Was so surprised that nobody's raised this point that I made an account just to make it.
Large organizations and highly placed individuals who solve coordination problems can make lots of money for reasons other than market efficiency. Most obviously, because they are in the best position to be rent-seeking. Coordinators take advantage of network effects to make themselves indispensable, then have every incentive to enshittify - to use their position as a coordinator to extract rent and dictate what activities can be coordinated (picking up rideshare customers) and which cannot (coordinating contract negotiation, selling products the coordinator disapproves of, etc).
This isn't so relevant to your point about freelancers, and I agree with the general point that coordination is enormously valuable to society. But coordination would also be well-paid and 'taut' would in a world where coordination incentivizes net-negative economic efficiency via rent extraction.
Was so surprised that nobody's raised this point that I made an account just to make it.
Large organizations and highly placed individuals who solve coordination problems can make lots of money for reasons other than market efficiency. Most obviously, because they are in the best position to be rent-seeking. Coordinators take advantage of network effects to make themselves indispensable, then have every incentive to enshittify - to use their position as a coordinator to extract rent and dictate what activities can be coordinated (picking up rideshare customers) and which cannot (coordinating contract negotiation, selling products the coordinator disapproves of, etc).
This isn't so relevant to your point about freelancers, and I agree with the general point that coordination is enormously valuable to society. But coordination would also be well-paid and 'taut' would in a world where coordination incentivizes net-negative economic efficiency via rent extraction.