Dave,

Sorry, no book yet, though another medium writer, Michael Woronko and I have been discussing how to put one together and then market it. As Edison said, genius is 10% inspiration and 90% persperation.

Having spent my life in the intersection of horse racing and agriculture, I see derivatives in terms of paramutual wagering. In that you might have a race where the combined value of the horses is a couple hundred thousand, but there are millions being wagered on them. The useful effect is primarily to keep lots of surplus investment money busy and not causing too much inflation in the necessary economy.

People instinctively like risk and gambling is a fairly lazy way to engage in it.

The more efficient society gets at providing for its members, the more it has to keep them entertained and busy. Efficiency is to do more with less, so peak efficiency will be when we do everything with nothing.

I don't know that economists and financial managers are so much corrupt, as they are creatures of the system, or they wouldn't be able to participate in the system. I find this in various, if not most fields, in that the initial tools develop into being axioms around which the entire field revolves, like the grain of sand at the center of a pearl. Yet that initial stage was laid out when there wasn't as much information to use, yet any subsequent information has to conform.

Here is, I think, the most glaring example;

https://johnbrodixmerrymanjr.medium.com/the-confessions-of-a-cosmic-heretic-5cd4c044b8ea