I think one depressing example is innovation in weapons and other dangerous fields. “If we don’t build it, someone else will first” is unfortunately historically been shown to be true, has it not?
Today’s unsavory borderline reactionary doomposting brought to you by: my crippling fear that I’m isolating myself in a political echo-chamber (so naturally I gotta hop online and exclusively ask my fellow leftists)
Markets distributing scarce resources can only ever have a profit motive driving them, because that is the underpinning of the market. And so therefore they are not an act of maximizing happiness, they are an act of maximizing profit (even if the profit ceiling is imposed by regulation or not). It’s an unnatural construct that requires an incredibly dense onion of manufactured legal and social norms over time to simply maintain. I wouldn’t call that something that is done well