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Systems that assume people will act in ways that create public goods, and that give them opportunities and rewards for doing so, often let them work together better than neoclassical economics would predict.

To take the most famous example, the root of Facebook's churn issues began when their graph burgeoned to encompass everyone in one's life. As noted above, just because we are friends with someone doesn't mean we want to see everything they post about in our News Feed. In the other direction, having many more people from all spheres of our lives fol... See more

But digital distribution channels did not simply change how hotels were sold. They changed what hotels are. Airbnb unlocked millions of rooms in new inventory by lowering the cost of finding, booking, and trusting them. Others used Airbnb as a channel to offer a more standardized lodging product, with a business model that flipped the real estate o... See more

Software tech stacks today look way more like a rainforest — with animals and plants co-existing, competing, living, dying, growing, interacting in unplanned ways — than like a planned garden.

Many policy prescriptions are themselves no more than metaphors. Both the centralizers and the privatizers frequently advocate oversimplified, idealized institutions - paradoxically, almost "institution-free" institutions. An assertion that central regulation is necessary tells us nothing about the way a central agency should be constituted, what a... See more