[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is government, which is another natural monopoly that serves as a social Schelling-point, and one that has become badly outdated for the conditions we're about to face.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.