If you write a book and everyone buys it, you're rich now. Your second book will do better with your name recognition too, so you get wealthier by reputation rather than effort or quality. This is the exponential/multiplicative impact of wealth.

You need janitors and sanitation workers society and I doubt most people will just want to do it. Cleaning doesn't contribute to the bottom line, you can't say you cleaned $30 worth of value, so how much do you pay the janitor under socialist models?

You can see the same greedy processes as capitalism in condo strata and other situations where people must share costs. We're greedy shits and half of us will let the world turn to shit to avoid paying more than they have to.

And what happens to people who want to produce things nobody wants? Sometimes this stuff pays off hugely like the math behind cryptography (which was nothing more than an academic exercise for like 100 years), but sometimes a person wants to spend all their time making macaroni Squidward vore content.

I agree CEOs are overpaid, they're overpaid because there's a perceived lack of them because being a CEO is all about your pedigree. Shareholders won't make Jeff the 18 year employee into CEO because they don't know who Jeff is, and Sandy over there went to Harvard and has run 6 companies before, starting with the one she inherited or bought with her trust fund. That's not really fair at all, and it makes capitalism worse too.

I like the ideas of cooperatives and all that, but in my cynical eyes human greed is the center of the problem.