During the enlightenment, Thomas Hobbes discusses the Social Contract, which is the agreement between ruling bodies and the public. It’s to say that as long as live in the working class is tolerable, we’ll continue to let the leadership lead (instead of overthrowing them for someone else, or even to establish self-governance).

There have since been data driven studies that development of a society: roads, schools, bridges, libraries, hospitals, etc. that increase general quality of life also increase productivity which increases profits, and this is the foundation of a free, liberal society with heavily regulated market capitalism. (The regulations assure that enterprises don’t cause harm, such as polluting rivers or underpaying their workforce or selling a false product, and don’t engage in anti-competitive practices such as underselling the competition or lobbying officials to legislate in their favor.)

Sadly, the ownership class did exactly what Marx predicted in Das Kapital, manipulated elections, bribed officials and was able to open the US federal government to lobbies and special interest groups. Reagan happened, and what followed was deregulation, the disenfranchisement of labor unions, and the capture of institutions. The US and EU became neoliberal, and has been in the process of collapse ever since.

During the aughts and 2010s, I got curious why game development companies would crunch to meet deadlines even though this didn’t work. Productivity would decline thanks to the crunch, and the development team’s health and morale would get wrecked. Studies came out that crunching does not work, and in fact has results the opposite of what are intended, but game development companies still crunch to this day in 2026.

We’ve seen a similar effect with RTO mandates, even after we’ve seen widespread increases of worker productivity through telecommuting. There have been some suggested causes for RTO orders: Companies are stuck leasing large office spaces and management doesn’t like the appearance of unused empty offices; Upper management narcissistically needs to have an entourage of busybodies around them doing the appearance of work. (This hypothesis is consistent with the existence of bullshit jobs.) Upper management distrusts the workforce, expecting that they are intrinsically lazy and prone to freeloading, and hence need to be micromanaged.¹ Essentially, our C-suite can’t get past themselves to keep their workforce happy to maximize production and then just let them work.

So the conclusion that I’ve come to is that our upper management is mostly incompetent, and enacts policy not based on data-driven best business practices but what feeds their own respective egos. When one is wealthy enough it’s very easy to fail upwards, and they all are that wealthy. The businesses that are still growing are the ones that have market advantage and engage in shenanigans to undermine and eliminate competition. This is how ISP services mostly have regional monopolies across the nation, and how all the big box stores now have their prices set by Amazon, making them essentially an oligopoly or a cartel.

That is to say our businesses don’t have to run themselves well, and the same culture is informing the capture and corruption of government. It’s also now I can predict that the EU, also trapped in neoliberal policymaking is not far behind the US in being captured by the ultra-wealthy and mega-corporations, and are facing the rise of right-wing movements and Overton window shifts towards fascism.

¹ This is consistent with conditions in Meta offices and Amazon warehouses under the direction of Zuckerberg and Bezos, respectively. This is also consistent with the market of products and services to combat time theft, even though most instances of alleged time theft are human beings doing human stuff like pooping or talking to loved ones, and wage theft by comparison is a crisis greater than all the petty property crime combined. (Generally, white collar crime causes more lost of life, property damage and cost than all other crime by orders of magnitude. Law enforcement is totally focused on the wrong criminals.)