Capitalism leverages our species’ superpower: cooperation. In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari explains that unlike other species who can also cooperate (bees, apes, wolves), homo sapiens can cooperate at scale, “in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why sapiens rule the world.”1 Though our motivations may be selfish, the bounties of capitalism are the product of coordinated effort across time and space by thousands, even millions of people. In early capitalist societies, machines and factories allowed dozens, then hundreds of people to combine their efforts into one
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