You know, one of the points people like to make about the recent financial crisis is about the financial services industry sucked into lots of talented people who could/should otherwise have been doctors, scientists, teachers, engineers and so on. But what about all the talented people who also could have been but instead are working on another cool-but-useless Web 2.0 startup? Isn't the social cost of that at least as high?
The mediocre, median case of the useless Web 2.0 startup founder is that he fails or exits badly and re-enters the "real economy". The median case of the financier is that he makes millions and stays in the industry for decades. Well, it was that way until 2008 happened. Now this is less clear.
A lot of things that seem cool but useless turn out later to be useful. Back in 1995, a lot of people thought the web itself was cool but useless.
Not really. The web was invented for a specific purpose: Gopher had proved inadequate for scientists informally publishing papers and collaborating. Even if consumers had never taken it up, it would still be being used by the physics community for its original purpose.
When Tim Berners-Lee was traveling around pitching the WWW in 1991 he didn't present it as a physics-only project, or even an academics-only project.