Is the implication that as societies scale they become unsustainable because humans, with their mimetic tendencies, copy behaviors more often of the lucky than the skillful? It doesn’t seem to be that way in practice. It seems few people copy the people who’ve had the greatest
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The intuition I had (far from proven, just an hypothesis) was that “imitating the behavior of those on top of my mind”, *all other things equal*, tends to be a riskier strategy in a metropolis than in a village.
That feels true but maybe it’s not if the people on top originated from your village. Said another way, perhaps it’s not risky to attempt to be a billionaire in the United States. Cuba or North Korea may be a different matter.
