>> We have to move towards a system where profit maximization closely correlates with consumer good.

That's easy to say but IMHO requires the consumer to pay directly rather than the whole advertising nonsense that has nothing to do with the consumer searching for stuff.

Starting to think the only way to stop this kind of thing is to remove the profit motive as much as possible. The whole 401k plan idea for retirement savings is causing huge inflows of cash into the market which is probably where a lot of the money looking for returns is coming from. When a whole society is seeking profits it seems like that's going to make things worse. I'm not even sure how much return rich folks were looking for in the old days - if you owned a big company and it was making money, was there such thing as "enough"? There definitely isn't today.

Sure it's easy to say and difficult to achieve. Would it be easier to eliminate profit motive rather than limiting the ways in which it can be done? Eliminating profit motive would be an attempt to change human nature, we are greedy after all. Regulating the ways in which the profit motive can be expressed is an administrative exercise.

If we could ensure that people are more like to get rich doing valuable things (value != money, value == things that match our values), then we wouldn't see the brightest minds of each generation slave away in ad-tech and finance. Spending their work lives manipulating people into buying things they rarely need or fighting it out in a zero-sum financial game for negative societal gain.