Ultimately I know there are flaws in here, and no concrete numbers, thus it's still a hypothesis. But I haven't come across anything similar yet so I'm putting it out there. I've been developing this hypothesis for the past several months: in any given domain, the problem is not the system - it is *people*. Of course, systems have strengths & flaws, but crucially when on paper they *should* work fantastically they actually fall apart or become Swiss cheese with holes because people *find* ways to f&#$ it up. --- The premise is that all the Economics and Politics humans have developed and established fail to consider personality types. Humans have thus far designed these systems with rules to drive behavior in a society, when in practice *the behavior of a minority tends to drive the system*. I recently worked for a guy who asked for my DiSC profile prior to an interview. I thought, "that's an interesting metric when hiring somebody...I thought these personality tests were flawed and/or inaccurate." People change over time. However, the more I think about it, the more I notice people seem to have a "core tendency" towards one "type" or another that either doesn't change over time or does so very slowly. Here in the US, we have multiple ways to "measure" personality: - with DiSC, four main categories: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness - with Myers-Briggs, preference pairs of Introverted-Extroverted, Thinking-Feeling, Sensing-Intuition, Judging-Perceiving - I read a book from my library called "Surrounded by Idiots", in which the author uses 4 colors in a 2x2 grid to categorize people People like you & me who analyze things realize that everything in Nature is more analog. Personality is on a spectrum, not some box you can point to on a whiteboard. But being human, it's easier to predict behavior with a few "types" than an infinite spectrum. So these can still be useful. Observing people in real life with such categories in the back of my mind, I've noticed that there are some common denominators, and the biggest one is that among all "personality types", no matter how you name them, there are *"the doers"* and then *everyone else*. These doers are the people who just Go. They are often high-energy with endless to-do lists. They seem to act before they think. They do plan, but often it's short-term or short-sighted in terms of consequences because a primary attitude is "I'll figure it out". They only learn as much as they need to get by in the moment. In modern parlance this has manifested as various sound bytes: - "fake it 'till you make it" - "Get Shit Done" - "do whatever it takes" - "better to be Bold than Smart" - "figure it out as you go" - &c. Example: as of this writing we have a relatively small number of "tech bros" who are developing artificial intelligence at breakneck speed. Nobody asked for it. There's a lot of hype and discussion around it, and if you listen to news or podcasts close to this tech circle, you will hear a lot of optimism and even some good uses of this AI. However, go outside this circle into the general public where everyone else is, and you find that most people who use AI are just asking chatbots simple questions. Telling it to write their essays and do their homework. Banal things. Nobody asked for it, but Doers don't care, they just go go go because that's how they operate. Example: the stock market. It is actually easy to invest in the stock market without losing money, but most people don't bother. The whole thing was created by Doers, for Doers. If one simply buys ETFs that track the index, their money will inevitably grow over the long run. But this isn't enough for Doers - they must create options, derivatives, and all manner of "speculative investment vehicles". They must detect patterns, they must swing-trade & day-trade, &c &c because nothing is ever enough. They must keep chasing. Everyone else does not have the motivation to do this. Circling back to the premise, you can look at people in any system throughout history and notice the Doers and everyone else. Regardless of the initial goals of the system (which is usually along the lines of "benefit the most people" or "allocate resources optimally"), the Doers end up shaping things because, well, they are the ones doing stuff, by definition. In capitalism, the ones who are always moving and always want more are the ones who get more. This in turn drives up the price of everything and concentrates resources. In order to get a piece of the pie, you have to do even more and more as time goes on. Doers naturally will keep perpetuating this, while everyone else gets left behind. Everyone else just wants to live in peace and not be a "slave" of some kind. Everyone else doesn't want to keep chasing money, or wealth, or whatever. But they don't actively protest either, because they are not Doers. They just want to be. Socialism and Communism are similar. Doers end up at the top, because they are the bold ones who can convince everyone else of their ability to make everything great. But they end up taking all the resources for themselves, because they always want more. They can't stop moving. Meanwhile everyone else gets left behind, because they don't want to keep moving and chasing. They just want to be. Same with Politics. Everyone else votes for Doers who give bold speeches, who promise all manner of things, even if they don't have an actual plan - because they'll figure it out as they go - and in the extreme case, we end up with politicians like Trump. He has a terrible record of making an actual profit and running successful businesses, but he just kept moving, kept chasing. He went boldly regardless of consequences. Today, you can hear any number of pundits analyzing how he does things. Even as Everyone Else complains about him, he's still in power, running things, because everyone else doesn't want to go go go and remove him. They just want to be. In prior times, we had kings and queens. They wanted to control more and more people & territory. They appeared bold and confident that they can run a society. Everyone else just wanted to eat & hang out. As I said above, everything's a spectrum. Along the spectrum of personalities this Doer/"Dominant" type is a sub-spectrum, so I've described the extremes. There are Doers among "everyone else" who don't go so far as to create giant multinational corporate monopolies, but they're in the minority, so if they actively protest, there aren't enough of them to effect change. This is another piece: statistically, these Doers are a minority of the population but because they Do so much more on average day-by-day, they set the rules. The last piece of this hypothesis is how these Doers operate. I noticed something: they hear/see the same news as everybody else, so they are definitely aware of what's going on - politics falling apart, economies struggling, systems failing, etc etc - but they don't think they play any part in any of it and *they don't change their behavior*. Not because they are callous, nor because they worked out some conspiracy, but simply because they are "programmed" to keep doing. It is in their nature. For instance, my former boss, who required the DiSC profile, is a "High-D" on that assessment. He is a Doer. He is a real estate agent. He's acutely aware that home prices (in the US) keep going up, further out of reach of the majority of the population, even accounting for the cycles of the market over the past several decades. He even works this "cost of living issue" into his marketing. *He does not acknowledge that, if we stopped treating houses as commodities, where people flip them over & over for profit, the prices would be stable*. He just wants to keep chasing. In his words: "I like spending money too much and I like making money too much." He has an outsized influence on things but he doesn't realize it and/or doesn't care. He could easily put his efforts toward any number of endeavors but he continues to sell real estate. Imagine if that energy and effort went towards passing affordable housing policies and re-zoning & such. Speaking with people like this I've noticed that *they are generally nice people*. They just don't want to share. They are self-centered by nature, with various internal & external motivations to accumulate stuff for themselves. Again, not by some conspiracy, not by grudges or vengeance, but by nature. Kind of like machines with a specific operating system that's really hard to deviate from. They can acknowledge that overconsumption is plowing through limited resources but will continue consuming anyway. Etc. The conclusion is that going forward, systems must consider personality. That is, recognize that behavior will never be uniform and thus resources will never flow homogeneously. Rather than establishing rules to drive behavior, which humans routinely break, the system must *respond* to varying behaviors to meet its goals. I don't have concrete answers now, so spitballing here: design some mechanisms where, regardless of how much Doers do/move/chase, the laws of physics prevent everything from concentrating into the hands of those few people. I don't know if this is possible, but it's worth pondering; otherwise something along those lines. Another concept that comes to mind that I don't necessarily endorse, but is along the same train of thought, is Gesell's monetary system where money decays/expires (laws of humans rather than physics, so can be f&#$ed with).