I said is willing to pay for—not necessarily that they can pay for it. Any one-sentence definition of a word as complex as useful is going to necessarily be incomplete, but I certainly mean to include externalities in it. If, for example, people value “a sense of belonging to a community” and are willing to give up something meaningful for it, but co-ordination problems or whatever else means it can’t be captured by market forces, then I would absolutely view someone who creates “a sense of belonging to a community” as useful—provided that the cost of their doing so is less than the price that the community members would be hypothetically willing to pay.
I said is willing to pay for—not necessarily that they can pay for it. Any one-sentence definition of a word as complex as useful is going to necessarily be incomplete, but I certainly mean to include externalities in it. If, for example, people value “a sense of belonging to a community” and are willing to give up something meaningful for it, but co-ordination problems or whatever else means it can’t be captured by market forces, then I would absolutely view someone who creates “a sense of belonging to a community” as useful—provided that the cost of their doing so is less than the price that the community members would be hypothetically willing to pay.
Fair enough. How do you determine then what people are counterfactually willing to pay?
I don’t think anyone has a good way of doing that.