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>If truly productivity enhancing investment is effectively dead (or, equivalently, there is so much paper wealth chasing a withering set of profitable opportunities for investment), then capital's only game is to chase high valuations backed by future profits, which means playing the Keynesian beauty contest for keeps.

What if profit is dead because wealth is all concentrating in people who don't need it from a marginal consumption standpoint, which means asset prices blow up because everyone rich believes that they need to "invest" that money somewhere... but demand shrivels outside of interestingly-subsidized areas like healthcare because nobody else is making enough to even keep up with the asset price rises?

And without demand, where would innovation come from?

If you accept that the economy can be in disequilibrium, then it is very easy to see how this happens.

Rich people learn a habit that makes them consume less than their investment returns. The difference is reinvested, resulting in a net increase of their equity. Even if you say they spend 90% of their returns on consumption, the last 10% still grow in absolute terms. Since returns are paid proportionally based on the quantity of equity, you can clearly see that money is allocated from where it has high marginal utility to places where it has low marginal utility.

Of course this leads to a contradiction. If money is held by people who have a low marginal utility for consumption, why would investments pay high returns? Your equity is the latent demand that your investments need to pay you the returns in the first place. You'd increasingly be paying yourself. That is equivalent to investing into something that yields a 0% return which in turn is equivalent to doing nothing.

"in people who don't need it from a marginal consumption standpoint".

We need the rich to spend more money. There are plenty of cool ways to do this. Build a mile high pyramid on a Nevadan playa, a canal to the Sea of Cortez to re-flood the Salton Sea, humans on other planets, new city states a la Praxis, interstellar probes, etc.

Some billionaires are doing some of these things. Hope more do in the future.

Profit is a myth of epistemic collapse at this point. Productivity gains are also mythical and probably just anecdotal in the moment.

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding but a lot of people (ok, well, a few, but you know) make a lot of money on relatively mundane stuff. Technocapitalism’s Accursed Share is sacrificing wealth for myth making about its own future.

What percentage of work would you say deals w/ actual problems these days?

In a post-industrial economy there are no more economic problems, only liabilities. Surplus is felt as threat, especially when it's surplus human labor.

In today's economy disease and prison camps are increasingly profitable.

How do you think the investor portfolios that hold stocks in deathcare and privatized prison labor camps can further Accelerate their returns?

What’s an example of work that does not deal with actual problems?

Online influencers, podcasters, advertisers, social media product managers, political lobbyists, cryptocurrency protocol programmers, digital/NFT artists, most of the media production industry, those people w/ leaf blowers moving dust around, political commentators (e.g. fox & friends), super PACs, most NGOs, "professional" sports, various 3 letter agencies & their associated online "influence" campaigns, think tanks about machine consciousness, autonomous weapon manufacturers, & so on. Just a few off the top of my head but anything to do w/ shuffling numbers in databases is in that category as well. I haven't read "Bullshit Jobs" yet but it's on the list & I'll get to it eventually so I'm sure I can come up w/ a few more after reading it.

Lol, you just listed things you don't like from a very privileged urban (my assumption) living space.

So what actual problem do NFT artists work to solve?

Boredom

You don't know me & I don't know you so just address the substance of the post instead of worrying about where I grew up & what hardships I faced.

You mean Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B?

It's curious that you only list digital/NFT artists, and fail to see the problems that many of these solve.

In a world re-calibrated to pure problem-solving, presumably we'd ask a mime or other non-digital artist for news on what our government is doing (instead of the Fake News Media), and then an interpretive dancer, not a lobbyist, would intermediate between government and industry? The trombone players would investigate financial crimes, the bassists would monitor our airspace, and the guy currently painting a mural on a wall would be responsible for DoorDashing a cargo ship's worth of food and supplies to a disaster zone (not the bad NGOs)?

Yeah, this is just a list of jobs you don't understand and/or make you feel sad.

> If outsiders could plausibly invest in China

But they can and they do.