Your point about drug discovery helps illustrate the second item. If most of the drugs being pursued were cosmetic in nature, we could challenge the long term benefit of drug discovery.
I appreciate the apology, but that's part of my frustration. My claims do have some grounds for validity and consideration. They have a rational basis.
In fact, simple economics teaches us that a high failure rate is a good thing. Low failure rate would be consistent with very low risk projects that tend to be about some form of rent seeking or regulatory arbitrage. High failure rate means people are actually working on things that are hard to do. That's very valuable
This is completely independent of what other people are doing, or whether other people have, say, failed music startups / failed websites that fail at whatever rate.
I'd say that startups can create wealth though, as 'value' is either tied to currency or not objective at all, and funny business with numbers isn't the most important thing in life.