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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Swords are a fun, evocative example: I bet the real price of one sword serviceable for betting your life on is less than it than it was in 1500 but that if one needed ten thousand swords in six weeks that would be *barely* within the capabilities of the United States government.
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(This assumes that the US government can't source them from a factory in China; it reads to me as trivially possible if you let the US do that.)
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Preferences might lead to less of a thing happening but shouldn't create massive inefficiency in that thing happening when someone chooses to do it, no? I mean, swords are cheap today
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I think this is the counterintuitive thing: you're not detecting inefficiency in the costs of things done today. You're detecting the market measurement of opportunity costs and/or one's unwillingness to bear them sufficiently to enable the optimal path.
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