Not making money on average like I'm trying to say is a true but meaningless statement. But there's a difference between the statement: "I can't make money on

Not making money on average like I'm trying to say is a true but meaningless statement. But there's a difference between the statement: "I can't make money on average by putting money into this system (this system isn't undervalued)" and "This system is worthless" which is kind of conflated. Like the system will always expand to the point that there's no free cash on the table, so looking at it and saying "on average paying more for CEOs or putting money into a random hedge fund doesn't move the dial" has no bearing on whether executive pay being high or hedge funds existing is keeping money off the table (if they were smaller/lower there would be gain to expanding). The gradient at the equilibrium is always zero, "We found that paying developers more or less doesn't impact the average success of a firm". Yeah because there's an equilibrium where the firms/market has decided roughly what a developer costs, and everyone is paid close to that. That's not an argument that developer pay should be wildly less, because if the average was moved to "developers make $10k per year" than at THAT point, far from the equilibrium, you'd see a big gradient that firms who paid developers more (ergo probably got better devs) did far better.