"Greed is what is (at least, at risk of) killing us and the planet."
If you are going to get that general, why not say the core problem is that we live in a universe where the core biological law is natural selection/survival of the fittest? Ultimately, every biological entity survives and reproduces by either growing the pie or stealing more of the pie. Human beings became dominant in part because the big brains allowed for cooperation in growing the pie, rather than just fighting each other for resources. Unfortunately, our brains are limited and this did not scale beyond the Dunbar number. The invention of rule or law and market economies helped scale this even further, as these innovations made it so that you had to create some value to exchange, rather than just stealing. But the success of those innovations just allowed the species to grow even more numerous, and the systems far, far more complex, and so market economies have broken down as so many people have found it more profitable to game the system than to create real value (gaming the system meaning everything from exploiting arcane financial structures, lobbying for government favors, building web apps to exploit natural monopoly opportunities, etc.)
What is the solution? My best take is that we need to refactor our laws, legal system, and financial system in order to eliminate the opportunities for complexity exploitation, and to re-incentivize value creating activities (such as basic R&D).
If you are going to get that general, why not say the core problem is that we live in a universe where the core biological law is natural selection/survival of the fittest? Ultimately, every biological entity survives and reproduces by either growing the pie or stealing more of the pie. Human beings became dominant in part because the big brains allowed for cooperation in growing the pie, rather than just fighting each other for resources. Unfortunately, our brains are limited and this did not scale beyond the Dunbar number. The invention of rule or law and market economies helped scale this even further, as these innovations made it so that you had to create some value to exchange, rather than just stealing. But the success of those innovations just allowed the species to grow even more numerous, and the systems far, far more complex, and so market economies have broken down as so many people have found it more profitable to game the system than to create real value (gaming the system meaning everything from exploiting arcane financial structures, lobbying for government favors, building web apps to exploit natural monopoly opportunities, etc.)
What is the solution? My best take is that we need to refactor our laws, legal system, and financial system in order to eliminate the opportunities for complexity exploitation, and to re-incentivize value creating activities (such as basic R&D).