Anti-waste: toward a more intelligent measure of prosperity

May 15. 2026

Marco Vitale, the Italian economist, industrial strategist and advisor to generations of entrepreneurs, has spent decades arguing that capitalism survives only when it preserves a civic dimension. Known in Italy for his writing on democratic capitalism and the social responsibility of enterprise, Vitale belongs to a tradition of European economic thought that sees business not merely as a mechanism for profit, but as a cultural institution embedded within society.

Reflecting on Peter Drucker’s vision of management, Vitale warned that competence alone would no longer be sufficient for leadership. The consequences of economic decisions had become too significant for business to remain morally neutral. Responsibility, therefore, would become inseparable from power.

Today, that observation feels less philosophical than structural.

The dominant economic model of the last decades has been extraordinarily effective at generating wealth, efficiency, and scale. Yet beneath this acceleration lies another phenomenon: the systematic monetisation of fragmentation.

From speculative real estate markets that transform housing into abstract financial instruments to hyper-securitised systems where value circulates faster than meaning, contemporary capitalism increasingly extracts from distance rather than proximity. Entire industries have been built around monetising fragmentation, abstraction and isolation because capital often becomes more profitable the further it moves from lived human reality. The further capital moves from lived human reality, the more profitable it often becomes.

Vitale describes the alternative as a form of democratic capitalism rooted not in predation, but in civility.

A capitalism capable of recognising that markets cannot survive indefinitely if societies themselves begin to fracture.

The issue is not capitalism versus anti-capitalism. It is the difference between an extractive capitalism that isolates value and a participatory capitalism that distributes it more intelligently across society.

For years, economic growth has been measured primarily through expansion: more assets, more ownership, more optimisation, more leverage. But ownership itself is beginning to change cultural meaning.

The next economy may not belong to those who accumulate the most resources, but to those who orchestrate them most intelligently.

Across mobility, hospitality, housing, energy, logistics, and even luxury, a different logic is quietly emerging: access over excess, circulation over accumulation, stewardship over extraction.

The implications are profound because they force a reconsideration of what efficiency actually means. A building left empty while cities experience housing shortages no longer appears sophisticated, but structurally inefficient. A vehicle used for only a fraction of the day reflects not only environmental excess but economic underperformance. Even the partially occupied office tower has become a symbol of a broader systemic imbalance in which societies have been organised around isolated ownership rather than shared optimisation.

The future of prosperity may therefore depend less on producing endlessly new resources and more on coordinating existing ones with greater intelligence and social coherence.

This shift is not ideological. It is increasingly operational, economic and cultural at the same time.

The age of over-securitisation created enormous abstraction between capital and reality. Financial systems became increasingly detached from physical communities, local economies, and civic continuity. Value was packaged, fragmented, traded, leveraged, and redistributed globally, often without any relationship to the human environments from which it originated.

The result is visible everywhere: cities hollowed out by speculative investment, infrastructure shaped by short-term returns, and populations that increasingly experience economic systems as external forces rather than collective frameworks.

Vitale writes that contemporary fractures are simultaneously strategic, organisational, and civilisational.

That distinction matters. Because what is collapsing is not only economic balance, but social reciprocity itself.

The great paradox of modern markets is that hyper-individualism eventually becomes economically inefficient. As trust weakens, transaction costs rise and institutions become more fragile. When citizens no longer recognise themselves within economic systems, volatility stops being cyclical and begins to feel permanent.

Beyond a certain threshold, disconnection stops being profitable because every fragmented system eventually absorbs the cost of its own fragmentation.

This is why some of the most forward-thinking companies are no longer focused exclusively on scale, but on systems integration through shared infrastructures, circular economies, resource pooling, distributed energy networks, collaborative logistics and adaptive urbanism. Increasingly, intelligence is being measured not by how aggressively societies compete for resources, but by how elegantly they coordinate and share them.

Luxury is also beginning to evolve under this pressure.

The old model of status built around visible excess increasingly feels culturally exhausted. Scarcity alone is no longer sophisticated if it exists alongside waste, exclusion, or social deterioration.

A new form of prestige is emerging around precision, restraint, longevity and collective intelligence.

The truly modern institution may not be the one that accumulates the most, but the one capable of generating the highest level of trust while using the least amount of unnecessary extraction.

This transformation ultimately redefines value itself. Efficiency can no longer mean maximising output at any social cost because genuinely advanced economies also depend on relational efficiency: reducing waste, reducing exclusion and reducing the friction between private success and

In this sense, democratic capitalism is not nostalgic moderation; it is systemic evolution.

An attempt to move beyond an economy organised around permanent competition toward one organised around coordinated resilience.

Vitale ultimately frames the choice clearly: either societies continue down the path of incivility and predatory concentration, or they rebuild capitalism around civic responsibility and collective durability.

The future may depend on understanding a simple reality: a civilisation cannot indefinitely capitalise disconnection.

The encouraging sign is that many institutions, cities and businesses are already beginning to move in another direction. Shared mobility, adaptive reuse, distributed energy systems, circular production models and cooperative urban infrastructures all point toward an economy organised less around isolated ownership and more around intelligent participation.

Perhaps the next era of prosperity will not be defined by how aggressively societies extract value from systems, but by how elegantly they learn to coordinate and share them.

Not as an act of sacrifice, but as a more advanced form of economic intelligence.

CPM