[bumby]

>building in a lot of slack into their industrial capacity

This is exactly what I was cautioning against. Slack in a system is not economically productive. It is risk mitigation. You're conflating economically productive value with risk-reduction value. For the same reason, insurance is considered a liability, not an asset. That doesn't mean adding extra capacity isn't warranted from a risk perspective, but it doesn't mean you can add that excess capacity to the plus side of your ledger. It really seems like we're talking past each other because you aren't able to parse the different types of value I'm talking about.

>It correlates with leverage

I've already conceded this point. I used economic leverage because it is the most generalizable method to get leverage. Sure, you could instead blackmail the boss or date the boss's daughter to get leverage. But I don't think those hold as a general rule for a good strategy so we're mainly left with providing differential economic value. It's like quibbling that offense/defense doesn't matter in football, only points matter. In the same way, harping on leverage is both true and not particularly distinguishing in its helpfulness. Or to tie this into the OP, adding value to society does not give you much leverage in a capitalist system. Adding economic value does. And I think people focus on the wrong value system and get frustrated when the expected results don't follow.