Our revealed preference for Inferno suggests our true desires for brotherhood and tranquility fall short of what we profess them to be. If thirst for higher status drives our interactions, reducing conflict only serves to limit opportunities for advancement.
Start with the view that status is very important to humans. The essay argues that it is so important that we actually prefer the hell of a world filled with competition to a heaven in which no one is dissatisfied with their status.
Given this view of human nature, there is no getting rid of competition altogether. If you were to get rid of competition in one realm, competition would emerge in another realm.
If you think that competition for wealth in a capitalist economy is bad, consider the alternatives. In particular, think about competition for money and power in an economy where markets are weak and government is strong.
Recall Bryan Caplan’s aphorism:
Free markets are awesome because they give business incentives to do good stuff that sounds bad. Governments are awful because they give politicians incentives to do bad stuff that sounds good.
The institutions that emerged out of the Enlightenment that set up competition in various realms, including scientific research and business, all worked well for a long time. But those institutions are threatened by people offering false utopian alternatives.
Today is a day for somber reflection, candle lighting and humble acknowledgment of the reality of ptsd for so many Americans that bore witness to the horrific events of 1/6 from the uneasy comfort of their homes over on the msnbc.
I’m disappointed that Arnold refuses to acknowledge this date or the lived experiences of so many Americans that suffered through it. Instead we are left with a post on competition.
RIP 1/6 vs. GameStop. Was it even close?
http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/emh-and-gamestop/
In unrelated news, here is an unofficial tally of the carnage and damage.
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/09/09/realclearinvestigations_jan_6-blm_comparison_database_791370.html
It's worth adding that St. More's Utopia was not all that utopian compared to the aura and meaning that the term has gained over hundreds of years. It even has slaves, and a comprehensive system of penal slavery (under enlightened conditions).
I think Infovore is too pessimistic about tokenization and not pessimistic enough about the problems with the current web infrastructure. The current web infrastructure is very conducive to lots of fraud at enormous scale. The only way that the big players can effectively limit fraud on their ad networks is to do many things that are of questionable legality involving the abuse and cross-referencing of private data (e.g. Google spying on Gmail contents to determine whether or not an Adwords click resulted in a successful conversion: this is why Amazon started concealing cart contents in email notifications; Facebook and others buying access to credit card data to confirm conversions).
Moving more web business away from easily spoofed telemetry and comprehensive privacy violations to simple transactions of monetary units is a good and straightforward thing that requires less belief in innovation than the current model, which requires a belief in the magic AI fairy and the notion that the government is never going to figure out how to prosecute crimes online and how to regulate these obese multi-trillion dollar 'tech' turkeys. 'Web 3' is actually bearish on the notion that there is much more juice in the fancy-statistics-masquerading-as-SHODAN economy.