[PaulHoule]

It reminds of this book

https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Society-Distribution-Possibi...

which has a case study of US Steel used lobbying as a weapon against the rest of us by getting protectionism against steel imports because they felt entitled to keep making steel with pre-WWII open health furnaces that had been paid for long ago but produced more expensive and lower quality steel than international competitors who were using basic oxygen, electric arc and other modern processes. In a market economy they would have been forced to go out of business or invest in new equipment —- that is, make a disinvestment that they didn’t want to make (that’s why they call it “capital(ism)”), it’s like the capital makes decisions on its own.

Circa 1980 almost all futuristic thinkers thought the copper network was going to be ripped out to replace it with fiber because fiber was clearly better in the long term, but what we did get was much more complex and path dependent because in favorable locations cable TV was a great business that built out infrastructure which could be repurposed, DSL was a good solution for crowded little countries like South Korea and the UK, etc. Like those open hearth furnaces, bad infrastructure that exists drives out good infrastructure that hasn’t been built yet.

[gsf_emergency_6]

Nice turn!

>makes decisions on its own

Somehow, society making decisions on its own is a Stephen King story.. maybe direct democrats should just not use that name that always triggers. How about "civilianism"?

https://jacobin.com/2025/11/mamdani-chavez-torres-municipal-...

  A participatory budget, which gave residents binding control over the full municipal investment budget.

(Contexts: upcoming Donald-Zohran meeting, Venezuela. Etc):

Current day examples (which are a bit more nuanced than in Thurow's day, but I'd argue the Gresham bug picture is roughly the same as what you said. "First-mover foot-gun"?)

-Tesla vs BYD (even though Tesla's factories in China are most productive)

-NVIDIA infra (note the optical fiber history repeating itself )

Literary case study: The villain in Snow Crash is a missing element of to-day's oligarch periodic table (Evangelical sham-futurist)

Good names are the first hard quest. To ward off Lasch's alt-institutionism