The article doesn't convince me that money thrown away by individuals on a Kickstarter pipe dream is any worse economically than money wasted by a large corporation on a failed product or an unproductive hire. Economic growth happens because the few successes more than make up for the many failures. This will be as true for Kickstarter as it is for the economy in general.
This is a completely misguided article, from the ground up.
The point of Kickstarter is to fund things that people want but where traditional funding sources are unable to accurately assess the demand for those things.
In other words, KS does not create market inefficiencies, it corrects them.
Optimizing the (immediate) measured economy doesn't necessarily reflect the most important goal of society. People might measure their productivity in forests paved, or maybe we can maximize the needle on some Fed metric by building more napalm factories. On the other hand, most corporations doubted the value of exploring packet switching back in the 60's.
