One of Fukuyama’s interesting insights is that democracy has always expanded via trickle-down empowerment, not bottom-up revolution… basically elites sorta defecting on other elites by empowering next ring of masses for temporary advantage but then they can’t take it back 🤔
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I’m wondering whether decentralization progresses via a similar ratchet… centralized things ceding ring after ring of coordination functions to decentralized things
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You can view this as the innovator's "trilemma": low-margin business lines are "given away" not just to improve average margins but to harm the competition
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Power is always conceded when elites play whatever game they play (not sure why democracy has to be an outlier?). They defect because otherwise they think they've lost, and making a deal with the lower rung then becomes a problem of complexity (ie. managing that new network).
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Sound a lot like North, Wallis & Weingast (Violence and Social Orders, 2009), who cite Fukuyama only once, on social capital. Was he earlier?
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