Both can be true: a.) A tiny number of billionaires have reorganized society in ways that cause benefits to accrue to themselves. b.) The net size of those be

Both can be true: a.) A tiny number of billionaires have reorganized society in ways that cause benefits to accrue to themselves. b.) The net size of those benefits, distributed equally over all people, is tiny. All this means is that people are being used in absurdly inefficient ways, because that benefits whoever is in charge. For example, plantations are arguably like this. They are less productive, per acre, than smallholdings. But they scale: A single owner can make the plantation arbitrarily large. "Who cares if the country grows half as much per acre as it could, if I get to control 10x the acres? That's still 5x the wealth for me!" Surely we in software, home of the Mythical Man Month, know all about this? It doesn't matter if the microserfs are less productive, if you can have all of them to yourself.