There's a flipside to this though - this is how you get shit and useless products. What you (or Taleb) are describing here is a money-making specialist. A person who can play the market and management game well. That's almost entirely orthogonal to creating the best product, or doing something valuable for society.
The argument I'm trying to make here is very similar to the one about MBAs ruining companies. You get people who can play the market game so well their incentives get completely misaligned with what the rest of the company would like (and what the customers would like).
And in general - as a society we like free markets and competitions because they're supposed to give us a spectrum of products, from cheap but good enough to expensive and high quality, in an efficient way. But people who are too good at optimizing for the way markets work can make money without giving us the result we expect, thus ruining the very reason we want capitalist economy.
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There's a flipside to this though - this is how you get shit and useless products. What you (or Taleb) are describing here is a money-making specialist. A person who can play the market and management game well. That's almost entirely orthogonal to creating the best product, or doing something valuable for society.
The argument I'm trying to make here is very similar to the one about MBAs ruining companies. You get people who can play the market game so well their incentives get completely misaligned with what the rest of the company would like (and what the customers would like).
And in general - as a society we like free markets and competitions because they're supposed to give us a spectrum of products, from cheap but good enough to expensive and high quality, in an efficient way. But people who are too good at optimizing for the way markets work can make money without giving us the result we expect, thus ruining the very reason we want capitalist economy.