Capitalism incentivizes risk taking because the payoff is enormous - the most successful risk takers get to own the world 50 years later.

The problem: there's a second phase 50 years later, where the risk takers from 50 years ago own the world and do their best to prevent further rewards flowing to new risktakers. We are in that phase now.

The other problem: when the reward is so great, you do everything to get ahead, even illegal things, because the expectation value (winning*P(winning) + prison*P(caught)) is still positive.

>It's up to individuals to take advantage of the opportunity, or not.

The problem is that after decades monopolies consolidated and you have massive offshoring of labor to cheap countries and offshoring of profits to tax havens, there's not much opportunities the working class individuals can take, as all the opportunities are now geared towards the asset owning rent seeking class.