Modern civilization traps us in collective action problems where everyone races to the bottom, and Scott Alexander's essay diagnoses this condition through the image of Moloch, the ancient god to whom children were sacrificed. Alexander, a psychiatrist who blogs under a pseudonym, draws on Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the logic of game theory to explain why systems produce outcomes nobody wants. Competition forces participants to sacrifice values for survival: companies that care about workers lose to those that exploit them; nations that educate citizens lose to those that conscript them; scientists who replicate studies lose to those who publish fast. The essay became influential in rationalist and effective altruist communities, providing a vocabulary for discussing systemic problems that cannot be solved by individual choice. Alexander examines various domains where Moloch operates, from capitalism to democracy to education, showing how optimization for measurable goals destroys unmeasured values. He considers possible escapes: coordination, monopoly, explicit value optimization, or technologies that might make coordination easier. The essay is long and discursive, written in Alexander's characteristic style of systematic examination punctuated by jokes. Readers interested in why things seem to keep getting worse despite everyone's best efforts will find Alexander's framework clarifying, even if his proposed solutions remain speculative.