I think this “rapid growth at all costs” is going to bite us, and I think it is possible that it’s going to bite us even more than the .Com bubble or the 2008 crash.
I really hope I am wrong, but I don’t see we can expect companies to keep growing if we don’t require them to be profitable.
Making money was already a problem, what we should strive for is creating value. You can make big bucks selling cigarettes, leaded gas or PFAS riddled products... the money is made but you're still a net negative for society
A decade or two ago, I'd have told you the companies that are building new technologies (smartphones, streaming services, etc) were creating value.
I don't think that at all anymore, even retroactively.
This is fortunately a problem that economics has already solved: value is what people are willing to pay for. Any other definition involves imposing someone's own subjective judgement on what's valuable.
Needless to say, I don't agree with your definition or your idea that it's solved.
"Value" to the individual is subjective, and defined by the price people are willing and able to pay. Its "solved" in the sense that modern economics universally accepts it.
The harder part are the second order effects / negative externalities (e.g. cancer from cigarettes). But it’s a constant balancing act between over- and under-regulation. On a more general level this was represented all the way back in Adam Smith's work. i.e. I don't think it unfair to say value and regulation is a conceptually solved problem, irrespective of the constant attempts to undermine it.
The OP I was replying to brings the notion that money and value aren't the same thing. If someone disagrees with that premise, then maybe they should reply to OP.
I feel like I’m getting old saying this, but no, I was there and the entire tech community went hard against smartphones, claiming they would never be better than a Pocket PC or a Palm Pilot and were simply another marketing ploy by Apple.
They claimed that they were inferior to purpose built MP3 players, no one would ever pay hundreds of dollars for a phone, real software developers didn’t write apps, wireless data would never scale, etc. As far as I know all those comments are still preserved for posterity in places like Slashdot.
Whatever axe you have to grind against the smartphone naysayers of the time... I have no horse in that race.
Cigarettes and leaded gas are bad and a net negative on the world, but they aren’t Ponzi schemes in the same way that so many tech companies are.
Thats it.
Yes there's a whole bunch of financial engeering to create "losses" for tax reasons etc. but ultimately value added is profit.
I think this can be said about nearly every Blockchain startup, for example.
There might be a chance that their value is not recognised correctly, but on the whole they consume more value than they produce. Obviously this is purely day to day operational expenditure not capital expenditure.