But we don't need a rich person to hold onto the money, decide where to invest, or spend lavishly on enormous mansions/yachts, we can build institutions to focus on benefiting humanity as a whole first or even automate rich people out of their jobs.

Letting good investors keep their returns is how we encourage the volume of good investments to increase. It both provides better investors with more capital to invest with, and incentivizes them to invest.

Centrally planned economies don't make these considerations and languish in productivity as a result.

The wealth generated should go to the investor who earned it.

>>or even automate rich people out of their jobs.

Go right ahead. Any automated tool you create that can effectively identify investment opportunities would be a enormous boon to humanity.

What you'll find as you grow more familiar with how an economy works is that investment is a dynamic, ever-changing process, and individual initiative and enterprise is always necessary to make it happen.

Many people make the mistake you're making now, of taking for granted the process of managing and allocating capital, because they don't understand how enormously complex the task is.

I think you've overstating the efficiency in this investments economy, along with overlooking the negative externalities. How much was thrown away? 6 empty houses per homeless person. Why instead of updating AIM/ICQ for Android/iOS and business usage, they were abandoned and new investors replaced them with several Electron based permanent MVPs? There's entire industries dedicated to creating fake demand for high margin items, then there is also people buying things just on speculation that it could be worth more later. Its incredibly inefficient and wasteful. Who pays for the smog from coal? Our lungs do.

First of all, pollution has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. It is an act of public property damage that ought to be punished. If it's not punished, we get negative externalities.

As for efficiency, you're overestimating how efficient political establishments can be in comparison. Just because a plan calls for the government to act efficiently, in the interest of the public, doesn't mean that this is what actually happens.

All of the tendencies toward waste and corruption seen in the market are manifested in politically appointed institutions as well. Private sector investment has been demonstrated to be the best way to increase productivity, and to be far more effective than politically directed management of economic assets.