An unavoidable feature of late stage capitalism is The Scam. Scams are not new, obviously, but they have become omnipresent in our lives and the economy.

In 2024, Facebook—one of those players in the AI scam bubble—estimated that 10% of its revenue came from selling ads to scammers for scams and banned goods (https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/).

Across the world, but especially in remote parts of Southeast Asia, there are entire cities that have cropped up, devoted entirely to scamming, populated mostly by enslaved people who were themselves scammed by fraudulent job offers and trafficked into scamming (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/02/scam-state-multi-billion-dollar-industry-south-east-asia).

Obviously, technological changes are at least partly to blame for this. The means of scamming—global telecommunications, the digitalization of services, a constantly-connected global population, the proliferation of AI slop—are cheaper and easier for scammers to access, and thus more lucrative.

But does technology alone explain why scamming is such a prevalent feature of the global economy, or why we are whipsawing from one speculative global asset bubble to the next so rapidly?

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I suspect that technological change alone can’t explain the simultaneous emergence in cities literally devoted to scamming in places like the Thai-Burna border and proliferation of scam asset bubbles in places like the US.

Instead, I’ll point to an intrinsic feature of capitalism: the tendency of the rate of profit to decline.

Capitalism is competitive. Capitalists cannot rest on their laurels, since competitors are always ready to snap up market share. So capitalists are compelled to constantly increase and intensify activities that can generate profits.

But profit is a signal to competitors that there is market share to be gobbled up—by selling a better product, or a cheaper product, or otherwise interfering with their competitors.

So profit in any competitive capitalist market should tend towards zero. If a capitalist is collecting income in excess of costs, some competitor is going to try to collect some of it instead. And a capitalist who fails to compete risks being driven out of business and losing their capital ownership, becoming—like the rest of us—a worker subject to the rule of and exploitation by capitalists.

Capitalists can, of course, try to ameliorate these effects of competition by trying to expand into new markets, or create new markets for new goods and services, or by squeezing their workers and suppliers, or using the extra-economic powers against their competitors.

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Or, capitalists can attempt to consolidate their control of markets by cooperating with, or even merging with, their competitors.

And this is precisely what we see in the actual economy, alongside the explosive growth of the scam economy: corporate consolidation.

> “We collect data on the size distribution of all U.S. corporations for 100 years. We document that corporate concentration (e.g., asset share or sales share of top businesses) has increased persistently over the past century. Rising concentration was stronger in manufacturing and mining before the 1970s, and stronger in services, retail, and wholesale after the 1970s.”

https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/100-years-of-rising-corporate-concentration/

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It’s a trope among capitalist ideologues that rising capitalist wealth does not make the poor poorer; rather, capitalists are increasing the overall amount of wealth available to be owned, making everyone better off, or at least no *worse* off.

But that’s not really true, because as the wealthiest among us continue to expand their ownership, they don’t merely accumulate dollars in accounts or material luxuries, but rather ownership of the assets that allow people to be productive in the first place. As the rich get richer, they not only own more stuff, but also the capacity to make more wealth.

Consider that, in 2020, billionaires increased their wealth by $3.9 trillion (https://www.businessinsider.com/billionaires-made-39-trillion-during-the-pandemic-coronavirus-vaccines-2021-1) while the rest of us became $3.7 trillion poorer (https://www.businessinsider.com/workers-lost-37-trillion-in-earnings-during-the-pandemic-2021-1).

This isn’t just a case of a bunch of people buying a bunch of stuff from those billionaires. Instead, those billionaires exploited our desperation not to sell us anything but to buy up all our assets in a fire sale, taking even more control of our productive capacity.

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The world’s wealthiest one percent now own more than the poorest 95% of us.

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-top-1-own-more-wealth-95-humanity-shadow-global-oligarchy-hangs-over-un

Just three investment firms are the largest shareholders in 40% of all publicly listed firms in the United States.

https://theconversation.com/these-three-firms-own-corporate-america-77072

Globally, our food, our media, our medicines—virtually every aspect of our lives—are controlled by an ever-smaller number of conglomerates.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/these-10-companies-control-everything-you-buy-a7400971.html

This kind of wealth inequality is not assailable through economic means. Once you are as wealthy as these people, you can never stop being wealthy. There is effectively no act of market competition someone could undertake to topple their status, no risk the wealthy could take that would cost them the status of being super-wealthy. Their wealth is self-reproducing (or, rather, we are compelled to constantly reproduce it for them).

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So if you are a small-time capitalist, or would like to become a capitalist, your opportunities to survive as a capitalist are small and becoming smaller.

Because even the most innovative or visionary capitalist can hope to aspire, at best, establishing some venture that will be bought up by one of these major firms, either to consolidate that firm’s control over the market or just to shut it down to eliminate the competition.

https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/do-companies-buy-competitors-in-order-to-shut-them-down

Capitalists do not only compete with the laboring class for control of the laboring class’ output; they also compete among each other for shares of control of that output. And, right now, the richest of the rich are winning that competition, accumulating not just wealth but also the chance at even trying to accumulate wealth in the future.

As the rich get richer, in other words, it’s harder for anyone else to get rich. Inequality diminishes social mobility, even among our wealthy elites:

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/10/13/the-great-gatsby-curve-among-americas-uber-rich/

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