One of the things I've come to believe after being around for a while and watching a lot of humans is that we are much more at the mercy of our environment and the forces therein than we think. Individual humans are very very small, and their decisions are largely driven by the socioeconomic context they inhabit. Incentives matter a lot.

Today there is effectively a Cold War between the US, China, and to some extent other nations and nation-blocs over who can print the most money to hep up their economy the most to generate the most GDP growth. All those metrics are financial in nature. You get what you measure. You also get ghost cities (China), crazy asset bubbles (America), predatory leveraged capital (everywhere), and a financial economy increasingly disconnected from value creation, but those things are not being measured so nobody (in the political class) cares.

This creates an incentive structure best parodied in the Silicon Valley TV series: your company's product is not its product. Your company's product is its stock. The goal is to soak up as much of that financial capital as possible, because that's where the money is.