Today's column was in part about how Bloomberg made his billions — honestly, but probably not in a way that benefited society 1/ nytimes.com/2020/02/20/opi…
I was actually inspired in part by an old paper by Paul Samuelson on the theory of speculation, which contained a passage about the profitability and uselessness of getting information slightly ahead of everyone else 2/ jstor.org/stable/pdf/404… 
Samuelson envisaged carrier pigeons — but in the real world, you get that edge with a Bloomberg Terminal. So everyone has to have one, even though they on net contribute almost nothing to the economy 3/
