[nostrademons]

It may be good but also can be very problematic.

Organizations don't really shrink well. When times are good, they hire a lot of people that are marginally necessary. Over the good times, these roles become well-integrated into how the organization does business; whether or not they were necessary at first, people start depending on that person for a task, their approvals become part of a critical workflow, they develop special institutional knowledge without which the institution won't function, etc. When the organization needs to shrink, the marginally-necessary roles all get laid off. Except now you have all these unfilled dependencies. Other remaining employees depend upon the now-gone employees to do their jobs. Communication processes break. People get demoralized as they realize the organization is broken anyway, and quiet-quit or start looking out for their own self-interest.

You run into Gall's Law in action: "A complex system that doesn't work cannot be patched up to make it work: you have to start over with a working simple system."

Lots and lots of things are going to break as fertility declines and the population shrinks. Education is going to be one of the first ones hit because it explicitly deals with young people, but likely this will go right up to capitalism and the state.

[ModernMech]

I'll give a real example.

In my department we have research staff to look at research proposals and make sure they're good before they're submitted to the grant agency.

Someone might look at the budget and say "This is administrative bloat because it is not teaching focused so we are cutting them."

What's the downstream effect? Well now those professors who relied on the research staff have to take time out of their schedules to do deeper reviews of their work, so they reduce teaching time and increase research time.

They are not as skilled as the dedicated staff, so now there are fewer proposals being accepted. This means less money to the university, and particularly the department.

So what does the department do? They stop hiring undergraduate graders and they institute a hiring freeze. Now that means they cannot admit as many students, teaching costs go up, class sizes go up. And for the admitted students, now they've lost their work study, so it means fewer students are going to enroll because their aid has decreased, effectively increasing tuition. This can be a vicious downward spiral if not checked.

So the original intent of "tighten belts and reduce waste" is really "we made everything worse for everyone"

[dpe82]

Thinking about it as a system:

If every university were subject to similar constraints, the average "quality" of research proposals would go down (everybody would have less time to spend on it) but since the pool of research dollars is assumed constant everyone would still get roughly their same slice - just with less overhead.

[ModernMech]

How it would actually work is only the best schools would keep their funding while lower tier schools would be shut out entirely and be forced to severely reduce their research agendas. There's a school near me that just went from College to University status because they grew their graduate program enough, they would probably not weather the storm the same as MIT.

[nostrademons]

On a system's level, that's probably the desired outcome in a world where total science funding is shrinking and fewer people can be employed as scientists.

In your example, I'd be more worried about the case where the specialized design reviewer knows what the available sources of grants are and procedure to apply to them, and the professor has since forgotten that knowledge, and so the department now cannot bring in any grants or revenue. That'd kill science even at established institutions like MIT or Yale or Harvard, even if they have very good researchers.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

Capitalism handles this problem well because a dysfunctional company can be replaced by a nimble startup.

There's not really an equivalent in the education world, because of how the university prestige economy works. Prestige is sort of like a natural monopoly: The more prestigious your university, the more talent you attract in terms of students and professors. The more talent you attract, the more prestige you generate via their discoveries. And both talent and prestige lead to donations, which in turn attract further talent and prestige.

[nostrademons]

Right, capitalism has a natural answer for this, which is one reason it's proved so robust over generations.

The solution for the prestige economy is as Paul Graham wrote:

> Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first.

https://paulgraham.com/love.html

Basically people need to defect, ignore prestige, take the hit, and do what they want to do regardless of what other people think. Note that this will destroy the job market, because so much of it is based on prestigious credentials because people are apparently unable to screen for the qualities that are actually needed to do the job. But the job market is in the process of being destroyed by AI and liars and lying AI anyway. The future looks like a bunch of new startups starting from scratch and inventing new ways of doing things, and largely ignoring the existing "real world".

The part I'm worried most about is government, which is another natural monopoly that serves as a social Schelling-point, and one that has become badly outdated for the conditions we're about to face. Unlike prestige, however, you kinda can't just ignore the existing government and do what you want. It's very, very rare for a government to get replaced peacefully, particularly a replacement that doesn't just change the people but wholesale ways of doing things. While I'm hoping that that's what happens, history has plenty of examples of revolutions that ended up extremely bloody, and didn't actually solve anything.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

I think you're too cynical. One of the strengths of democracy as a form of government is that leaders get replaced regularly.

[nostrademons]

I'd agree with that.

The part that makes me concerned is efforts by leaders to change the structure of our democracy from rules explicitly laid out in the Constitution to rules implicitly laid out in party bylaws and customs. Gerrymandering in particular is bad news: instead of having voters choose their leaders, it lets leaders choose their voters. Also the increasing centralization of power within the executive branch and within the federal government, the increasing politicization of the courts, and the influence of money on politics and politics on money.

All of these make the system more brittle. Democratic capitalism is effective because it tolerates partial failures well; if you get a bad leader, vote them out at the next election. When people no longer believe that they can vote out the bad leader, or that voting out the leader will change anything, then that release valve disappears.