In the series, corporations get a bailout when things get bad, collude to make it worse with profits over people and then basically buy off world governments in a reverse bail out to take control of the system. With a “Corporate Congress” and all people having a “life debt”.
Oh, and the time travel aspect of it is pretty cool too.
The premise was that it was a gradual decline to that point though. There would have been millions of opportunities to right the ship up until that point. It’s optimistic that at some point, at SOME point, people will decide to do what the smartest people think. But the movie is pretty pessimistic that there was entire generations that didn’t ever do that even once.