I think one additional area you can plug in here is regulation and federal business/commercial law as well. When that is done well it really should reduce coordination problems and relax constraints.
However, I thin one can says relaxing the coordination constraints is (probably) a necessary condition for increasing rewards at the object/skill level it doesn’t seem to be a sufficient condition.
Still, as ALexei says, I do like you posts and make an effort to pay attention when I see one posted.
Good points. Personal to Prison Gangs makes a similar point about regulation, along with several other phenomena—litigation, credentialism, tribalism, etc. Based on the model in the OP, all of these are increasing over time because they solve coordination problems more scalably than old systems (e.g. personal reputation).
With regards to coordination vs object-level skills, I think a decent approximation is that object-level skills usually need to be satisficed—one needs to produce a good-enough product/service. After that, it’s mainly about coordination: finding the people who already need the good-enough product you have. To put it differently, decreasing marginal returns usually seem to kick in much earlier in object-level investments than in coordination investments.
More generally, would it be reasonable to say that legibility relaxes coordination constraints? That feels like it helps crystallise something I’ve been mulling over.
If you have a map of a city, you don’t need to find someone who knows the city to navigate it. If you have accurate birth and death records for a country, you don’t need to talk to local leaders to find out things like “how many people are avoiding taxes” or “how many people are dying of malaria”. If you know exactly what quality of wood a forest is going to produce, you don’t need to talk to all of the forest managers to find out which one is most suitable as a supplier.
The thought about the margins for object level and coordination level seems right. Perhaps another aspect to consider in that context is sources of increasing returns. The object level seems much more like the internal economies of scale. The coordination space seem much more like Smithian external economies/network type effects (which suggests my initial view was in error).
I think one additional area you can plug in here is regulation and federal business/commercial law as well. When that is done well it really should reduce coordination problems and relax constraints.
However, I thin one can says relaxing the coordination constraints is (probably) a necessary condition for increasing rewards at the object/skill level it doesn’t seem to be a sufficient condition.
Still, as ALexei says, I do like you posts and make an effort to pay attention when I see one posted.
Good points. Personal to Prison Gangs makes a similar point about regulation, along with several other phenomena—litigation, credentialism, tribalism, etc. Based on the model in the OP, all of these are increasing over time because they solve coordination problems more scalably than old systems (e.g. personal reputation).
With regards to coordination vs object-level skills, I think a decent approximation is that object-level skills usually need to be satisficed—one needs to produce a good-enough product/service. After that, it’s mainly about coordination: finding the people who already need the good-enough product you have. To put it differently, decreasing marginal returns usually seem to kick in much earlier in object-level investments than in coordination investments.
More generally, would it be reasonable to say that legibility relaxes coordination constraints? That feels like it helps crystallise something I’ve been mulling over.
If you have a map of a city, you don’t need to find someone who knows the city to navigate it. If you have accurate birth and death records for a country, you don’t need to talk to local leaders to find out things like “how many people are avoiding taxes” or “how many people are dying of malaria”. If you know exactly what quality of wood a forest is going to produce, you don’t need to talk to all of the forest managers to find out which one is most suitable as a supplier.
Interesting point. Rings true, though I’ll have to mull it over a bit. Certainly important-if-true.
The thought about the margins for object level and coordination level seems right. Perhaps another aspect to consider in that context is sources of increasing returns. The object level seems much more like the internal economies of scale. The coordination space seem much more like Smithian external economies/network type effects (which suggests my initial view was in error).