Excellent article:

> This last point is crucial: it’s not that capitalist CEOs are just evil people—well, some definitely are—no, the structural logic is coercing them to do something destructive in order to survive. They can’t help themselves.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how much of the world going sideways is from bad actors and how much is from emergent behavior of complex systems. The answer is both.

In particular, there is a level above this that I want to draw attention to. The structure of corporate competition coerces executives into choices that are bad for the world. This is true even for entirely well-meaning executives.

However, executives are not stupid or unaware. So over time, it becomes known that being in an executive position will require you to make choices that are perhaps "economically rational" for the firm but otherwise require compromised morals. And once that awareness gets out, the system selects CEOs that are OK with that moral compromise.

So it's less a question of "is it bad actors or bad systems" and more "it's a bad system that produces bad actors".

Bad behaviour from CEOs is an old problem and we have ways of dealing with it such as passing laws and regulations. Most of the worst problems I see in the world seem to be bad politicians / presidents and not so much bad CEOs.

Getting to the CEO position by climbing the greasy pole may select for iffy types but most founders get there more by try to solve a problem for customers which kind of selects the other way.

Bad actors may have created the bad system in the first place, right? You can maybe say it's a flaw in human nature to create bad systems in the first place, but maybe the real flaw is our inability to fix them?

A roundabout way to get to the provocative thought:

The actual actor of History is Capitalism. It's Capitalism controlling Humans, not the other way around as conventionally thought.