I would be interested in a sketch of a situation which you think would output a different strategic equilibrium.
I don’t think I fully understand what you’re asking, but here’s a partial answer.
I think that the US North before the Civil War but decreasingly between then and WWII had a different equilibrium, in which people could viably just be landholders who improved their lot through, well, improving their lot. The Puritan states especially tended towards this. Merchants and artisans were also a thing, but a single whaling expedition was kind of a big venture compared with most things, and most business didn’t occur at scale. The rise of major government expenditures (direct wartime expenses and indirect mobilization-related ones like railroads) changed that, as did the central controls put in place between the World Wars to manage the disruptions this caused, which naturally were designed to accommodate powerful incumbent stakeholders.
If you read accounts of economic life from that time, it really doesn’t look like “competent people are rare, and the world is big,” it looks like “ultra-competent people are gold, most people are good enough at something to get by, there are lots of different types of people with their own weirdness going on, and the world is very messy and diverse.” Moby Dick definitely gives me this sense.
I’m very torn. I fully agree with Raemon’s concerns, and might even go further: competent people are rare, and fully goal-aligned people are nonexistent. Looking at accounts from previous times is an existence proof of different equilibria, but does not imply that they’re available today.
And if you look closer, those previous equilibria were missing some features that we hold dear today, such as fairly long periods at the beginning and end of life where economic production isn’t a driving need, some amount of respect for people very different from ourselves, and a knowledge that the current equilibrium isn’t permanent.
The part I’m torn on is that I deeply support experimenting and thinking on these topics, and I very much hope that my predictions are incorrect. This is a case where investing mental energy on a low-probability high-payoff topic seems justified.
I don’t think I fully understand what you’re asking, but here’s a partial answer.
I think that the US North before the Civil War but decreasingly between then and WWII had a different equilibrium, in which people could viably just be landholders who improved their lot through, well, improving their lot. The Puritan states especially tended towards this. Merchants and artisans were also a thing, but a single whaling expedition was kind of a big venture compared with most things, and most business didn’t occur at scale. The rise of major government expenditures (direct wartime expenses and indirect mobilization-related ones like railroads) changed that, as did the central controls put in place between the World Wars to manage the disruptions this caused, which naturally were designed to accommodate powerful incumbent stakeholders.
If you read accounts of economic life from that time, it really doesn’t look like “competent people are rare, and the world is big,” it looks like “ultra-competent people are gold, most people are good enough at something to get by, there are lots of different types of people with their own weirdness going on, and the world is very messy and diverse.” Moby Dick definitely gives me this sense.
I’m very torn. I fully agree with Raemon’s concerns, and might even go further: competent people are rare, and fully goal-aligned people are nonexistent. Looking at accounts from previous times is an existence proof of different equilibria, but does not imply that they’re available today.
And if you look closer, those previous equilibria were missing some features that we hold dear today, such as fairly long periods at the beginning and end of life where economic production isn’t a driving need, some amount of respect for people very different from ourselves, and a knowledge that the current equilibrium isn’t permanent.
The part I’m torn on is that I deeply support experimenting and thinking on these topics, and I very much hope that my predictions are incorrect. This is a case where investing mental energy on a low-probability high-payoff topic seems justified.