We have certainly confused ‘effort’ and ‘profitability’ with ‘value’, and your analogy of hammering a nail through thick wool captures this perfectly. In a system where survival and status are strictly tied to making the numbers go up, people will naturally gravitate towards whatever generates the most returns, regardless of whether it actually improves the human condition.

A significant part of the modern economy — particularly within the attention economy and financial speculation — essentially extracts time, energy and resources without producing tangible social benefits. When success is measured exclusively by the accumulation of wealth, the natural result is exactly what you described: a system that incentivises control over genuine growth.

Absolute transparency is not human, and that is the crux of the matter. If we could accurately measure the holistic cost of our activities (environmental degradation, the psychological cost, damage to the supply chain) against their actual benefits, many highly profitable industries would be exposed as massive net losses – this is where the economic paradigm shift comes in.