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
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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