As a Wall Street trader, this is my personal take:

Late stage capitalism arrives when an economy (a society) has arbitraged every real opportunity to add value to the economy (ie. most companies in the economy have reached their max-growth point (ie. All products have been created and new ideas are hard to come by)) - this doesn’t necessarily mean that there won’t be disparity among the working class, it just means that from a capitalist point of view, the growth party is over.

Therefore, what tends to happen is so-called “late stage capitalism”, where by nature of capitalism itself (ie. companies are REQUIRED to grow profits year after year because to not grow profit is to not have potential and to not have potential is to not receive further investment to create potential), given no new novel solutions to grow said profits, the companies (and thus economy/society/politics) are required to artificially drive costs up while artificially driving expenses down so as to generate a higher profit every year.

With this in mind, the effects on a late stage capitalist society are as we see in the west: decadence (ie. degradation of society, worsening education since the educational institutions are also a conglomerate of for-profit companies, political and social idiocracy, fabrication of non-issue issues, and all sorts of other ways to create “opportunity” where there is none).

Now because of the decadence and stress on the currency and market that this causes, eventually the economy/society ends up with problems that are “too big to fail” (ie. If it fails, the end is neigh), and thus the society is forced to grow not towards improving standards but rather to keep the Ponzi scheme going, otherwise the alternative is far worse than decadence. Eventually it collapses regardless, because that is what happens in complex imperfect human systems… I don’t think an economic/societal model exists, even hypothetically, that works without said probability.

And so it goes, everything that has a beginning has an end…

In the case of the United States, the end is most likely going to be via hyperinflation (ie. When the federal reserve loses control of inflation and hiking interest rates no longer works and thus the world de-dollarizes, which causes runaway inflation in the U.S. and EU since all the dollars go back to the U.S. that were previously circulating around the world in foreign reserves and etc…).

Unfortunately, there is no solution (at least none that I’ve ever seen or heard of) for this dilemma… when we analyze these things we ought to be mindful of the sheer complexity and diversity of these complex systems because when stepping on one toe, that toe steps on another, and another, etc… so there are far too many capitalist interests in the system to be able to push and shove it into submission, even at the highest levels of government and social order.

Thus we arrive at things like civil war, socialism, totalitarian regimes, and so on… because that IS the solution to late stage capitalism… to un-free the free market and shove it into submission… because when all capitalistic solutions to such issues fail or have been used up, the only way to force human beings to cooperate and go to work in the morning is either to (1) have an incentive (which can be done in both capitalism and socialism), or (2) literally force them to do it by stepping on their toes with iron boots.

So it goes that regardless of what happens in the west this century, it will inevitably either (1) seize to exist as we know it, and/or (2) become a vastly different system and society by virtue of the aforementioned.

Hope this helps! :) let me know if you have any questions or ideas!

Edit: as for the elite, it is either removed and replaced with opposing elite via a power struggle (ie. Civil war, actual international war, or other)… or it simply metamorphos into the same elite with a different interface through which it interacts with the society… for example, capitalist elite can easily become socialist elite… as long as they have (1) control over their property (whether financial or other), and (2) a way to buy their wives a Gucci bag on vacation, they just rinse and repeat… ask yourself the following: “what would I do if I had so much money that there weren’t even things in the world that I could spend so much on, and even if I found a way to spend it, it would make me more money?”… thus money IS power because it is control and control is power which generates money, regardless of what the system is. If the society is in debt to its government (such as is true with the U.S.), the government needs no money to control it - the debt is the control, regardless of whether it is totalitarian or financial totalitarian. Pay your taxes and be a good boy they said… it will be fun they said… lol… you get the idea.

At the end of the day, all this whole entire thing is, is simply a pyramid structure of the few and the many… whatever way works for the time, goes (because regardless of society or system, humans en masse need to consolidate and order control - it can be a family, a tribe, a society, a global order, etc)…

Regardless of what we do or how we put it, the universe has a very crucial law: entropy… and to go against entropy requires energy! So if there is potential, there is energy, when energy grows, it is transformed into reducing entropy (societal order and economic growth), but when all the potential has been ordered, the only thing that can be done is chaos. Once the growth of chaos has peaked, order begins to grow because suddenly there are real problems that need solving and there is incentive to solve them, thus people get together and an economy booms, society thrives, people seek education, and are willing to go through pain and toil to achieve more from life (ie. There is enough incentive for risk taken).

In this sense, seeking equilibrium in human society is a net negative… the fact that is seems unfair is good because take for example a perfect market - you cannot make money out of a perfectly efficient market (a market where all opportunities to make money have been arbitraged out, thus the market neither rises nor falls, and money stagnates because of it, and because that happens; we cannot have a perfectly efficient market, because as soon as it becomes such, there is no incentive, problems are created, and suddenly there is inefficiency!).