Capitalism Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

When is enough enough? This simple, vital question—How much monetary gain does a person or a company need in order to feel satisfied?—has little place in the finance industry or in contemporary capitalism more broadly. The capitalism that has become dominant in the years since the 1980s is not about enough; it’s about more, and no amount of more is ever enough.

For many of its critics, capitalism, in all its versions, is a maximizer of . The relentless pursuit of profit, the drive to multiply shareholder value that undergirds most large public companies, and the demand that revenue grow faster than the overall economy or the population—all of these impulses prevail on Main Street, on Wall Street, and in Silicon Valley. This is one reason why such an enormous gulf has opened up between the richest Americans and the rest, and why large banks, behemoth energy companies, multinational industrials, huge private-equity