"In economics, the ideal, or first best, outcome for an economy is a Pareto-efficient one, meaning one in which no market participant can be made better off without someone else made worse off."

Nitpick - Pareto-efficient outcomes are, in real social systems, horrible, horrible outcomes, very far down the scale in terms of overall utility. They are by nature Utopian, and they fail the way Utopias fail. In a Pareto society, you can't do anything productive, because everything you do makes someone worse-off.

Pareto-efficient outcomes are used in economics only because they are mathematically convenient. It's like looking under a streetlamp for your keys because the light is better there.

A much better form of "optimal" outcome would be one cast in dynamic terms, that instead of saying "No transaction is allowed if there exists Y such that d(utility(Y))/dt < 0", would be to say that "No transaction is allowed such that the sum over all Y of d(u(Y))/dt < 0".