I’m using the word “ideology” here not in the sense of political ideology but rather their view of tech innovation, in which successful innovations lead to big companies which become dinosaurs that get defeated by the next generation of plucky upstart mammals. Rich and powerful tech investors and executives see themselves as being the previous generation of upstarts and they’re painfully aware of the possibility that they’ve become the dinos. Paradoxically, the story they tell about their specialness as founders is embedded in a framework that implies future creative destruction at their expense, leading to an insecurity that drives them to do bad things.
It’s interesting because a standard role of economic ideology is to justify the positions of the wealthy. In this case, yes, the economic ideology justifies their existing position but it also implies future uncertainty. And, in an appointment in Samarra sort of way, every step they take to avoid the future reckoning just makes this uncertainty worse. Leading to tragedy for these tech executives and also for the rest of us.
I thought about all this after reading Careless People, a memoir by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a lawyer from New Zealand, about her several years as a Facebook executive. It follows her trajectory from idealism through enthusiasm, excitement, intensity, disillusionment, resistance, and departure. One thing I appreciated is that Wynn-Williams doesn’t present herself as a victim. In the book she’s a competent and resourceful person who eventually finds herself in over her head. And she’s got great stories. I don’t know what’s true, what’s exaggerated, and what’s left out–I don’t know any of the people involved, but it all sounds plausible. Her superiors in the organization seem like a bunch of liars, but I guess that some of that is helpful for attaining success in this ever changing world in which we live in. There were some scary bits like when they pressure her to take a long-distance flight when she’s in an advanced stage of pregnancy, and a funny bit where Mark Zuckerberg is playing Settlers of Catan with the other senior executives, they all go easy on him to let him win, and Zuckerberg doesn’t realize this is happening. I guess that he outsources his people-reading skills.
One thing that struck me is that, somewhere in the middle of the book, Facebook moves from a traditional big company that tries to use some mixture of competition-busting tactics and lobbying to maintain its position as market leader, to a powerful entity in itself that negotiates to keep governments in power.
It’s kind of like, first they’re playing the business game according to its de facto rules, then they’re playing the version of the game of monopoly where if you’re powerful enough, you can try to rewrite the rules. They’re playing the game of meta-monopoly.
And that seems dangerous. It puts the executives in the “fiduciary” position in which they’re expected not just to play hard and not just to push the boundaries of the rules–the usual calculation is that breaking the law is ok as long as the expected benefits exceed expected costs, and when benefits are in the billions and fines are sporadic and in the millions, you can see where this is going–but also to change the rules. This is too much power, and it also seems corrupting. I feel like even the Facebook executives themselves–even the creepy ones who may have enjoyed being able to change the rules–were not served by this.
To use a saloon poker analogy for a moment: you can think of Facebook as a successful poker player with a huge bankroll, playing a largely on-the-level poker game, with some collusion, some stacked decks, etc., but still mostly poker–but now someone comes in and hands Facebook a revolver. Cool! Now then can really make bank. But the poker game won’t last so long anymore. Nobody wants to play a game where they don’t have a chance. They move from lobbying the government, to being partners with the government and getting special advantages, to needing the government to keep the game going, maybe even infusing the game with tax dollars in some way. I’m not saying this has all happened yet, just that it’s the trajectory. I think they’d be better off if they were still playing in a straight-up poker game, but I can see that once they had the opportunity to grab more, it was hard for them to say no.
The ideology’s in trouble
The trajectory of Facebook gives me some insight into the inherent incoherence of the ideology of market-leading tech companies. I have the impression that their ideology has three components:
1. The company was founded from a combination of inspiration, brilliance, hard work, ruthlessness, and luck. The right people at the right time putting in all nighters and refusing to take no for an answer. The startup is the creative mammal thriving beneath the notice of the lumbering dinosaurs.
2. As the company gets big, it needs to avoid becoming one of those dinosaurs. So it should never lose its startup habits: openness to wild new ideas, thinking big, willingness to work long hours, and commitment to the cause. The challenge is to stay young and hungry even while the company is becoming middle-aged and fat.
3. The goal is 20% annual growth forever, or until the heat death of the universe, whichever comes first.
OK, you can see some contradictions here! On one hand, the storyline is that you’re gonna get overtaken by hungry young newcomers; on the other hand, you’re supposed to stay on top forever. The result, at least for Facebook, seems to have been a kind of desperation, a sense that on one hand they are the kings of the world and that on the other hand they are destined to fail and so they have to try harder and harder to grow and grow and preserve a near-monopoly status. And that’s how you get these executives who control unimaginable fortunes and yet are willing to lie and cheat (I wanted to say “lie, cheat, and steal,” but I don’t know if there was any actual stealing reported in that book), indeed they seem to feel that they have to like and cheat and manipulate the rules and all of this to stay on top.
This is where I feel like their ideology is killing them. Yeah, it’s good that they recognize that as businesspeople they’re nothing special–they just happened to be in the right place at the right time–and it’s good that they recognize that a company has a natural life cycle and you can’t stay on top forever. The bad thing here is that it gives them such a sense of existential insecurity that they feel that they have to keep reinventing themselves and their businesses. They seem to feel a kind of duty to keep the growth going, even while they recognize that there’s no reason they shouldn’t be supplanted by the new generation, and that motivates them to do bad things.
Again, I think they’d be better off if they weren’t able to change the rules in this way–they’d be better off if they were just selling widgets and following the usual corporate playbook. This growth-or-die attitude is just ruining these people.
Your story seems to have 2 parts. First, there is Schumpetarian creative destruction – common in technology industries. Massive wealth can be accumulated, only to fall subject to destruction by new competitors. Much has been written about how leaders in such circumstances have fallen prey to this competition as well as ways leaders can avoid such an outcome. I think back in the dot com days, many industry leaders (digital camera producers, the US auto industry, large steel producers, etc.) were disrupted by new technologies and new entrants. But lessons were learned, and my sense is that such disruption is less common now (e.g. Intel seems to have survived, Microsoft has not yet been dethroned, etc.). The “ideology” you speak of might relate to the habits of these market leaders that led to their downfall – paying too much attention to the high margin customers and largely ignoring the low margin customers who eventually were served by the new technology and permitted these entrants to gain market share and scale and move into direct competition. There are many accounts of this evolution.
The second theme is a traditional economic theme of regulatory capture. One strategy market leaders may employ is to capture the regulatory process in ways that prevent competitive entry. I think we see this with social media platforms. They are ripe for this strategy since there is so much public and political interest in preventing harms from these platforms. While regulation is often unpopular for businesses, it can provide a useful function when employed to entrench market power against would be competitors.
I think it is hard to play both of these strategies at the same time – avoid disruption by self-disruption and avoid disruption through regulation. The former requires the freedom to be nimble while the latter necessarily limits such freedom. I don’t know enough about Facebook to place them in this context, but I think they are in the situation of being exposed to disruption, trying to disrupt themselves (probably through AI endeavors), and trying to use regulatory capture to thwart their competition.
I was thinking in the same direction. Here is what I wrote before your comment went live:
I think the post fails to mention an important topic: how to tackle the competition. As a ‘dinosaur’ company, it can engage in anti-competitive behaviour. They can either copy or absorb promising start-ups. In the dinosaur analogy, the old ones eat the promising young ones and leave the weak ones, which they cannot catch, to perish. This is how they have survived for so long. We have seen this happen quite a few times; think of the innovative start-ups WhatsApp and Instagram, for example. If Facebook/Meta had not taken them over, we would have forgotten about them by now. Interestingly, in line with ideology component #1, we were also able to observe that some up-and-coming companies managed to avoid being taken over (e.g. Zoom, and to some extent, OpenAI).
Another missing aspect is the multipolarity of the tech world. In the West, we tend to think of major US tech companies as the only tech companies. However, there is serious competition emerging from other markets. For a while, it looked as though Russian-owned Telegram might take on WhatsApp. AI companies got the scare of their life upon DeepSeek’s sudden bursting onto the scene. In Europe, we are currently seeing Chinese companies such as Shein and Temu taking on Amazon. Many crypto companies are not US-based either. This leads to fascinating results when the behemoths that have grown in local markets start competing with each other. (I am pretty sure Amazon tried to put their fingers on the scale when European regulators considered going after Shein and Temu.)
There’s a few things here, which are not at all specific to Tech, Facebook, etc, but for some interesting cultural reasons the chattering class is currently obsessed with painting tech executives as both uniquely evil and dumb. First, high-level competition is tough and brutal, it’s often a winner-take-all gladiatorial game (or at least few winners take almost all). There’s entire genres of business books about this. Just an older one which comes to mind is “Only the Paranoid Survive”, by Intel CEO Andrew Grove:
“Grove calls such a moment a Strategic Inflection Point, which can be set off by almost anything: mega-competition, a change in regulations, or a seemingly modest change in technology. When a Strategic Inflection Point hits, the ordinary rules of business go out the window. Yet, managed right, a Strategic Inflection Point can be an opportunity to win in the marketplace and emerge stronger than ever.”
And when companies get to be very powerful, they work with – or even become – government power. The history of Latin America, just for example, is rife with this. There’d be places where the nominal local government was almost the security arm of a giant corporation.
The problem is when you think about these aspects, it start to sound, well, like leftism. And that’s BAD if you want to be a Respectable Pundit. Thus it tends to be expressed in this very class-nonthreatening culture-warrish way. The problem with the megacorp CEO is not that megacorps are very bad, but that *he’s* a jerk, a dork, a *TECHBRO* (boo, hiss!), i.e. not the proper sort of person who is obsessed with saying all the correct things and genuflecting to those pundits as tribal leaders. This is changing a bit – with e.g. “billionaire” becoming a derisive term – but there’s a long way to go.
Seth:
You make good points. Still, I see a difference between the attitudes and behaviors toward tech zillionaires today and those of mid-twentieth-century corporate executives. Those chairmen of GM, Citibank, etc., were politically connected and did their part to influence policy. There was (and is) the Chamber of Commerce, which did a lot of lobbying. And those mid-twentieth-century executives bathed in a pro-business economic ideology in which the capitalists were heroes, facing risk every day in the marketplace.
That said, I get the impression that those executives of bygone days saw their economic and social positions as well deserved. Some of them were upper-class Wasps who were in the social positions appropriate for their breeding; others were up-and-coming outsiders who owed their success to their smarts and hustle. Either way, they firmly believed they deserved their status and they had no reason to believe it would ever end. They lobbied and got government contracts because it was part of their business, and they tried to influence politics because of their political convictions in favor of the unfettered free market.
In contrast, it seems that present-day tech investors and executives are more insecure; they have much more of a sense that their current power and wealth arise from being in the right place at the right time. Their ideology is not just the old-school survival-of-the-fittest-and-hell-yeah-we’re-the-fittest, but a more dynamic, we-were-the-young-upstarts-and-if-we’re-not-careful-we’ll-become-the-dinosaurs. As a result, their political activities are more extreme. Old-school conservatives wanted to keep the system as it was and just steer the boat in their direction. Today’s tech lords have this feeling that, if they’re not winning, they’re losing, and this insecurity makes them willing or even eager to blow up the system.
At the level of specific economic policies, though, sure, I get your point that there are many similarities between current tech lobbying and past business lobbying.
The push to devote some huge chunk of our economy to data centers so we won’t lose out to China? A plan which would just incidentally provide a massive subsidy to already-rich AI companies? That looks very similar to the interstate highway system, justified in the 1950s as a military necessity and representing a huge subsidy to car companies. So, I guess that the tech executives instigating an elite panic about the importance of U.S. dominance in AI is old-school business-led industrial policy, while the tech executives pushing election denial and post-truth media are something new. The embracing of the chaos is what I’m attributing in part to the economic ideology.
You can say steal – see tax rates / panama papers etc.
Surprised you didn’t mention cancer as an analogy.
I get a sense of comfort that these nutjob CEOs profiteering off of our political polarization will never be content with what they have. Desire is suffering etc
Sarah Wynn-Williams is prohibited by a court order from promoting her book, so I am glad to see it mentioned here.
Seth is right that there is an entire literary(?) oeuvre on the boom-and-slowly-bust business cycle. A good one is Barbarians and Bureaucrats by Lawrence Miller. Zuckerberg is an interesting character in that he really was one of the barbarians who stayed up all night writing code. Since then, he has insisted on being his own bureaucrat, and in doing so, has exemplified the Peter Principle.
It is currently freezing in the Twin Cities and ICE is still stalking the streets on the lookout for ??? so it was really interesting to avoid the icy pavements, hunkerdown and read today’s commentary. I especially liked:
“Mark Zuckerberg is playing Settlers of Catan with the other senior executives, they all go easy on him to let him win, and Zuckerberg doesn’t realize this is happening. I guess that he outsources his people-reading skills.”
I had never heard of Settlers of Catan–remember, it is cold here–and I needed Wikipedia for an explanation.However, it would be intriguing if Zuckerberg, himself or outsourced, would take time out to respond to what I assume is a nonpositive observation.
By the way, how does she know that “Zuckerberg doesn’t realize this is happening.”? Maybe he knows exactly what’s happening, but why complain about it? That’s the sort of take I find suspicious – “That CEO? Such a boob, doesn’t know the most obvious thing, how does he manage to tie his shoes in the morning …”.
(The three types of people we remember in history):
The Prometheans: Those Who Bought Our Freedom
History remembers the man who split the atom or the woman who mapped the genome; it has absolutely no interest in the university dean who signed their travel vouchers. We remember **Einstein**, yet the name of the man who chaired his department at Princeton is—rightly—consigned to the lint-trap of oblivion. These scientists are the only ones who actually moved the needle, dragging us from the prehistoric muck of calorie-chasing into the light of civilization. They gave us the **time** to be human, a gift the administrative class merely attempts to tax.
## The Titans and the Thugs: The Architects of Order (and Chaos)
We remember the figures who held the power of life and death, because the human animal is hardwired to fear the predator and venerate the protector. History is a gallery of **Saints and Caesars**, Gandhis and Hitlers—those who either shielded the flame of liberty or tried to extinguish it under a jackboot. You will search the archives in vain for the “Executive Vice President of Logistics” who kept the Roman legions fed; history forgets the bureaucrat because, in the final analysis, the bureaucrat is merely a parasite on the pulse of power.
## The Immortals: The Cartographers of the Internal
Then there are the artists, the only group that manages to survive without an army. We remember **Shakespeare** and **Mozart** not because they were “productive members of society,” but because they provided the soul a residence that isn’t a tomb. They offer the joy that makes physical survival a prize rather than a sentence. The business founder may build a skyscraper, but the artist ensures we have something to look at out the window. One is a footnote in a ledger; the other is a permanent resident of the human consciousness.
—
**A Note on the Forgotten:** The world is run by men in grey suits—the technocrats, the deans, the founders, the middle-managers of destiny—who believe their startups, their spreadsheets are the stuff of legend. They are wrong. They are the scaffolding of history, and once the building is finished, the scaffolding is always, *always* discarded.
The desperation that happens to market-leading tech companies can also happen to market-leading researchers… I’m thinking of the stories I’ve heard of research giants who get a lot of attention at some point in the career (e.g., for doing the right thing at the right time) and then seem to lose their ability to distinguish science from straight-up conning.
too many counterexamples – leading researchers who retain their reputation despite doing poor research, bad things, etc.
Quote from above: “I’m thinking of the stories I’ve heard of research giants who get a lot of attention at some point in the career (e.g., for doing the right thing at the right time) and then seem to lose their ability to distinguish science from straight-up conning.”
“Doing the right thing at the right time”
Can possibly also be something someone does to merely climb
Perhaps it might even help with receiving tenure or some attention
Or lead to getting some more grants worthy of mention
Maybe if the intention has not been just and proper all along
It sometimes won’t take that long
For certain things to fall back in place and where they belong
That’s the moment when a “right” has possibly been made possible by a “wrong”
In light of this, here are two links to ideas which might be interesting to read and see
I am not a researcher myself, so while I focus on writing some more lyrics or poetry
Maybe some actual researchers can have a look, ponder, and judge and assess it
Or even adapt or improve the basic idea, to better make it fit
https://groups.google.com/g/openscienceframework/c/2nhHMdGGhrw
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/12/17/stranger-than-fiction/#comment-628652
An interesting analogy is the early behavior of the railroad cartels as narrated by Gabriel Kolko’s Railroads and Regulation, 1877–1916. Finding it impossible to enforce cartel rules they found in governmental regulation by the ICC a way to preserve their rents.
There may be a much simpler explanation for all of this, near-zero marginal costs and network externalities. Industries that rely primarily on digital technology have these two properties, and both favor so-called natural monopoly. You either monopolize your market space or someone else will. Hence the blitzscaling demanded by VC, documented by (for instance) World Eaters by Catherine Bracy. If you get to be the monopolist you have to guard yourself against would be successors. Buying them out, building artificial obstacles (no third-party parts!), etc. you can stay on top. One other aspect of this is guarding your market space, which in a dynamic setting may be shifting under your feet. AI, for instance, might cannibalize a portion of the social media space or create a competitive space, so you have to be aggressive at those boundaries. Ideology in this case is strictly second-order, caused but not causing.
Incidentally, the government has been a big part of the market for tech products going back decades, so monopolizing and directing this demand toward your own enterprise, or even morphing your enterprise through collaboration with or domination over government, is beneficial for you.
This is a fair summary of some tech giants, but not all. Bill Gates became fantastically wealthy and simply left Microsoft, as did Steve Ballmer. Neither, so far as I know, attempted to actually take over government, though both carried out the normal regulatory capture that we’ve seen forever. Indeed, both spent far more time fighting governments than subverting them. Page and Brin? Google may be an awesome competitor but it is a modest governor of nation-states. Elon Musk, of course, is just plain crazy.
Overall, I think you have captured the ethos of a subset of techbros… but a proper subset, and perhaps not even a majority. As to the corporate infighting just below the founder level, I think you can find that at any company larger than a family diner.
A missing component in all of this is that the tech giants are who they are specifically because the government encouraged them to do what they are doing.
The NSA specifically encouraged Google and Facebook to compile dossiers on everyone, and gave them money to do it
https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance
And now the government is a major purchaser of “data” on americans
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/26/tech/the-nsa-buys-americans-internet-data-newly-released-documents-show
The government also has a history of using ISPs to spy on americans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
And the NSA seeded the IPv6 committees with agents to torpedo the early secure encryption protocols that would in theory be built directly into ipv6 and make their spying much less effective.
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/did-the-nsa-subvert-the-security-of-ipv6/
The reality is that big tech started as a subsidiary of the fascist arms of the government. In turn, big tech then subverted government operations through the DOGE operation, which almost certainly unloaded private data about american citizens to Russia
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-musk-spacex-security
Big tech operates in part through manipulation of the financial markets. Their high flying P/E ratios allow them to use stock to print money, quite literally. Stock becomes collateral for bank loans that literally manufacture money. If the stock prices go up, they can manufacture more money. Using this manufactured money, they can purchase competitors permanently locking themselves in as controlling agents in a kind of holding company status.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur
The problem with all of this is that nothing grows forever and so high flying PE ratios are destined to come down. However, they are desperate to prevent that by manipulating beliefs in the market that there could be some crazy growth coming just around the corner, because that growth creates power for them. It’s just as important for the big tech world to control the narrative around their legitimacy and power as it is for fascist dictators to do the same. In the end, both must fail, because they have no relationship to the truth, but plenty of damage can be done in the meantime.
Good post. The tendencies you describe shed some light on how the alliance of the oligarchs with fascists came about.
Quote from aboce: “A missing component in all of this is that the tech giants are who they are specifically because the government encouraged them to do what they are doing.”
I wonder what the role of universities and (some) individual scientists working at universities might be in stuff like this. I stumbled upon the following text which was part of a grant proposal concerning autism and work and social security (or something like that), which still puzzles me to this day because it seems to involve data privacy issues and/or some steering which I find noteworthy. The original text I came across had been redacted with black lines, which I will substitute with “(…)” in the comment here:
“(…) has an enormous amount of person-level linkable statistical data available. Labour market and education data of the total Dutch population are available to researchers affiliated with Dutch universities In the secure remote access environment hosted by (…). This information includes – among others – exam grades, highest diploma, labour market status and most important income source (e.g. employment status, sick leave, social benefit, entrepreneur), wage, and job sector. It is furthermore possible to reconstruct and retrieve this information for entire families. Linking the (…) and (…) data to the (…) creates the opportunity to compare persons with and without autism with otherwise similar background characteristics.”
Well Andrew, initially I was just going to comment “+1 for meta.” I was going with that, seemed good, but couldn’t get a decent follow up given all the very high quality comments above. I really liked the meta metaphor so to speak, because it does truly speak to the human condition.
But then – I went on to my Steam account just now and saw this in my Queue list: Military Incremental Complex – wholly moly. This is no mere simplistic board game like “Settlers of Catan”. This is, for our youth and anybody that wants to play, for reals. Check it out. I’m not going to download it…
“CEO supervillains are trapped in their own ideology”
Do you impute some sort of intellectual consistency, some coherent economic ideology on the tech oligarchs? I think that is futile. They are just greedy and evil, and extremely powerful and dangerous. It’s true that they are also insecure. Like Trump and Musk, the most insecure manchilds on the planet. They probably realize at some level that this can’t go on, but that won’t prevent them from continuing doing what they do, like destroying the planet.
After reading this and the comments, I’m leaning towards tech companies are just more companies. In my mind, especially when I was younger, I think I had them bookmarked as something else, and that’s my mistake.
Dale’s comment about Microsoft convinces me that the dinosaurs aren’t really dying, so that model doesn’t seem too useful, and Peter’s comment convinces me that the behavior is pretty explainable in more direct terms than ideology.
I guess the thing that feels supervillainy that isn’t here are the financial games — like the oft commented on valuations of Tesla vs. other car companies. But financial games don’t seem like a new thing either.
I think this is partially right and partially wrong. I think its more compounding versus non-compounding growth.
The classic model of business is 1) small company develops products losses money/small profit; 2) growth to larger company making the product while investing all profits and outside capital in growth; 3) be large incumbent collecting the profits of those investments and pay them out to investors as dividends/buybacks; 4) decline as product/market deteriorates. A single firm might have several of these business, ideally at different lifecycles. The key factor is that in 1:2 returns are compounded as the business grows (burger chain in Ohio -> midwest burger chain -> national burger chain -> global burger empire) but have higher risks of collapse and failure. However in 3, returns are non-compounding as a global burger empire makes a similar amount each year.
People really like compounding returns over non-compounding so a lot of finance ends up as methods to make non-compounding returns act more compounding. The private equity model is essentially a version of this: Buy companies with borrowed to inflate small improvements into larger compounding growth in the short term before flipping the company and trying again with more companies using your profits from the first time. The big tech companies are trying to find a way to keep compounding by launching lots of new products but because their legacy business are so large and profitable they can’t find non-crazy business (move to mars, replace all humans with robots, AI’s will be your only friends,…) that can both possibly grow compounding and use 50 billion of capital a year. So, we get AI will replace your friends and Mars colonies because its the only sort of business that could be 10x as valuable as facebook or microsoft office.
The incoherence you’re identifying, “we’re the scrappy mammals” alongside “20% growth forever”, points to something structural above individual psychology, because the ideology doesn’t just create insecurity, it also functions as selection pressure. The tech demo days and founder mythology and talks by technical luminaries operate as machinery for manufacturing the specific delusions the heroic tech system requires.
The poker analogy can be extended: they’re not just holding the revolver now, they’ve convinced themselves their skill at poker qualifies them to redesign the casino, the city it sits in, and the laws governing both… the same “reality is malleable” mindset that was functionally adaptive for willing a company into existence becoming pathological when applied to domains they’ve never seriously studied, which is most domains.
It’s easy to get addicted to the returns. For a certain kind of tech founder/executive, the self-image of being a “Master of the Universe” collides with the constant demand for investor-grade growth. They’ve made themselves (and their backers) a lot of money, so the pressure to keep that compounding is intense. The result is a sincere belief that there’s a way to sustain ~20% growth indefinitely — even when the evidence says otherwise.
There’s also a Dark Forest mentality at work: a sequential game under incomplete information. Each player acts without fully knowing what others have seen or decided. In that setting, you effectively have three moves: monopolize an opportunity you’ve found; broadcast it (and alert competitors); or do nothing. The dominant impulse is to monopolize — buy up competitors, control chokepoints, lock in distribution — or to delay broadcasting until you’ve accumulated enough territory that competition can’t catch up. What you can’t do, given the incentive structure, is nothing: “do nothing” doesn’t compound, and compounding is the metric everyone gets judged by.
For a more comprehensive attempt to address economic dynamism, technology, and capitalistic institutions, try https://jaigp.org/paper/25. Of course it was written by an AI and published in a journal devoted to AI authored research. Too many words for me, but not any worse than other things written on these subjects. I actually found it refreshing, particularly for those who think that economists neglect the most profound questions.