David Duvenaud
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
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 ofโฆ
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
During COVID in Canada, there was this famous truckers strike where there was this like vaccine requirements across the U.S.
border, which truckers didn't like.
And they basically formed this convoy that drove all their huge trucks to the capital and then just like sat there and honked for a few weeks.
And the point is, like in the future, no one will have big trucks, right?
They won't actually like any means that they have for civil disobedience are just going to be much easier to take away than they are today.