Ah ok yeah I see where you're coming from there. It's kind of like the question of did Steve Jobs need to be an asshole to be as successful as he was. And it can be tempting to think that they are intrinsically linked, but I also like to believe there is a world where he grew more on the empathy side but was still able to lead Apple perhaps even better.
You could be right, but in the hypothetical world where he's 100% right, and the current path the project or feature is taking is heading towards a dead end or is broken in some way. I feel there is a real cost that can be more easily ignored, e.g. working on a dead end or slowly failing thing that isn't set on the right trajectory is ultimately demoralizing and ends up in hindsight having been an opportunity cost and waste of your time vs. working on something else. And conversely if he's right about something like this, there should be positive feedback when it is turned around and starts performing better for the team involved?
Trying to understand what you're saying, especially with 'let's fix that right there'.
Is it basically the idea that the good we've gotten out of it (like driving down extreme poverty) has required 'social democracy' as another concept or force, to bend capitalism towards something better? And that a more useful perspective is zooming out from just capitalism by itself to include that?
I do feel like I still have a pretty limited understanding of how all of this fits together, so I appreciate you trying to teach me something here.
I think this is a pretty common and growing sentiment that I've felt too. One thing that has grounded me is learning and reminding myself that capitalism has driven extreme poverty across the world to the lowest share in known human history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#:~:text=Extrem...
I'm not sure if this on its own is enough to make up for the negatives, but it did personally restore some perspective that there is some real good to it alongside the bad. So I've personally shifted from more doomer sentiments on peak capitalism to feeling a little more hopeful. (That despite the dysfunctions of it there could still be a functional good foundation worth keeping and iterating on rather than the only solution being throwing the baby out with the bathwater.)