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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I don't know what to do with this belief, because on the one hand I rather like many institutions, but I don't particularly think they have a right to nosh on peoples' time and talents, and I think it feels unlikely that this genie goes back in the bottle.
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"Can you give me an example?" The Catholic Church for much of recorded history, teaching as a profession prior to women having routine access to professional employment, the United States federal government between about 1920 and about 1960, etc.
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Replying to @patio11
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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Replying to @devonzuegel
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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Replying to @patio11 @devonzuegel
Concrete (ba dum bum) example: I think we'd mutually agree that we live in a society which has difficulty producing bridges relative to the same society generations ago. One could possibly diagnose this as "We have lost the art of collaborating to build bridges."
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Replying to @patio11 @devonzuegel
I think my thoughts are leading me to the sounds-controversial-but-not-intrinsically-implausible conclusion that bridges are like swords: allocating productive capacity to them is evidence that one's society is poor, and what reads like difficulty is in fact just preferences.
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Replying to @patio11 @devonzuegel
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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Replying to @patio11 @devonzuegel
Not sure. Doubt slave labor makes good swords if you make them by hand. Could probably machine-produce them, but I suspect it would take time to do the sword engineering and turn it into a good mold or whatever.
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