David Duvenaud

But in general...

no matter what political party ends up in power, they don't, even in the very worst case, end up killing more than some small fraction of their population.

Life can only get so bad when you're needed.

That's the real key thing that has been keeping governments aligned, and that's the key thing that's going to change.

Yeah, I mean, maybe the closest contemporary analog is Saudi Arabia, where the government basically gets most of its wealth from oil.

And there's this nice sort of grandfathered in class of like all the sort of cousins of the many princes or whatever who have these like sinecures, these like make work jobs.

And they also have like very little political room to maneuver, right?

Like there's purges, there's like drama at the top.

And anyone who's making any sort of like problem for like Mohammed bin Salman or whatever is like probably going to lose their sinecure at the very least.

And then maybe like the example of like the same thing done well is like Norway, where there was like this like sort of strong democratic government and the government was able to commit at least in the short and medium term to like redistribute this wealth.

Yeah, more the second one.

I mean, maybe one sort of…

The best example is in Canada, there was like a lot of lockdowns during COVID.

And I think the public health people would have preferred to have longer lockdowns.

And the government was just forced to end them or like make them shorter than they otherwise would have been because they actually needed people to get out and run the economy.

Maybe another example is like in New Brunswick in another Canadian province, all lockdowns.

private activity, like just people going for walks in the woods has been banned until the fall because of a fire hazard.

And like there's lots of forest fires in Canada right now, but industrial activity is still allowed.

And it's just so tempting for all sorts of like public health and like environmental and safety reasons to curtail people's freedoms and movement all the time.

And this is like always sort of just barely being kept in check by the need to have like free movement so that there's an economy and maybe like more concretely also