> ...our current system of harnessing greed fails at controlling negative externalities. Without these negative externalities, greed would be a positive force.
I believe it isn't a "current system" attribute, but a chronic feature of human power dynamics in scarcity-bound systems. We've always had these negative externalities, but the reach and rapidity available to those at various apexes within our power structures has dramatically expanded in recent generations.
Greed could be perceived a positive force in the past because its negative externalities were limited to relatively local scope and durations, and its essential beneficial features could be extracted and applied in modified forms outside of those scopes. But it still sucked mightily for those within its blast radius.
I really wish there was structured, systematic study of human power structures in relation to the various common personality types engaged at different focal points of those structures I could investigate, as I feel quite naive and ignorant of them.
That's an interesting observation about bounded externalities and wider positive effects.
I hope someone studies the dynamics and effects of power through the lens you described.
It might show up in biological systems as well, as so many of these depend on resource competition and signalling in an ever changing, open evolution environment.
> That's an interesting observation about bounded externalities and wider positive effects.
To a first-order approximation my mental model I'm trying to look for extant literature upon: model the signalling as a message-passing system whose agents exhibit observational reflexivity while they pass the payload. Agents are simultaneously bounded by their individual observational capacity's volume (how much granularity, how fast, how broadly of topics, how far-ranging of inter-relationships they can comprehend).
If the hypothesis withstands systematic back-testing scrutiny against historical data, then the next step is to assess its predictive modeling power. Degrees of validation would help me resolve some confounding observations of my own that different organizing principles of various systems ("capitalism", "socialism", "communism", "anarcho-", "merchantilism", etc.) in different contexts (economic, biologic, social, etc.) appear to repeat certain patterns. As if the levers of control change an interface like a protein surface on a cell/bacterium/virus/DNA-strand/RNA-strand changes, but there is a certain "core API" functionality that is found over and over, like a "portable DSL" that is re-evolved in many contexts due to emergent properties of power structures in resource-constrained settings.
I wish I had Dyson Swarm-scale computronium and stor-tronium to help us process and synthesize all of history's known works to find out who else has gone down this rabbit hole, though. There is hardly any original thought when college-dorm-style chatting ideas like this, mostly new ideas only show up in engineering new capabilities and pursuing scientific discovery of new principles; our ancestors were smart cookies. The Vatican has vast stores of works yet to comprehend, for just one data source out of many (every nation's archives, every private archive, etc.).
Curse our limited lifespans, and simultaneously marvel at our verse's breathtaking beauty, right?
I believe it isn't a "current system" attribute, but a chronic feature of human power dynamics in scarcity-bound systems. We've always had these negative externalities, but the reach and rapidity available to those at various apexes within our power structures has dramatically expanded in recent generations.
Greed could be perceived a positive force in the past because its negative externalities were limited to relatively local scope and durations, and its essential beneficial features could be extracted and applied in modified forms outside of those scopes. But it still sucked mightily for those within its blast radius.
I really wish there was structured, systematic study of human power structures in relation to the various common personality types engaged at different focal points of those structures I could investigate, as I feel quite naive and ignorant of them.