Dwarkesh Patel

And when you hear about wicked tax collectors, it's because if you are told we want 10,000 florins worth of tax from this town, but you extract 15, you can keep the other five because the 10 is what you need to send to the central.

So the more you extract, the more you get paid.

This delegate system in which there's a local tax collector and even a more local tax collector below him who might collect tax from a particular village means that you depend a lot upon the person whose job it is to collect your taxes.

So when Cosimo is papal banker, he is the person who is collecting and channeling the money from every church in Christendom when everybody puts a coin into a collection box or pilgrims come in.

and put money, all of the wealth that's supposed to flow back to the papacy is actually flowing to Cosimo.

Cosimo is passing it on to the papacy after taking a cut.

So that is a lot of money moving quickly.

It is also a lot of ability to make contracts and contacts.

We all know how important networking is.

And he rises in prominence from a banker to a

somebody who has enough money to effectively take over his state via manipulating the guys out of a bag system.

And so to discuss that again briefly, if you have a system where you lottery people, sortition is the technical term for it.

This is a very old form of government.

Ancient Athens uses it.

It actually works really well.

But like any institution, it is corruptible.

And in the same way that you can corrupt voting by bribing people or manipulating the machines or manipulating voters, you can also corrupt sortition by bribing the people who pull names out of the bag or by the simpler mechanism, which Cosima uses first, of if you're a giant bigwig in the city and you employ a third of the people in the city and a third of the people in the city are on your payroll.

And nine guys at random are chosen out of a bag.

Three of them are going to be your guys, just statistically.

And so if you tell all your guys, I want this policy, this policy, and this policy, and if you have questions, send for me and I'll tell you what to do.