Companies don’t really need non-competes anymore. Some companies take an extremely broad interpretation of IP confidentiality, where they consider doing any work in the industry during your lifetime an inevitable confidentiality violation. They argue it would be impossible for you to work elsewhere in this industry during your entire career without violating confidentiality with the technical and business instincts you bring to that domain. It doesn’t require conscious violation on your part (they argue).
So beware and read your employment agreement carefully.
More here https://www.promarket.org/2024/02/08/confidentiality-agreeme...
And this is the insane legal doctrine behind this
I know of several cases where lawyers said "don't bother arguing with them about clause X, just sign it and ignore it".
Seems like a lot of successful people in business know exactly how far they can step over the line without suffering serious consequences.
Looking at what the growth trajectories are of countries with high corruption, it’s not great, so our growth is probably still reduced by the corruption or lawlessness that still exists.
The alternative is something like oligarchs that extract wealth because of state granted monopolies, corporatism that strangles competition with anti competitive regulation, etc. The accumulation of wealth is all out of proportion and possibly not even correlated in those cases with the production of actual value.