[highcountess]

Humans are generally not very good at properly evaluating things in general. They are exceptionally good at believing themselves to be very good at properly evaluating things though.

It is why empires collapse from miscalculations about war by their experts, it is the foundational mental model underlying communism that simply cannot work but keeps being attempted, and it is how countries can be destroyed in every which way while the experts maintain that everything is just fine.

Never underestimate the powers of the ego, the destroyer of worlds. I mean they don’t know what they are doing, but we have advanced technical knowledge and experience, so we should clearly be in charge of all things, including those beyond our narrow scope of advanced technical knowledge and experience.

[dagss]

To be fair, capitalism doesn't really work either, you get a very unstable systems with cycles (which people try to stabilize in ad hoc ways), you optimize for the wrong things long term (right now producing much more goods than we need, without factoring in devastating costs that climate change will bring in a few decades, and destruction of nature and eradication of species) and when things crash many people are hurt. And it practically needs wars and destruction to reset wealth distribution every 50 to 100 years.

No communism doesn't work either. I wish there was more alternatives.

And some of the usual examples of "socialism doesn't work" might have worked if US hadn't interfered. E.g. in Chile, no system would have survived US actively supporting Pinochet. We will never know how socialism would have played out there if US (and Soviet too) left it alone.