The British Engineer Charles Babbage (Father of the Computer in many respects) wasn't afforded the opportunity to complete the first working mechanical calculator because of cost restrictions by the British Gov't, an invention which could have altered the British course in History. High risk projects in Science and Engineering may rarely pay off, but when they do the ROI is incalculable in many ways. Flipping houses, not so much.
Curing cancer is a place holder for any number of fields that are still under-explored. Finance really shouldn't be a driver of growth, especially when the growth is concentrated in public financing of debt, it just doesn't seem sustainable.
Implicit in this claim is the idea that somehow we need someone to own things. Why is that exactly? In fact, employee-owned cooperatives demonstrate that when the doers own what they're doing, it can have some benefits for all involved.
All I was trying to say is that just because there are people who choose not to work on the high risk/high reward items does not mean they are not valuable. Balance is important.
Tragedy of the commons. When scarce resources are communally owned, they tend to get exploited even worse than when they're privately owned.
Employee-owned cooperatives aren't communally owned, they're employee-owned (as the name indicates).
The resources, in this case, are the employees themselves. So you're claiming that employees will exploit themselves more than an employer would?