The issue is that as resource availability plots towards the corner of the graph, the potential actions become more and more constrained, and inherently, the benefits of being clever and brave are constrained with those limitations. Eventually you get down to the point of eating cockroaches because the option is death from starvation.

It’s certainly a matter of scale, but I think the point is that the scale isn’t linear, and that the benefits of strategic risk tolerance scale exponentially with resource abundance.

As with most things in life, the playing field isn’t level. I guess the real question here is should it be? To what extent does it benefit society at large to make it more level, and how much more level is optimal?