So… If Capitalism Is “Killing People,” It Is Doing It Selectively

Estimated Read Time: 6 minutes

On the surface, the data is awkward for the “capitalism just kills people” story:

• More people are alive.

• People live longer, on average.

• Extreme poverty has fallen sharply compared to even 50 years ago.

If capitalism were simply a death machine, you would expect the opposite.

But that does not let capitalism off the hook. It just forces a more precise diagnosis.

Capitalism is very good at:

• Scaling things that make money, whether they are good for us or not

• Ignoring harms that do not show up on a profit and loss statement

• Concentrating power in the hands of people who already own assets

So instead of asking:

“Does capitalism kill people, yes or no?”

A better frame is:

“Which kinds of people does capitalism protect, which does it sacrifice, and through which mechanisms?”

Let us look at a few of those mechanisms.

Mechanisms Where Capitalism Clearly Saves Lives

It is easy to forget how brutal pre industrial life was.

Capitalism; messy, uneven, and often cruel, did help build:

1. Productive economies

Competitive markets and profit motives pushed:

• mechanization of agriculture, which reduced famines

• mass production, which made goods and medicines cheaper

• logistics networks, which move food and drugs where they are needed

  
  

You do not have to romanticize factory work to admit that fewer people starve when there is surplus food and functioning markets.

2. Medical innovation at scale

Pharmaceutical and medical technology companies are not charities. They invest billions because there is a return.

The upside:

• vaccines

• antibiotics

• insulin, HIV medications, cancer treatments

• surgical tools, imaging, intensive care technology

These are heavily capital intensive and intellectual property protected, which are very capitalist structures, and yet they have saved tens of millions of lives.

3. Infrastructure and public health

Even when states pay for the roads, power plants, and hospitals, they often:

• tax profits from capitalist firms

• contract those same firms to build and maintain infrastructure

  
  

The system is uneven and often wasteful, but the net effect on survival has been strongly positive compared to pre industrial baselines.

Mechanisms Where Capitalism Clearly Harms or Kills

Now the other side of the ledger.

1. Environmental externalities

Capitalist markets are terrible at pricing long term, diffuse harm.

So we get:

• air pollution that kills millions, especially in lower income countries

• heat waves and floods intensified by climate change

• food system shocks that push the poorest into hunger

  
  

The benefits of burning fossil fuels are privatized, in the form of profits, comfort, and GDP.

The costs are socialized, in the form of healthcare burdens, displacement, and disaster response.

2. Harmful but profitable industries

Where there is money to be made, you will see highly optimized machines selling:

• tobacco and vaping products

• ultra processed foods engineered for overconsumption

• opioids and other addictive substances

• predatory financial products

These business models do not just incidentally hurt people. In many cases, they rely on customers getting sick, addicted, or trapped.

3. Inequality and exclusion

The second curve, market value, grows dramatically faster than the first curve, human beings.

That gap shows up as:

• asset owners seeing their portfolios inflate

• non owners stuck with wage income and rising costs

• entire regions locked out of capital flows and basic infrastructure

Capitalism does not need everyone to thrive. It just needs enough workers, consumers, and stability to preserve investor returns.

Everyone else is optional.

4. Cycles, crises, and political fallout

Boom and bust cycles, such as 1929 or 2008, are not just numbers on a screen.

They translate into:

• lost jobs

• shredded social safety nets

• austerity

• political radicalization and, often, conflict

People do die from these downstream effects. Just not in a way that shows up as a single neat “cause of death” in a medical chart.

The Real Question: What Kind of Capitalism Are We Running?

Given the two curves, it is hard to argue that capitalism, globally, is a pure net negative for human survival.

It is equally hard to argue that capitalism, as currently configured, does not:

• offload risk onto the poorest

• over reward asset owners

• under price long term planetary damage

• and, in the process, shorten lives for specific groups by country, class, race, disability status, and other lines

A more honest framing might be:

Capitalism is a powerful engine for turning ideas and resources into goods, services, and longer lives, if you are inside the circle of protection. If you are outside that circle, capitalism is completely willing to let you die quietly, as long as the index stays green.

So the design question becomes:

• Where do we draw that circle?

• Who gets included?

• What constraints do we place on profit seeking?

What a “Less Deadly” Capitalism Could Look Like

If we treat capitalism as infrastructure, not as a religion, then it is tunable.

Some design levers:

1. Price the real harms.

   • Carbon pricing.

   • Strong pollution standards.

   • Liability regimes that actually bite when firms externalize risk.

     
     

2. Protect the floor.

   • Universal access to primary healthcare and vaccines.

   • Strong food and housing security nets.

   • Labor protections that prevent the worst forms of exploitation.

     
     

3. Limit extraction from the vulnerable.

   • Regulations on predatory lending, health harming products, and algorithmic targeting.

   • Guardrails on how platforms monetize attention and addictive behavior.

     
     

4. Rebalance power.

   • Tax regimes that actually touch extreme wealth, not just wages.

   • Public investment in neglected regions and communities.

   • Ownership structures that give workers and communities a real stake.

     
     

None of this abolishes capitalism. It simply moves the line on who is protected and who is left to absorb the fallout.

Bringing It Back to You and Your Organization

If you are reading this as a founder, investor, or executive, you are not designing a new global economic system.

You are designing a local subsystem: your company, your product, your portfolio, your policies.

A few questions you can actually act on:

• Who benefits from our growth, in concrete terms?

• Whose risks are we quietly externalizing? for example to gig workers, to communities, to the environment

• If our business scaled 10x, who would be better off, and who would be worse off?

• What would it cost to redesign our model so that we are not trading off someone else’s health or safety for our margin?

  
  

Those are not purely moral questions. They are also risk management questions:

• reputational risk

• regulatory risk

• climate and supply chain risk

• talent risk, since smart people increasingly do not want to work for companies that openly harm others

A capitalism that keeps more people alive, for longer, with more dignity is not just ethically preferable. It is more resilient.

If You Want Help Thinking This Through

This is the kind of problem I work on with clients: taking abstract questions like “Is our business model extractive?” and turning them into concrete:

• product decisions

• pricing and incentive structures

• impact and risk dashboards

• governance and guardrails

  
  

If you are wrestling with where your company sits on these two curves, and what to do about it.

Reach out at Numbers & Letters Advisory and let us map it out together.

Disclaimer/Full Disclosure (You made it!): This blog post was generated with the assistance of AI, with N&L human oversight ensuring accuracy and insight. The thoughts and opinions expressed are our own.