You need socialism. That is not a snark. I am serious. It is getting rarer in the world. Even the "left" is very capitalist.

There's an intuitive appeal in having a coordination mechanism where good leaders decide which problems are important to work on and then get the smart people to work on those problems. But historically, societies structured that way haven't worked well; they struggle to get good signals on whether the solutions make sense, and the coordination mechanisms are vulnerable to subversion by bad leaders. The Soviet Union famously forbade anyone from researching genetics for decades because a crank named Trofim Lysenko who didn't think it was real happened to become politically popular.

There is probably a middle ground somewhere between literal Soviet communism and unregulated capitalism. There are quite a lot of countries happily functioning in that middle ground, and while they're not making 15 people incredibly wealthy they're also not grinding the rest of the population into the ground.

Which countries do you have in mind? In the vast majority of the world today, people can become billionaires if they build a large company selling lots of goods or services people want to buy, without having to justify to anyone why the stuff they make serves "real human needs". You can do it in China, in India, in France, in Norway, etc.

We flipped from an Epicurean mindset to a Stoic or Nihilistic mindset. IOW, we stopped talking about helping people lead good lives and started talking about how we can all weather stress and work hard and deprive ourselves of good things to build something. Or we're talking about how nothing matters so why bother?

Sounds like you’re really going through it. Sorry to hear

Some people long for a savior-leader to come along and right the ship. An Obama that can from the top make all the stuff underneath right. They can’t do it themselves because structurally they, the middle or lower layer, are deadlocked, or the system makes things unsurmountable. But then it turns out that the savior-leader can’t make things right because they too are a product of the system. Just as convinced that the system is too broken for them to fix.

The $5 trillion didn't come from nowhere. People spend money on the products because they are helpful.

However, you're right that most people at these companies are so accustomed to the "free money faucet" from ads, huge margins, etc. that it's incredibly easy to end up totally disconnected from reality. That's probably what frustrates you the most.

I will say - after having left Google just about a year ago now - that there is literally no better time to make money in tech than right now. AI is eroding the moat of all large tech companies, and skilled individuals with passion and drive can make a huge impact on the world with an incredibly small budget.

You'll make it. All of us will.

I think "because they are helpful" is OP's point of contention. Tobacco isn't helpful, but it's a product that people spend money on.

As someone who has been CTO at a small company, senior leadership at a scaleup, and now middle management at a large co, I can tell you that what you are imagining is not structurally possible in our current system.

That's not say leaders here and there aren't thinking about what they're building and the macro effects, but you have to understand that unless you're bootstrapped and self-funded, even the most morally minded CEO is still beholden to investors who primarily care about money. You can only be as ethical as your board allows, and that primarily comes from profitability and financial success. In the good times its easy to talk a big game (eg. Google's "Don't be Evil"), but eventually competition comes for us all, and if your morality is hurting the bottom line you will be replaced. The backstop would be customer sentiment, but most buyers (whether B2B or B2C) are also not morally motivated. That's why free + ads is the dominant model, why micro payments failed despite years of techie hand-wringing, and paid consumer apps outside of streaming are vanishingly rare.

It's not all hopeless though. If things reach a high enough threshold of public sentiment then we can put legal and cultural pressure that will actually change things top-down. I think this is where AI is probably going as it's the most universally feared and hated impact across party lines that I have seen during my life, and the leaders in charge seem incredibly tone deaf about how it's being perceived, so I do expect regulation and softer forms of social enforcement to affect that trajectory. But if you're hoping for individual CEOs and leaders to fix our systemic problems, don't hold you're breath, they are just as replaceable as the workers under them.

> You can only be as ethical as your board allows

Personal integrity is something you control for yourself. Nobody "allows" you to have it. If we still taught this and more people lived by it, we'd have a lot fewer problems.

You're misunderstanding the point, a CEO's control of the company is contingent on the boards approval. Yes, of course you can hold the standard for yourself, but you serve at the pleasure of the board and investors. The system selects for amorality because the incentive is profit. I agree with your statement in general, but even if 95% of people live by that rule, there still is systematic pressure to select CEOs out of the other 5%, because then 401k go up (including yours and mine).

We should expect personal integrity from board members and investors as well. This is a social problem, and a very old one. The solutions that worked best (religion/morality codes or laws) are not popular today.

When have religion and "morality codes" meaningfully constrained elites? I can't think of an elite caste anywhere in history that is really even close to what a rational observer would call "moral". Yes, certain things are verboten in a given moral code (usury, for example), but elites either outsource it (e.g. to a "court Jew") or just do other evil stuff that isn't addressed in the code (and won't be, since they are the elites and therefore control things like that).

cos people will do things for money. Regulate money, tax better, redistribute better. Give more people the power to say "no" as opposed to "holy fuck I need to make rent next month".

Politically addressing needs has the same issue as regulating money, its unpopular either because of billionaire marketing or general ignorance and cognitive dissonance. Also resource allocation is hard when people interpret any level of cut as murder. So you're hemmed in on both sides while FPTP makes it impossible to be honest with the electorate where jetpacks for everyone and free head is what wins you elections, regardless of its delivery.

While some commenters might suggest socialism is the panacea, I think that's just a different format of the same sort of failure. The fundamental flaw in our societies is ourselves, as we build societies that reflect our own failures. We care for ourselves considerably more than we do others, sometimes aggressively against others, sometimes will utter, wilful ignorance of others. The big picture is too hard for our brains to deal with. We have no baseline emotional regulation, humans can wrap themselves into the same emotional state about leaving Britney alone as they do about the death of a loved one. This means everyone's needs seem the same, which makes resource allocation hard.

We see a similar whine about immigration where the abstract is simply: You get $10k and an immigrant moves next door, or you get $0k and an arbitrary person who isn't an immigrant moves in next door. Solve for the status quo. But people will elect governments on a policy of cruelty to think that status quo won't immediately rubber band back.