My standard is to assume any activity lots of people voluntarily choose to engage in is valuable to those people, unless we have a compelling reason to assume otherwise. Failing to understand where the value comes from is not a compelling reason. This is not 'trivially easy to fulfill'--it is only fulfilled by those activities people choose to engage in. It's intended to apply to humans rather than insects, but in fact I'm happy to accept the conclusion that shit is valuable to flies.
What exactly is your standard? To make a personal object-level assessment of the value of something excluding evidence based on revealed preferences? Are you personally calculating the nutritional value of an apple against the costs of labor and land to determine if growing apples is productive?
"it is very hard to pinpoint what goes wrong when a financial instrument fails to do its function"
Yes, finance is complicated. That doesn't justify concluding that it's unproductive. |