Hard agree. It’s ironic that it took hundreds of years to get people to accept the unintuitive positive-sum-ness of liberalism, libertarianism, and trade. But now we might have to convince everyone that those seemingly-robust effects are likely to go away, and that governments and markets are going to be unintuitively harsh.
There are several important “happy accidents” that allowed almost everyone to thrive under liberalism, that are likely to go away: - Not usually enough variation in ability to allow sheer domination (though this is not surprising, due to selection—everyone who was completely dominated is mostly not around anymore). - Predictable death from old age as a leveler preventing power lock-in. - Sexual reproduction (and deleterious effects of inbreeding) giving gains to intermixing beyond family units, and reducing the all-or-nothing stakes of competition. - Not usually enough variation in reproductive rates to pin us to Malthusian equilibria.
Hard agree. It’s ironic that it took hundreds of years to get people to accept the unintuitive positive-sum-ness of liberalism, libertarianism, and trade. But now we might have to convince everyone that those seemingly-robust effects are likely to go away, and that governments and markets are going to be unintuitively harsh.
There are several important “happy accidents” that allowed almost everyone to thrive under liberalism, that are likely to go away:
- Not usually enough variation in ability to allow sheer domination (though this is not surprising, due to selection—everyone who was completely dominated is mostly not around anymore).
- Predictable death from old age as a leveler preventing power lock-in.
- Sexual reproduction (and deleterious effects of inbreeding) giving gains to intermixing beyond family units, and reducing the all-or-nothing stakes of competition.
- Not usually enough variation in reproductive rates to pin us to Malthusian equilibria.