Historian Bret Devereaux on his blog wrote about the status quo coalition which is a somewhat related idea; he has a similar bit about how returns from development outpace returns from conquest in the modern era, making modern wars of conquest not economically worthwhile.
A tumblr post I quite enjoyed:
I generally agree about your fourth point: More than a decade ago, one of the better professors I had at university was an English teacher; she was young enough and new enough to not have been worn down by the grind yet. A large part of the grade for her class was in the exam portion, where we were given ~4 hours of proctored exam time to (mostly) write several short essays in person by hand, without electronics. We were allowed copies of the literature involved and no other aids, and basically given "choose 3 topics from this list of 10 to write essays about", where the topics were things like "compare [work A]'s [element x] to [Work B's]." etc. I imagine she could simply load more of the final grade on that final exam, and the similar but shorter midterm, rather than homework essays, and still be able to assess/grade students' abilities in the era of ChatGPT.
Instead, it largely seems like universities have mostly tried nothing, and are all out of ideas. The remarkable fatalism I've been seeing about it is amusing.
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