There is no &quot;the world&quot;. There are only people making choices, often on the basis of a default morality they&#x27;ve never thought about.<p>The kinds of failures you&#x27;re describing are exactly what you get when the default morality is &quot;Make as much money as possible&quot;.<p>You can say it&#x27;s currently maladapted to expect more, and that&#x27;s possibly true.<p>That doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s an ideal situation, or a praise-worthy one. If the talents of smart people are consistently underutilised, that&#x27;s a social problem and not just a series of unrelated individual failures.