David Duvenaud

I guess one thing I'll say is I don't exactly fear some new particular party getting in power and staying that way.

Rather, it's going to be more that any party that does get in power is going to be so constrained by competitive pressures that they are forced to basically disempower the population.

How so?

Well, so like I said before, if you let people actually do like the civil disobedience or whatever that they sort of can do today, roughly, that kind of is tolerable when most people have jobs.

Most people have a bunch of like important responsibilities and they can't all just like block roads all day or something like that.

But in a world where like, you know, maybe like 30 or 40 percent of people just have this huge amount of free time and energy.

It just will be untenable and the state will collapse if they actually let everybody do this sort of agitation at the effectiveness that they can today.

Yeah, exactly.

And then the other thing is that there was this countervailing force where you just need people to go to work.

So they have to be able to move freely and do their own business without constantly getting permission from the government.

And there just won't be that pressure on governments to allow freedom anymore.

Yeah.

And I will say that again, like coordination could save us here, right?

Like, and the sort of saving throw is that all the leaders and everybody is seeing what's happening, realizing that there's this like tragedy of the commons happening and somehow coordinating earlier or like early enough and hard enough that they avoid these like races to the bottom.

I guess maybe one way to think about this is to turn on its head and be like, well, why did countries become democratic and like invest in their citizens and have freedoms in the first place?

And, like, one story told by, like, Alan Defoe in one of his papers is that the reason that, like, for instance, like, Prussia started educating its citizenry in, like, the 1700s was because musket armies were becoming more competitive than, like, the old, like, you know, knights and sort of, like, poorly armed peasants armies.

And that...

You needed to educate your massive citizens enough that they could form these like musket armies.

And this was just a more competitive option and that the elites resisted this.

Like they didn't want to like have this more empowered citizenry, but they were forced by competitive pressures to become more like these modern democratic, like human capital invested states.