Business optimization involves both cost control and value creation. Without sweeping change, the current obsession with the former and comparative abandonment of the latter will “optimize” us right out of being a functional civilization. Finance ultimately reduces to accounting, and if it does not perform as a service to those who are pioneering functional solutions within their individual areas of expertise, then it operates as a tax that progressively corners the world’s wealth for the elite at the cost of the human potential and social wellbeing otherwise promised by the Enlightenment.