> "It is not greed that drives the world, but envy" - cited to Warren Buffett. Hmm. He probably ran into too many business types with the mindset "It's not enough to win; someone else has to lose." Such ego trips are not useful to the stockholders.

You might be over-reading that. Getting ahead relative to others doesn't require explicitly pushing someone else down. If you work on your own and indirectly push everyone else down by inflating whatever metric you measure success by.

A clear example is that modern poor people are far richer than the richest people thousands of years ago. They have fridges and cars, or at least less disease. All those historical people are losers because we won but that's not a bad thing. In absolute terms, we didn't change their status at all.