> Either [serving the king or the peasant] can reward you, as long as you do it well. Correct! But this is a function of the wealth distribution. If it's not t

> Either [serving the king or the peasant] can reward you, as long as you do it well. Correct! But this is a function of the wealth distribution. If it's not too lopsided, chasing volume is a good strategy. In some markets, it still is, and that's great! However, the more lopsided the wealth distribution gets, the more it looks like a palace economy where a rational actor should ignore the masses and spend every waking breath figuring out how to get in the good graces of the nobility. > The purpose of capitalism is to allocate resources efficiently Efficiently according to whom? For what purpose? We circle right back to the definition of economic value and how it's wealth-weighted: if everyone has roughly equal wealth, they get weighted roughly equally in the efficiency calculation and the economic definition of efficiency roughly matches the colloquial definition. However, if Mt. Olympus has all the weight, "efficient" means "efficient at extracting tribute from the plebs." The wealth distribution is getting more and more lopsided every day. This has consequences.