Farming becoming economic is a great sign to me. It shows there are places with a lot greater efficiency that are competing fiercely with the local source and a

Farming becoming economic is a great sign to me. It shows there are places with a lot greater efficiency that are competing fiercely with the local source and are forcing specialization. Services are not commodities: a service by one provider is not necessarily indistinguishable from another. Service providers, and producers in general, actually vigorously fight commoditization -- it creates an opportunity for a market, and this improves competitiveness and efficiency. The providers are comfortable with their high margin untradable goods, but consumers get high price variability and discover-ability. Since the service providers fully control the service, they are unlikely to ever allow a market to form. Now imagine the opposite: imagine servers became fully commoditized. The market then would become highly specialized and efficient: you would probably be purchasing server time directly from the server manufacturer (chosen among many) through some contract and a provider (again chosen among many) would actually host the server and electricity for a cost. There's enough competition in the hosting business that this has essentially happened already: the commodity standard has become AWS. Low efficiency providers have been squeezed out for a long time. It's hard to compare this to trading grains or iron, though. The financial industry is 100% concerned with practical matters, since every stock is eventually linked to a real world property, value, good or service. It's a different matter if they are fair, though, as I discussed previously.