Question: Have Moral Mazes been getting worse over time?
Could the growth of Moral Mazes be the cause of cost disease?
I was thinking about how I could answer this question. I think that the thing that I need is a good quantitative measure of how "mazy" an organization is.
I considered the metric of "how much output for each input", but 1) that metric is just cost disease itself, so it doesn't help us distinguish the mazy cause from other possible causes.
2) If you're good enough at rent seeking maybe you can get high revenue despite you poor production.
I claim that, if it matters for world history who wins WWII (as just one example), then the great man theory of history is straightforwardly correct.
Bismark and Hitler come to mind: if you substitute them with their counterparts from nearby worlds, the power balance of Europe, and the world, looks radically different in their time and, I think, today.
And I think it DOES matter who wins WWII (for instance), because, at minimum, which nations have the "center of mass" of power is going to influence the way the deployment of transformative AI plays out.
I hadn't realized this, but it seems like a crucial insight.
Systems incorporate the powerful effects of the things that they're exposed to, so that there are diminishing marginal returns to those powerful effects.
"Powerful" in this sense is relative to a time and place.
Is it possible to train people to be good rulers? So that the people with privilege are good social stewards instead of assholes?
I don't know. The historical record is not great on this point. It seems like trying to be a social steward tends to morph into thinking that you're better than everyone else, and deserve the best stuff at the expense of everyone else.
Example 1: "It's low status to sleep in your car."
I can totally believe that this is code for "'the authorities' don't want you to sleep in your car."
It seems like this kind of thing is punished waayyy out of proportion to the the cost to society (which is basically non-existent, as near as I can tell).
But this is one way to escape from high rents and therefore wage slavery. Thus, punished, and censured as low status.