Profit is an aggregate that adds the remuneration of capital (closely related to savings), risk-taking, technological development, initiative (close to efficiency), all kinds of corruption and coercion, and a lot of other things.
We have no viable way to run through a market and classify "well this company is profitable because it's innovative; this other one is profitable because a law requires that everybody buys something it makes", so we can only speculate on what is important at each time.
All that because I'm not sure I agree. I see all kinds of rent seeking and artificial barriers linked to the current environment, and those are not exactly measures of inefficiency, they are something else.
Profit is an aggregate that adds the remuneration of capital (closely related to savings), risk-taking, technological development, initiative (close to efficiency), all kinds of corruption and coercion, and a lot of other things.
We have no viable way to run through a market and classify "well this company is profitable because it's innovative; this other one is profitable because a law requires that everybody buys something it makes", so we can only speculate on what is important at each time.
All that because I'm not sure I agree. I see all kinds of rent seeking and artificial barriers linked to the current environment, and those are not exactly measures of inefficiency, they are something else.