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Comment by brewdad | Hacker News Reader

Your coworker is wise. Economic theory holds that in a truly efficient market, profits approach 0.

That’s economic profits that approach 0. You can still run an accounting profit, it’s just not bigger than it would be if you invested your money somewhere else, like land or mining or coffeeshops or whatever.

Economic profit is still there, it's abnormal profits that would go to zero. With zero EP the opportunity cost of staying in business would be to high.

With 0 AP, the industry is in equilibrium, with no companies dropping out, and no companies entering the market.

The economic profit is literally defined as the accounting-type profits, minus the opportunity costs. When the opportunity cost is large like that you are describing negative economic profit.

Probably I had already heard it in a longer version but wow, summing it up like that really hits home.

does that mean that investment is fundamentally beholden to market inefficiency?

We ship fruit from Argentina where it is grown, to Thailand to be packaged, to the United States to be consumed.

While it may be efficient from the perspective of a spreadsheet, its inefficient due to the external costs, ie pollution from shipping, the delicate nature of just-in-time shipments, etc.

Your fruit cup might cost a bit more if it was to be done all in one place, but I would call that a cost for a less fragile system.

Exploitation of a knowledge gap and existing market constraints.

If all you can think of are services, maybe. But the people that make things don’t agree.

“Market failure”, “Market gap”

no more than engineering is fundamentally beholden to imperfect science.

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