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Notes -
You may be interested in the Chinese concept of neijuan.
While I do think free market capitalism is really the only incentive structure that works at scale and we've never found anything better, I find it hard to disagree with the leftist criticism that the drive to optimize everything in sight, abetted by increased technological capacity, significantly eventuates human misery.
You can see similar dynamics everywhere, from college applications, dating and even PVP video games, where the competition is more and more of a red queen's race. Everyone would be better off if we all stepped off the brakes collectively, but of course nobody has any incentive to surrender an advantage and so we all drive off the cliff together.
I think most people just aren't psychologically equipped to deal with significant differences in the status of those "around" you without any way of being able to climb up. It's one thing if the king is far away, you'll never meet him and you only have to compete for status with your tribe, a whole another thing to feel like you have to compete with status with the entire world, which of course is an impossible fight to win and only the insane would try to joust the windmill.
Is it "fair" that the family of my lawyer friend is ludicrously rich because his grandfather owns a bunch of valuable patents? Objectively his grandfather's provided much more value to the world than I ever have and my friend is a great guy personally, but my monkey brain just isn't happy about it and still makes me miserable from time to time.
The modern liberal ideology of trying to Harrison Bergeron anyone that sticks their head up is of course a ridiculous way of addressing this dynamic, but it is true that free market libertarians have no answer.
I have no answer to neijuan either unfortunately; I can only wish you the best with your job and partner.
In many ways that the people who predicted East Asia to be the future of the West had the right idea, I can only hope we look more like Japan and less like South Korea.
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