A lot of it is slow realisation that this was always the "end game" of capitalism. Beware Marxist terms, but then he kinda coined the "capitalism" term too! Big simplifications ahead.
Capitalist is an entity who makes money because they own capital. Any actually productive activity (like investments into products/factories/people/etc) are secondary to extracting rent from owning the capital.
Now, for various reasons, few different things dominated over economy in the past:
1) Rate of return on investment for actual production, investment, etc was bigger than for rent extraction. Some of this was due to wars shaking things up, some of it was due to non-availability of (2)
2) Ability to grow capital purely by speculation was limited by physical & legal issues. This is where financial industry/engineering comes in - you can spend all your efforts on pure speculation, do corporate raiding etc. and be shielded from consequences. Same with earning money just by moving money around exploiting sub-second price differences.
3) (2) was less acceptable in the past - but became very much so in the present, even if there's constant grumbling about Wall Street - hell, the amount of people who claim that "maximizing shareholder value" is an actual law you're obligated to follow should be good point about it.
4) Corporate entities are a lot like paperclip optimizers - individuals in them can be individually moral and the corporate entity can still be an amoral profit chaser, especially in face of external stockholders. However, in the past, they faced different limits (legal & physical), different stockholders (less volatility and short-term juggling), and different social pressures.
All of the above combines with increased disconnect in many countries between different social groups and people starting to think that maybe, maybe, there's something weird. Then they look into how some people have been pointing that this is the "pure capitalism", maybe started calling it "late stage capitalism" to compare with more encumbered earlier forms, etc.
Exactly -> " Corporate entities are a lot like paperclip optimizers "
We are so scared of AI paperclip optimizers, but don't see that humans are machine s that optimize to have as much sex and food as possible.
Our society is optimizing for producing Doritos and Taco Bells and McDonalds and Porn.
Wasn't there a George Carlin bit about men only went to the moon so they could brag and get laid? All our better 'accomplishment' can be reduced to sex. Art, Music, Writing, is sex.
And, Capitalism just smooths the way to the lowest common denominator.
Unless people wake up and put limits on it, like a regulator on an engine so it doesn't blow up.
> Beware Marxist terms, but then he kinda coined the "capitalism" term too!
The term "capitalism" (kapitalismus) does not appear even once in the entire corpus of Marx's writings.
'Kapitalismus' first appeared as a term arrayed against socialism in Werner Sombart's 1902 book Der moderne Kapitalismus. It was only after this book that the term capitalism was incorporated bit-by-bit into Marxist theorizing.
'Capitalism' didn't appear in political science dictionaries/glossaries until after World War I, and didn't appear in the Encyclopedia Britannica until 1926.
The first use in English is from 1854, nine years before Sombart's birth, with use (as "private capitalism") in teaching and disputing about economy in USA since 1863 by Carl Adolph Douai.
"Capitalism" in the modern sense is apparently attributed to Louis Blanc (1850) and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1861, explicitly calls out owners of capital being dissociated from actually working it). As a word with way less scientific rigour than some of the stricter mathematical sciences, the exact way of using it also has considerable variation due to differences in languages.
Marx used "capital" and "capitalist", which are older terms. "Capitalism" as a term evolved from the same use that Marx learnt from, with earliest uses of "capitalists" being associated with 1633.
Capitalist is an entity who makes money because they own capital. Any actually productive activity (like investments into products/factories/people/etc) are secondary to extracting rent from owning the capital.
Now, for various reasons, few different things dominated over economy in the past:
1) Rate of return on investment for actual production, investment, etc was bigger than for rent extraction. Some of this was due to wars shaking things up, some of it was due to non-availability of (2)
2) Ability to grow capital purely by speculation was limited by physical & legal issues. This is where financial industry/engineering comes in - you can spend all your efforts on pure speculation, do corporate raiding etc. and be shielded from consequences. Same with earning money just by moving money around exploiting sub-second price differences.
3) (2) was less acceptable in the past - but became very much so in the present, even if there's constant grumbling about Wall Street - hell, the amount of people who claim that "maximizing shareholder value" is an actual law you're obligated to follow should be good point about it.
4) Corporate entities are a lot like paperclip optimizers - individuals in them can be individually moral and the corporate entity can still be an amoral profit chaser, especially in face of external stockholders. However, in the past, they faced different limits (legal & physical), different stockholders (less volatility and short-term juggling), and different social pressures.
All of the above combines with increased disconnect in many countries between different social groups and people starting to think that maybe, maybe, there's something weird. Then they look into how some people have been pointing that this is the "pure capitalism", maybe started calling it "late stage capitalism" to compare with more encumbered earlier forms, etc.