> But what happens at the point when ideal distribution is attained, and all consumers are satisfied?
I don't think we are anywhere close that, nor that we can ever get there. What happened is that most low-hanging fruits of actual value got picked, to the point that sales & marketing started to have much better ROI than trying to invent and build better things. It's a gradual shift towards a zero-sum-game economy.
The reason we can't ever totally satisfy consumer demand is because of marketing itself. As much as the profession likes to pretend it's about informing consumers of available choices in a free market, it is more fundamentally about creating demand. If we had spent the last two centuries fulfilling the consumer demands of 1818 consumers, we'd have been "done" decades ago, worldwide, if not sooner. Instead, before we ever get to the "demand satisfied" state, our demands are manipulated by marketeers so that we never reach this equilibrium.
I don't think we are anywhere close that, nor that we can ever get there. What happened is that most low-hanging fruits of actual value got picked, to the point that sales & marketing started to have much better ROI than trying to invent and build better things. It's a gradual shift towards a zero-sum-game economy.