Capitalism does some things well. The speed of innovation, the breadth of creativity, the streamlined practices. But it comes at a cost, at least eventually. I think it’s a self-cannibalising system. I think it’s bad at preserving the conditions from which value is extracted. In other words, it optimises so well that things lose their souls. Btw part 1 is here.

Decisions can be completely rational for an individual company while being increasingly disastrous when every company makes the same decisions. Cut staff. Reduce quality. Remove anything that can’t be directly linked to revenue. Shift the tax burden elsewhere. Each decision makes sense on its own spreadsheet. But add them all together and you get exhausted workers, hollowed-out public services, brittle supply chains, and customers who increasingly can’t afford to be customers. 

The Race to the Bottom

It could be a race to the lowest price, sacrificing staff, quality, using tax wizardry – purely because of competition. You’d think corpos could focus on offering the best service to attract and retain customers, but I think behavioural economists figured out humans prefer simpler choices and low prices, a preference increasingly reinforced, and ironically so, by the precarious job markets created by the same optimisation.

For example: When your rent, food, energy, and childcare costs are all rising, you’re probably not spending your evening studying the long-term social consequences of the airline choice for your summer holiday. You’re probably clicking “sort by lowest price” and hoping the wings are included.

Ryanair always looks cheap until you decide to take more outfits than what you’re wearing, want to sit next to your baby, partner, or grandma, or prefer leg mobility. I’m convinced there’s a way to go yet: a discount for the person willing to hop off the plane and guide it to its bay,  or pop on a high vis to drive a busload of fellow passengers to the terminal.

I guess the dream life for companies is to become a monopoly. Where they can finally jack prices back up but retain all the cost “efficiencies”. Terrific for shareholders. They can have all that they ever wanted, and more, and perhaps even, maybe their parents will finally tell them how proud they are. Whenever I’m in a low phase seeking meaning for my existence, I remind myself – it’s to create shareholder value.

Who Pays?

Tax optimisation might be one of the clearest examples of the self-cannibalising instinct. A corporation relies on educated workers, roads, courts, healthcare systems, financial stability, public infrastructure, and customers with enough money to buy things. But contributing towards those conditions (tax) is seen as a cost to be minimised. Sometimes the money leaves the country altogether. Which makes “shop local” make sense, as the money stays more local.

So I get to thinking, sure corporations are great at delivering value and profits and watches shinier than a Casio… what condition have the cumulative effects, of those practices, left society in?

Where Does the Money Go?

Imagine an economy with 100 gold coins. It creates five new coins every year, but four of them continually find their way to the richest 1%. The economy is growing, technically. The total number of coins keeps rising. But is the system robust enough to sustain social stability as well as economic growth? Consider: who gradually loses access to the old wealth, and who accumulates new wealth enough to influence the rules governing all the wealth?

In my view, the job of the government is to redistribute coins around society, not only to keep the economy flowing but also to maintain social cohesion. After all, aren’t the gov essentially risk managers?

What we Lose?

I don’t quite lean towards a particular ideology, I simply think about sustainability.In essence, how long can this last? And even if the answer is “a long time”, will that long time be a good time?

We’re social animals, we’re wired to engage with one another, cooperate, and form relationships. But what happens when resources accumulate in the hands of a few and everybody else is driven to become increasingly devious, as an adaptation to insecurity, trying to lock down a fragment of the scraps?

Well, we become less generous, because generosity feels dangerous. We become less trusting when one mistake could cost us our home. We start treating interactions as transactions because the surrounding system has taught us that anything can be taken away.

Dignity, trust, community, resilience, and quality of life are harder to put on a spreadsheet, so they’re treated as expendable. The cost of which doesn’t arrive neatly as ‘consequences of wealth concentration’.  They’re delayed, dispersed and honestly, difficult to attribute. Which makes sense as the manifestations appear as burnout, loneliness, resentment, deteriorating public services, political anger, and the vague feeling that everybody is trying to scam everybody else.

But the question that keeps me from taking the occasional nap is: Can a system remain sustainable when its internal incentives steadily undermine social cohesion, distribute gains upward, and convert every human need into an opportunity for extraction?

It feels like “tax the billionaires”, or the more poetic “eat the rich”, became more mainstream post-pandemic. And I think it’s because public services, and quality of life for regular folk, was noticeably worsening.

So, would mainstream anti-billionaire sentiment exist if economic stability and social mobility was easily accessible for all? E.g. was the sentiment alive between 2000-2007?

If no, and stay with me here, is it the billionaire that directly led to underfunded public services and lower quality of life? Probably not. Yet indirectly, via regulatory capture, probably yes. The more they accumulate, the more they influence to accumulate further. Eventually wealth becomes gravity.

And so to the notion of taxing billionaires, using Jeff Bezos as a convenient example. He’s worth ~$250bn. Enough to buy a kebab every second for nearly 8,000 years.

Tax, by the way, became an ugly word that made people run away to Dubai. Normally though, people agree to live in communal areas, and they contribute to keep that area pretty and the community’s needs served. Now scale that thought up to a national level. That’s what tax is supposed to do. It’d cost a libertarian a ton of time and money to train and equip themselves as a firefighter, or road repairer…compared to a community pooling together for a specialised, cost-efficient and resource-efficient team.
Caveat: This is for cities. I can’t speak for remote regions until I’ve completed my Walden life chapter.

Having said that, I can understand why people flinch at tax. For many young people, the social contract has been broken. They might think, “why is a third of my tax bill going to pensioners, some of whom are sitting on immense property wealth, while I have to pay exorbitant amounts to rent a windowless room with a DIY shower unit assembled near my bed? And my calathea is dying”. Tax has negative optics now because trust in public institutions is low.

Back to Bezos. ~$250bn. He owns around 881mn Amazon shares. Currently worth ~$210bn. That’s 84% of his wealth.
This is where it gets awkward. How do you tax someone whose wealth is mostly unrealised gains, without triggering a further tax-planning arms race?
Because if he sells shares, he faces capital gains tax. If he doesn’t, then the gain just sits there. Very large. Very untaxed.

There are also wealthy folks who take out loans against their assets, instead of paying themselves a salary. Because debt isn’t taxable. Even if they’re getting their hands on cash to pay for milk and eggs, they’ve done it without paying income tax first like the rest of society did. That imbalance needs to be addressed. Why should they be able to enjoy community living when they’re intentionally skirting community contributions?

Did you also know that instead of selling shares, and facing capital gains taxes, he could instead gift them to a charity? Such as the Bezos Day One Fund. No capital gains, no money flowing back to communities in a democratic manner. However, lots of personally-directed social power to further causes and narratives he prefers. And maybe even a tax deduction for being so charitable.

Moving on. Countries like Norway, Spain, France, and Switzerland have some form of threshold-based wealth taxes. Norway applies it to global net wealth, whereas France only applies it to real estate. So let’s use Norway as an example of how much the billionaires would “suffer“.

Norway’s wealth tax is applied on a net basis (assets minus liabilities), and is charged at roughly 1%. Meaning a Norwegian Bezos wouldn’t be able to rely only on unrealised gains, loans and charitable structures to avoid contributing to his community.

If his net wealth was $250bn, he’d have to fork out $2.5bn. Which seems like a lot. But consider that wealthy people are usually invested in appreciating and yield-generating assets. As a benchmark, a low-risk money market fund full of US bonds and short-term debt securities is currently yielding around 3.5% per year. On $250bn, that would be $8.75bn in one year. So even after paying $2.5bn in wealth tax, he could still be up around $6.25bn. Seems less dramatic now.
Caveat: In reality, bad market years, illiquid stock, concentration (Bezos’ case), valuation rules, and forced selling all need to be factored in. But their wealth planning teams still using Windows xp can handle that.

If we’re comfortable taxing wages before money even reaches a nurse, teacher, builder, or person renting beside a shower unit, it doesn’t seem insane to require the extremely wealthy to contribute annually at a rate that resembles normal civic obligation.

If their wealth becomes gravity and starts influencing public power, they should probably get a bill for that.

I used to think, “thank god physical disciplining in schools went away and the experience was safer for kids”.

Then I thought, well if some kids are getting abused at home, like they were previously, it just gives their trauma room to manifest in that safer school environment. Where the ugliest manifestations can hinder schooling more than physical disciplining would’ve.

Then I thought, but maybe if that safer school environment could now also treat kids as humans pending discovery of some form of intelligence I.e. who are the builders, movers, thinkers, performers, carers, strategists, artists?

I realised that the factory of schooling has remained the same, minus some cruelty.

And I wondered, “why did we stop halfway on the journey to giving kids dignity?”

Lisbon isn’t just about its beautiful tiles, food scene, sunsets, and investment returns. Lisbon is also the intangible things like family networks, old neighbours, cultural routines, dry humour, saudade, and its hopes.

It becomes a form of exploitation when investors are allowed to bid for a culture nurtured over generations, prune its rough edges, and then sell access to it for maximum profit…rendering it beautiful, but hollow. Meanwhile, those who created much of its value are left with higher rents, weaker communities, and a growing sense that their own country no longer has room for them.

But at least it enriches a narrow class /s

To be clear, the danger isn’t tourism itself. Tourism brings money, jobs, visibility, and cultural exchange. The danger is this modern extractive form of it. And it doesn’t take much imagination to consider the consequences. You’d only need to look at London, Paris, Geneva, among countless others, to notice how wealth preserved the surface while shifting the life beneath it.

I write this seemingly naively, as if private equity and wealthy investors are merely oblivious to the effects of their quarterly goals. Unfortunately, and with great insomnia, I know it’s a business model: privatise the gains and socialise the losses. All enabled by regulatory capture, political incentives, and a dash of scorn that community isn’t as profitable as individual isolationism.

I can’t seem to pinpoint moral imagination anymore. It’s quiet. I struggle between accepting accumulation as an inevitable human impulse, and whether surrendering to that conclusion is a kind of defeat itself. Greed often feels more powerful than kindness, because it’s easier: easier to take than to care, easier to extract than to preserve, easier for a few determined people to damage what many gentler people are trying to protect.

I don’t think a country should measure success primarily by how much capital it attracts, or how much property appreciates. Surely a humanistic approach, which, correct me if I’m wrong, is what we are would be: can its young people afford to live near their family? Can an elderly resident remain in the neighbourhood they know? Can workers in the tourism economy build stable lives from the wealth they help generate? Do local people feel included in the future of their own city?

A city that forgets whom it belongs to might still be beautiful, but it’s already started fading into a memory.

The irony is that I came to Lisbon as part of the very class of people stoking change.

I was raised in London, a city I no longer feel I belong to, and moved here with the kind of mobility many Portuguese people don’t have. I know that makes my concern complicated. I’m inside the problem, trying to live with some awareness of it. But that’s also why I feel it so sharply.

I’ve seen what happens when a city becomes increasingly organised around capital rather than belonging. I’ve seen parallel worlds emerge: one for those with money, mobility, and international networks, and another for the people who carry the place through ordinary life.

In Lisbon, I feel the parallel worlds too: the expat world of specialty coffee, brunch, English-speaking spaces, and aesthetic consumption; and the Portuguese world of families, workers, elderly neighbours, sarcasm, saudade, and the slight twitch of memories from difficult political histories. These worlds occupy the same streets, but they don’t always meet.

I’m learning Portuguese. I read Camões and the country’s history. I feel at home amongst the soulfulness and sarcasm of the Portuguese. In many ways, I feel more kinship here than in the city that raised me. I try, imperfectly, not to treat Portugal as a lifestyle accessory. But I still feel the weight of being grouped with those who arrive without curiosity, humility, or any real desire to belong beyond consumption.

There is a strange loneliness in loving a place while knowing my presence may symbolise something painful to the people from here.

I don’t think growth is inherently wrong. But if Lisbon’s transformation turns the city’s own people into background characters in a prosperity story written for investors, tourists, remote workers, and elites…then that growth has cost too much. A humane society should not ask ordinary Portuguese people to sacrifice their homes, neighbourhoods, and sense of belonging so the country can appear successful from the outside.

I feel for the Portuguese not because I imagine myself morally separate from the problem, but rather because I’ve already lost a version of home to the same problem.

London taught me what happens when ordinary people are priced out of the places that formed them. So when I see Lisbon beginning to split into parallel worlds, I can’t pretend it’s harmless.

I know what this story looks like when it is allowed to continue.


Though I moved to Lisbon with the mobility of a London expat, it wasn’t with a face people usually associate with that world.

Sometimes I feel suspended between the Lisbon of remote workers and the Lisbon of Uber drivers, Glovo riders, and service staff working behind the scenes…people whose presence is relied upon, yet rarely welcomed with the same ease.

I’m close enough to see both, and oftentimes misread by both, but I don’t quite belong to either.

So…even within the outsider class, there are hierarchies.

AI won’t determine the future nearly as much as how the gains end up being distributed. I think what the AI faff has exposed is the gap between economic systems and human needs.

It’s a fair aspiration to remove work from human hands (ongoing for millennia), but it’s not fair to gate-keep the value that comes with it.

Bigger Q:
What happens when intelligence is a commodity in a system built on scarcity?
How will our identities, structures, and search for meaning change?