I so absolutely love this article that I'll just leave it here for you to read and comment on it :).
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
There are so many good quotes there that I don't even know which one to pick to advertise/summarize this article, so I'll just pop a couple of random ones:
"Any human with above room temperature IQ can design a utopia. The reason our current system isn’t a utopia is that *it wasn’t designed by humans*. Just as you can look at an arid terrain and determine what shape a river will one day take by assuming water will obey gravity, so you can look at a civilization and determine what shape its institutions will one day take by assuming people will obey incentives."
"So we have all this amazing technological and cognitive energy, the brilliance of the human species, wasted on reciting the lines written by poorly evolved cellular receptors and blind economics, like gods being ordered around by a moron."
"A basic principle unites all of the multipolar traps above. In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse."
Jacek Złydach, http://temporal.pr0.pl/devblog | http://esejepg.pl | http://hackerspace-krk.pl TRC - Bringing you tomorrow's solutions yesterday.