Is it possible that the disconnect is that you‘re valuing technical ability over being good at people+management? Most high level executives don’t need to understand these things in detail, because they have other people they trust that do understand it.
Powerpoints need to be 5-word phrases because that’s how you should communicate with crowds. And it’s not simply about reducing complexity to the lowest common denominator (though that is part of it). It’s more about how getting any team of more than a few people to do anything at all together means getting them all on the same page. And simplicity increases the likelihood that everyone will have the same take-aways, and so have the same goal.
Two motivated intelligent individuals have some decently high chance of miscommunicating about meaningful topics — increase the number to 20 and now you‘re almost guaranteed it. Put it in a presentation where everyone’s only half listening and things are even worse.
Relatedly, Bill Gates’ article wasn’t that bad. Sure, there’s some inaccuracies if you’re reading it strictly. But it’s not meant to be read strictly. It’s basically marketing material aimed at a very large crowd, which, as discussed above, requires using phrasing that gets the point across, not phrasing that is scientifically accurate when dissected.
The whole point of capitalism is that the people who have and direct money are the ones who can make good decisions about how it should be used. When you see firsthand that high-level decision-making is a farce, where does that leave you?
Is a farce compared to what? It seems like you’re comparing capitalism to some ideal that has never actually been realized. And you can’t actually know if your ideal is feasible or even better in practice unless it’s been tried.
Scott Alexander posted this last month, arguing that building more in an area doesn't necessarily decrease local prices because it can cause more people to move in.
I see 3 levels of argument here, based on 1st, 2nd, and 3rd-order effects:
Position (3) has long been my view, and I thought I'd write a post explaining it a bit.
The problem in America isn't a lack of aggregate housing, it's houses not being where people want to live. Building more in those areas might seem like an obvious solution, but it wrongly assumes "where people want to live" is constant. If we instead consider that it could change, we need to consider what makes people move from an area with cheap housing to an area where it's expensive.
You can just ask people that, and they'll tell you: jobs. OK, so why are there better jobs in the expensive areas?
If you ask an economist, they'll probably say something about improved economic efficiency from people being closer together. I don't buy it, because it contradicts what I observe directly:
Yes, people in NYC and Silicon Valley get paid more on average, but I reject the assertion that wages reflect productivity or competence. If wages were high simply because aggregation improved efficiency, then we'd see a stronger correlation between density and wages, but the correlation of wages with housing prices and with wealth is stronger. In my experience and the experience of people I know, the dominant factor is how close you are to money. Wages in NYC are high because there are wealthy investors and corporate executives there.
Why, then, are those rich people in NYC? Because:
In this model, building more housing in Silicon Valley or NYC just leads to more competition for about the same total income from "good jobs", with that number determined by the amount of money there. That makes things better for rich people buying luxury services in expensive cities, and worse for other people. If you make housing cheap enough for many poor people to move in, the rich people might even leave because of that, decreasing the number of good jobs.
The solution, then, is not to build more in high-demand areas - it's to force demand to be spread out more.