When the benefits of a society that's lead well bubble up to a small elite, why should anyone else give a shit about how well-optimized the operations of society are?
To put it more directly - why should someone on the floor staff of Wal-Mart care about how optimally Wal-Mart is ran? They get paid by the hour, they don't own any stock in the company - and if it collapses, they'd just find another crappy job in another crappy retailer that pays minimum wage.
It's also worth noting that a lot of the optimizations of society are directed at 'optimizing' the share of the pie that the small elite receives.
In a well-functioning society, they should care because taxation of the small elite disproportionately funds the social safety net that means that, even though they mop a Wal-Mart, they'll get chemotherapy if they have cancer, and won't immediately become homeless when Wal-Mart deploys a floor-mopping robot and lays them off.
We don't have that, or, we don't have all of that. But we could. And historically, simply confiscating the wealth of the elite, or just stacking their headless bodies in mass graves, doesn't do great things for the prosperity of the average citizen.
To put it more directly - why should someone on the floor staff of Wal-Mart care about how optimally Wal-Mart is ran? They get paid by the hour, they don't own any stock in the company - and if it collapses, they'd just find another crappy job in another crappy retailer that pays minimum wage.
It's also worth noting that a lot of the optimizations of society are directed at 'optimizing' the share of the pie that the small elite receives.