Not sure if this captures Benquo’s main intended point, but my takeaway here is something like: There are multiple possible cultures / equilibria / ways of organizing an economy, and we’re stuck in one with high marketing / artificial scarcity / state legibility / market transactions, and low autonomy / household activities / leisure, in large part due to cultural evolution selecting for the ability of a society to mobilize for war (ETA: not sure if this is explicit in Ben’s post, but also selecting for the ability of a society in peace time to keep up with scientific/technological races needed to win future wars).
I think Benquo would go further and say that due to this selection pressure, the current culture isn’t optimized for what we actually want, so we should try to change it or build a new one. I’m a lot less sure of this (has the nature of international relations changed so much that it’s safe to throw away past optimizations?), and also on the question of which directions are good and feasible to push on (given that we’re in a local optimum of some sort and things are very complex and interconnected).
Not sure if this captures Benquo’s main intended point, but my takeaway here is something like: There are multiple possible cultures / equilibria / ways of organizing an economy, and we’re stuck in one with high marketing / artificial scarcity / state legibility / market transactions, and low autonomy / household activities / leisure, in large part due to cultural evolution selecting for the ability of a society to mobilize for war (ETA: not sure if this is explicit in Ben’s post, but also selecting for the ability of a society in peace time to keep up with scientific/technological races needed to win future wars).
I think Benquo would go further and say that due to this selection pressure, the current culture isn’t optimized for what we actually want, so we should try to change it or build a new one. I’m a lot less sure of this (has the nature of international relations changed so much that it’s safe to throw away past optimizations?), and also on the question of which directions are good and feasible to push on (given that we’re in a local optimum of some sort and things are very complex and interconnected).
The first paragraph seems like a fair summary, and I agree with your second paragraph’s description of why doing anything about this is hard.
I also definitely forgot about the industrial policy point, thanks for bringing it up.