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Dentin comments on What legal ways do people make a profit that produce the largest net loss in utility? - Less Wrong
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Homeopathy and naturopathic health cures. The only argument for these is that they work as well as a placebo.
Cosmetics and jewelery. These are particularly expensive mate attraction and social standing boosters.
Lobbying for government handouts/boons/subsidies. These have the potential to have net utility, but in many cases do not.
Monopoly businesses. Net loss of utility through inefficiency.
And finally, an overarching overemphasis on reliability. By declaring that 'failure is not an option', we spend vastly more resources than if we were to simply accept failure as an option and properly handle the failure cases. The best direct examples of this come from information theory: it is almost always cheaper to add error correction to reduce the error rate on a channel, than it is to improve a channel to reduce the error rate without error correction.
However, increasing returns to scale may make a monopoly a more efficient producer than a non-monopoly. In those cases the efficiency loss due to the lack of competition may be more than cancelled out by the efficiency gain from exploiting returns to scale.
The "canceled out" part depends on whether your interested in the utility of stockholders and the reduced resource consumption of the manufacturing process or the utility of the general population which might have to consume less of the product than they'd otherwise be able (because of higher prices) or more generally have less capital left to buy other things they need/want. Monopolies with regulated price structures sometimes work, I guess, though it's complicated.
So... what utility will be calculated will depend on whether one arbitrarily excludes a set of humans from the utility calculation?
Sorry I guess it wasn't clear. I was contrasting two naive utility functions: a flat one which adds up the utilons of all people versus one that only counts the utilons of stock brokers. I'm not asserting that one or the other is "right". Both utilities would have some additional term giving utility for preserving resources, but I'm not being concrete about how that's factored in. [I'm also not addressing in any depth the complications that a full utilitarian calculation would need like estimated discounted future utilons, etc.] Did I clear it up or make it worse?
I took "or" in your previous comment to be exclusive, so that "the general population" does not include stockholders. Are you now saying that your two categories are "stock holders" and "everyone, including stock holders"? (And presumably meant "stock holders" when you wrote "stock brokers" in you most recent comment")
yes, that's what I meant; thank you.
"Monopoly businesses" is a rather broad category. And "net loss" compared to what? Compared to if they were operating differently, or compared to if they weren't operating at all?
Thumbs up for this - selling snake oil is basically legal in the U.S. these days, but it's not exactly ethical.