For example I think many Muslim countries have a lot of success at preventing pornography
Citation needed.
My default assumption for any claims of that sort is “they had a lot of success at concealing the pornography that existed in such a way that officials can pretend it doesn’t exist”.
This was fun to read, but also a little awkward. This feels less like “The world if everyone was an economist” and more “The world if everyone agreed with Eliezer Yudkowsky about everything”.
Some thoughts:
I don’t care how strong your social norms are, you’re not enforcing that pornography ban. Forget computers, it’s unworkable as long as people have paper.
Same thing with sad people not reproducing. People would go “fuck social norms” and have kids anyway. People who respect the norms would be pushed out of the gene pool. I don’t see how you could enforce those norms without totalitarian violence.
I don’t see how you could have both a self-repairing culture of transparency and also a completely secret conspiracy that suppresses technological development (in a free market with its own evolutionary pressures) without anyone realizing it. The company that makes the fastest computers drives everyone else out of business. You can only stop Moore’s law if everyone coordinates to not build better computers, but that’s not subtle.
I’m not sure EY missed that (the guy is usually really good with this stuff), so maybe the joke is that an AGI already took over their world or something.