I wonder if capitalism is kind of like wheat.

In Sapiens, Yuval Harari makes the interesting observation that wheat domesticated us.

Societies that adopted wheat based agriculture were able to scale significantly further than societies that did not.

The benefits to individual humans were much more modest, and arguably net-negative.

But the benefit to the collective was so strong that it dominated the individual loss.

The meme of farming wheat is just too strong to ignore.

You could make an argument that capitalism has a similar shape.

Societies that organize around capitalism are just wildly more productive than societies that don't.

The result for individuals is more mixed.