Patrick Collison's Questions

Thanks for the offer though, would definitely ask in future.

Hmm maybe not divided like US but exists. Tokyo vs other big cities(Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka, Nagoya,..) vs others is popular conflict. Young people move to Tokyo to get jobs or go to univ and never goes back, meanwhile rural areas are losing younger smart people. And all govs and most news are in Tokyo so not considering others well.

I hope covid improves this situation.

It's all very well to pay someone well and expect good results for the money, but that person is still a member of society and will be affected by the things around them. I'd argue that someone who hears constant negativity in the media about how everyone is underpaid and living in poverty, and sees the person serving their coffee at a diner working their third job, and knows that their wife is working longer hours than they are for much less money, is going to be less productive as a result no matter how they're treated as an individual. Poverty is a structural problem in society. It doesn't just affect poor people.

What makes a lot of these interesting is that most have bad answers. Some (eg the inflation question) have answers were sustainable 10-20 years ago, but grew out of them. Some have cliched or even ideological answers. Again, time has changed the strength of these answers. Time to re-ask and re-answer.

Some (eg progress in science) have no obvious or common answer, but are commonly discussed at a smaller scale. Academic incentives, publishing & such are commonly discussed, but no ways forward seem to emerge.. even rhetorically.

In any case, I think the first one (inflation by sector) hits squarely at a major blindspot in most economic thinking. I think it's responsible for a lot of the divergent views of economists (relying on measurements) and non economists relying on intuition.

Your answer to this question may relate to GDP growth consistency. Again, I feel this is a blindspot in most theoretical economics. One of Thomas Picketty's controversy bombshells was treating GDP growth and rate-of-return (r>g) as basically constant. Almost all other theories (even Marx) treat these as determined by everything else in the theory. All that doesn't seem consistent with consistency, as patrick points out.

I would have also asked, "what is the successor to the university" since several of these questions could be answered if you had an answer to that. It's a loaded form of a question, but other questions take that form.

How you load questions can be the most important thing. "What's the successor to the scientific paper and the scientific journal?" is loaded in an opposite way to "* How do we help more experimental cities get started?*" I'm not saying questions shouldn't be loaded, just that they should be loaded carefully.

Great read. i will come back for the links.

Speaking logically; there can't be anything is making it physically harder to build infrastructure over time. And nothing physical is making the economics of railroads worse.

Therefore the changes have to be entirely legal, political and social. The specifics are probably things like increased environmental scrutiny, greater political impediments to forcing people out of their homes, requiring higher standards for construction, increased safety. Reduced political will to build infrastructure due to competing models of public/private ownership.

My personal theory; I suspect big chunks of modern infrastructure are now illegal to build. I don't know if it is still acceptable to sign off on a project where it is expected that 11 people to die. I know that would be wholly unacceptable in a mining context; for example. Probably construction too.