[BobbyTables2]

I suspect our primary school upbringing of “follow the rules” holds a lot of people back.

Seems like a lot of successful people in business know exactly how far they can step over the line without suffering serious consequences.

[thfuran]

Societies where no one has any regard for rules aren't great either.

[inetknght]

You can't make billions of dollars by following rules...

[epicureanideal]

Society would be better if we could, and we would all benefit.

Looking at what the growth trajectories are of countries with high corruption, it’s not great, so our growth is probably still reduced by the corruption or lawlessness that still exists.

[thfuran]

Why do you think having billionaires at all is of benefit to society? Or do you just mean that the people inclined to break rules to accumulate unreasonable wealth would just follow them instead if that worked as well and that is what would benefit society?

[epicureanideal]

Because in a well organized society where wealth accumulation is not by corruption, then by definition it would be by creating value, which benefits everyone.

The alternative is something like oligarchs that extract wealth because of state granted monopolies, corporatism that strangles competition with anti competitive regulation, etc. The accumulation of wealth is all out of proportion and possibly not even correlated in those cases with the production of actual value.

[thfuran]

Wealth is accumulated by capturing value, not by creating it.

[teaearlgraycold]

Ideally less people would be attaining that kind of personal wealth. Companies should be scaled back as well IMO.