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty. We went from an average lifespan of 40 years to over 80. We live in an actual age of marvels.
In our modern world, we have people building entire companies and fortunes around what are the silliest things. We have even more people copying the first successes and failing. In amongst that, there are the smaller numbers of people building companies that will laterally help those who's lives need improving.
If we lived in a society where our resources could be marshaled enmasse towards one goal or another, it wouldn't be the world we have now.
Telling entrepreneurs that one class of businesses is more socially correct than others isn't how the world works. People will find opportunities in many ways, and those will benefit the people in need. The poor will find edges in the market to improve their own lives. What might seem worthless to you might be valuable to someone else.
So if you have an idea for Bitly 4.0, do it. If you want to build cheap rockets to space, do it. If you want to build a social networking app that uses cheap cell phones to let goat herders in sub-Saharan Africa poke each other over hundreds of miles, do it. You never know how or when your product will be used, or who it will help.