Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

Adam Smith points out that it doesn't matter if things are done for the greater good or not. Them existing will improve lives for everybody either way.

The problem with government funded large project is that they often monopolize. In the Soviet Union to much investment was flowing into the wrong stuff. And small scale innovation didn't get the resources to grow.

While mistakes on a high level lead to total stagnation. For example NASA building the Shuttle crowed out almost everything else, and because the Shuttle was the wrong way to go the US has spent 50 years doubling down on that.

If a large company makes a really, really big bet on something, they can pay a very large cost if they are wrong. And this has been historically the case, large projects that don't get anywhere are canceled. Governments can double down almost forever.

So I think we do need everything, innovation from maverick individuals, innovation from smaller companies, large innovation form big companies, innovation from government project, innovation from private/government funded universities.

There is no perfect 'this is the way to get innovation' that we have yet discovered.

Self-driving EVs are not a solution to most of the externalities of personal automobiles. No means of transport is that requires twenty square meters of space and 2000 kg of matter to move 1.4 persons at a time on average.

It’s not even clear as of now whether they have a net positive effect on the society, even if they ever become viable in climates that aren’t always sunny.

Coal used to power entire countries, and it still runs our steel mills. American industrial might and American quality of life was only possible because of our coal miners. A Walmart stocker puts cheap Chinese stuff on shelves.

The typical romanticized coal miner is a masculine figure, a breadwinner, the representative of an industry that might have been core to the family and town for generations. A Walmart stocker is a guy in a T-shirt. Walmart itself is famous for... pricing out local businesses whenever it comes to a small town.

I'm not at all denying that it's a culture and glorification thing. I just think this is a factor people sometimes miss when looking at how a lot of the country is nostalgic for the 20th century economy, and why people keep wanting (mostly via vibes) to reindustrialize America.

> Extreme levels of wealth, consolidation and economic consolidation breeds dark triad personality traits. Beyond a critical mass of net worth further increases rapidly expand the power of those traits.

Well said, although I feel almost unable to even parse the second sentence.

I mean it largely depends how you define that. I can think of a lot of social ills the government isn't working to solve... poverty, houselessness, poor funding of schools in general, the ongoing deterioration of social programs, but I wouldn't say they're the cause of those issues?

Fact is when you scratch even fingernail deep on any of them you find the private sector, far more often than not. The welfare state is in tatters because numerous components of it have been privatized and are operated by contracted companies who are siphoning off substantial amounts of the utter pittance we dedicate to the problem itself, which means what gets to the people who need it is even more a pittance than it started as.

The houseless issue is perpetuated in part by local governments zoning restrictions and the myriad of issues around building them here, from supplies to labor availability, and also a substantial contributor is the fact that huge amounts of homes are being purchased by investment companies and hoarded either without people in them, or are rented out in which case worker's earned income is being siphoned off to those already far wealthier than they need to be.

Poor funding of schools is often due to a whole mess of factors relating both to how we as a society prioritize education (or don't, more often) and the fact that a school's funding is heavily dependent on property taxes around where it is operating, which means under served areas have less quality schools from the off, which means less educated people with less money to spend, which means less economic activity, which means less property taxes and so on and so forth.

And in all of these and many other problems you have the elephant in the room: lobbying. Corporations spend billions to lobby the government to do even less than it does about these and a bunch of other issues, chief among them to permit said corporations to hold more money, a solid portion of which can then be spent on yet more lobbying. And certainly the government and it's politicians aren't simply helpless patsies in that arrangement, I also would hold the people making the decisions to route that money far more responsible.