Good read, thanks. We’re very poor at collective decision making. I don’t know if it’s structural, cultural, or both.
The argument I was trying to make is that we (in the US) have an economic and political system where decisions are made by the person/party with the most economic power. I shorthand by saying it's "by auction."
When you do that at a system-level you have a problem where the decision maker is making trade-off decisions for the system based on their best interests vs the system.
This problem happens in product/software companies at a different scale where orgs have different power and may influence a product in a way that fails the users and eventually isn't in best interests of the system.