First of all, the implicit idea that the founders of these companies are all like, "Oh, hey, I have ten really highly functional business plans for bringing an app to profitability, and I'll reject the ones serving population X because I think it's 5% less profitable than the ones serving population Y" is dumb.
Second, the idea that that writer can identify the "right" populations and problems is risible.
And, to be clear, she absolutely is complaining that people are attacking small problems instead of global warming. She explicitly calls out rising sea levels.
And while a few of the services he identifies are targeted to a rich userbase (such as: locating rentable yachts, and probably the drone filming service, and the valet parking one), plenty of others aren't. The one about renting driveways is probably mostly enabling people who are relatively low-income for the area they live in to monetize an unused asset. Getting a new toothbrush addresses a need everyone has. Getting killed by the police is a problem faced disproportionately by lower-income people and minorities.
There are lots of false steps towards progress, and like I said, probably most or all of those will fail. But we've seen time and time again that top down direction to only focus on what some member of the cultural elite deems important is a recipe for disaster.
Isn't that precisely what VCs do when assessing the viability of a startup?
But we've seen time and time again that top down direction to only focus on what some member of the cultural elite deems important is a recipe for disaster.
NYT writers may be part of the cultural elite, but software engineers in San Francisco, by dint of their economic power and education levels, are arguably part of it as well. The VCs and startup financial and management classes are definitely so.
And not every tech idea is or should be VC-backed.
Software engineers are clearly in the cultural elite. And if any software engineer was in the business of telling people "I know what the right population and right problems are," they'd be idiots, too.
Note that that's distinct from, "I have AN idea that I think I can turn into a successful business, by targeting problem X of population Y" which says nothing about the universe of ideas.