A thing I believe with medium confidence: One reason many institutions today are weaker than counterparts were generations ago was that allocation of smart people got more efficient for certain definitions of efficient, and institutions no longer benefit from so much free lunch.
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This rings true to me! A guess at why: Increase in opportunity means that we have less lock-in (geographic, cultural, or otherwise), so people can defect more easily, turning more situations into Prisoner's Dilemmas
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It's not obvious to me that we're not in Cooperate/Cooperate looking at Defect/Defect as the good old days.
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So if I get it, you’re saying that Catholic Church benefited from ample talent pool because they basically had monopoly on universities and knowledge, but now that people are free to go other places, they’d rather go there than the Church, so the Church suffers.
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That's directionally what I'm saying, but its stronger than "The Church had a good talent pool" (which is likely still true, approximately).
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I am pretty sure there's some amount of truth to this. That said, I think we should be cautious for two reasons: (1) the returns in the field are *somewhat* endogenous (maybe urban construction would be much more interesting to those people if it weren't so inhibited!).
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(2) When spending time with people in the relevant domains, am often struck (in a positive way) by their quality. Larger bureaucratic/institutional dynamics seem to be significant forces.
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@zephoria made this point very well 10 years ago about a lot of work that's stereotypically been heavily gendered https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/10/19/teaching_nursin.html … -
Specifically, we have historically gotten away with underpaying nurses and teachers because brilliant women were de facto forced to go into these professions
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Also a lot of rural areas benefited a great deal before people could easily leave for better opportunities.
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Years ago, I heard a less generalized version of this theory used to explain the decline of the Mafia in the US. As discrimination against Italian immigrants waned, allowing them into better and better jobs, the mob lost its most reliable source of sharp minds.
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