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Lately I've been reflecting and I think one of the biggest themes of change in my lifetime is the increasing efficiency of the world, and largely, it sucks. I think different people have described this in ways that suit their own worldview. Like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, Redditors might call this a form of late-stage capitalism, woke people would call a subset of this gentrification, I call it increasing efficiency. Let me give you some examples.
Airplane seats. Thirty years ago, a savvy traveler would know to get exit row seats, for the same price you got extra leg room. Over the course of my life airlines have recognized they had this little luxury and were effectively leaving money on the table by not charging more for it. Over my life they have created sub-designations like economy-plus to extract that little bit of value that they were leaving behind.
Some years ago I went to Kansas City for a conference and I was pretty excited to try the barbecue. I went to a couple places and overall, while it was decent, I'd had better in New York which obviously makes complete sense! If you were a world-class barbecue chef from Kansas City, why would you stay in KC where there isn't much money and the competition is fierce? Bring your talents to New York or San Francisco and you stand to get a much bigger payday and critical recognition that would never be available to you in KC. In some sense, having a great regional cuisine only available in Kansas City is just irrational. If people all over the world would like barbecue, why would it only be available in some relatively poor middle-America city? It should naturally be available the world-over in proportion to the money available in a locality. I think essentially the beautiful diversity of regional cuisines is an inefficiency or an irrationality waiting to be eaten up. At this point the only foods remaining regional are really ones that nobody else wants.. In the world I grew up in my dad would always tell me that you just couldn't get a good cheesesteak outside of Philly, that world doesn't exist anymore.
Or consider my hobby, daguerreotype collecting. When I look at older collections built in the 70s-90s, collections were more haphazard. People would have lots of mundane things I wouldn't look twice at today mixed in with some truly extraordinary things that would be impossible to buy now even if you were a museum. It seems like in the past, before the internet, price discoverability was basically zero, so with enough persistence if you were willing to hit the road and hit up dozens of antique and book stores you could turn up great things for nothing. Today with the availability of eBay, prices are more accurate and as a result collections are much more defined by how much money you have to spend. There is no shortcut, there isn't really a way for effort and luck to substitute for raw dollars today.
I think Tinder and OnlyFans are examples of the same phenomenon. Tinder, for women, is essentially a price discovery tool. If you are a gorgeous girl from some small town you no longer have to settle for some guy from your hometown. You can go on Tinder and find that there are 6'5" med students that do rock climbing a few miles away that are very much in-your-league. Regarding OnlyFans, if you were curious about ho'ing it up 40 years ago what was your option? Mail photos of yourself to Hustler and then potentially move out to LA for a giant question mark of a payday? Today if you are a moderately popular woman on social media you will have a very good idea of exactly how much money you would stand to make the very moment you choose to open an OF, which could be a very large amount indeed.. I think thirty years ago if you were some loser guy working at a small town gas station you could at least have the fantasy of getting the girl, because sometimes the world was just crazy and irrational and nonsensical things happened! Today I think that fantasy feels less realistic as desirable women have far more tools to get a sense of their true worth. Not to say the world is perfectly rational now, but it is more than it used to be. I think the popular SEC couples meme is celebrating exactly the wonderful irrationality of mixed-attractiveness couples that is increasingly rare to see.
I imagine if you are a guy that frequented strip clubs, hooters and escorts you probably view the glory days as behind you. 30 years ago you could probably find some seriously gorgeous girls with enough looking, today I assume any decent looking girl would be leaving those places for OF.
I would say gentrification is a specific subset of this same phenomenon. Essentially it is a majority/privileged/white group recognizing that a minority/marginalized group has something that is 'undervalued' and moving in to exploit that. This undervalued thing could be a food like oxtail, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, a hairstyle, whatever. Either way I think these are both cases of an inefficiency being ironed out, low-hanging fruit being plucked and the world becoming more rational and efficient. After all, shouldn't Williamsburg be expensive? It has a great view of Manhattan and is closer to the Financial District than lots of upscale areas on the Upper West/East Side. The fact that it was ever cheap was just an obvious inefficiency waiting to be corrected.
I think this kind of sucks because the theme across all of these is that the world becomes less irrational and by extension less hopeful. In the past you could dream of getting the girl, or finding that amazing daguerreotype in an antique shop, or coming home to a cheap meal of oxtail in your Williamsburg apartment with a great view of the Manhattan skyline. Today, as with collecting, the quality of your life is much more closely following the amount of money you have to throw around and opportunities for savvy or just plain lucky individuals are disappearing. Kind of sad imo. I think the human spirit and persistence of hope rely to a certain degree on irrationality and chaos to sustain themselves, the idea that anything can happen and it doesn’t have to make sense.
I would be very interested if people have more examples of this because I feel like it has swept across almost everything in the last 30 years
I'm reminded of a couple years ago when a friend and I stopped at a Texas Roadhouse. I had not been to one since college when it was the highest-end eatery I could afford. The place was packed. I often eat 80 dollar filets at high-end steak houses, but I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of my steak. For 14.99 I enjoyed a flavorful (if slightly chewy) eight-ounce sirloin, two sides, and endless rolls. If I recall correctly, the same meal cost 9.99 when I was in college 15 years ago, while beef prices have tripled during that time.
The biggest change was in how the service was provided. In college, Texas Roadhouse was a standard sit-down restaurant with waiters who served a small number of tables. While the trappings of this model were still in place, the methodology was far more optimized. There is a well-defined mechanism for assigning parties to tables. Once parties are seated, the server "tags" the table with a sticky-note receipt with the party name and number, presumably to assist the waitstaff in delivering the correct order and to facilitate accurate billing. Despite my rather dim assessment of the waitstaff's mental faculties, we were delivered accurate orders in minutes. Once our plates were taken away, we were able to pay via the mobile payment device connected to each table. We left within thirty minutes from when we were seated.
The efficiency of this process was evident. The crowded restaurant was staffed by no more than 4 or 5 waiters. Yet there was something tangibly missing from the experience for both the patrons and the servers. Waiting tables at a Texas Roadhouse would have been a good job for a high-school or college student: the student would gain experience and acquire a certain amount of responsibility. Now, the waitstaff is not expected or encouraged to show any individuality or responsibility. Any deviation from the process is a flaw. When we were being seated, there was a slight breakdown in this process. A wayward plate from another table had been set on the table at which were to be seated. Our seater was flummoxed. Eventually she and another waiter contrived to put the plate back on the original table, at which point she continued to seat us. Addressing a trivial mix-up like this should be done without a second thought by even the most inexperienced waiter.
When we were paying, our electronic payment device asked for a tip. Given the impersonal experience in which our only possible interactions with our waiter were transactional (except, oddly, for the monetary transaction itself), a tip seemed pointless. The waiters had no opportunity to independently provide a pleasant dining experience, instead relying on customers' habit and largesse.
While my natural inclination towards productivity and efficiency makes me appreciate what Texas Roadhouse has accomplished, as a diner I felt like a commoditized agent being pushed through an assembly line. I, too, was expected to participate in the well-run ordering of the establishment. If I had been a little quicker with the credit card, maybe we could have spent only 25 minutes eating and not wasted 5 minutes of a table meant for the next faceless consumer.
So what am I to take from this? The dining experience felt demeaning and dehumanizing to both the servers and the customers. It feels like Wall-E. It won't be long before we do have robot waiters. We will all have adequate, but unsatisfying, commoditized consumption experiences. The majority will be content to consume and over-consume. I only can hope that a few of us will not want to just survive, but to live.
And yet, while the experience may have been grotesque, aesthetics are a low priority in any hierarchy of needs. The clientele were much more concerned about getting a decent meal at a reasonable price. I believe that making steak relatively more affordable for more people is a good thing. Better to gorge on sirloin than to go hungry in the streets. Better to be in a cog in a machine than for the machine not to exist at all. The economic engine that drives us towards efficiency may not always be pretty, but it generates results.
I have a mental model for economic markets that they behave much like a stochastic gradient descent algorithm. Firms and entrepreneurs explore the economic domain and move ever towards optimization. Whether this exploration results in a globally optimal solution depends greatly on the initial conditions. Initial conditions such as culture, institutions, and societal norms can have a major impact on how close the market engine comes to global optimization. An optimization problem is considered relatively stable if many different initial conditions can result in similar minima.
While this mental model is useful, it is incomplete: the very act of economic optimization can lead to eventual changes in the topology of the economy. In the case of Texas Roadhouse, the optimization begets atomized consumption and labor. Neither buyer nor seller is being acclimated to experiences outside of a prepackaged box. This may well lead to a fragile stasis as we lose initiative and dynamism and as the economic system becomes incapable of accommodating any deviation from the norm. Hence I can simultaneously applaud the innovations that lead to greater abundance, and decry the resulting changes to our society that can lead to stagnation and collapse.
The clear intellectual inferiority of the waitstaff is a microcosm of the entire labor market. For the first time in history, most labor is sorted (roughly) by intellect. In the agrarian days, farmers were more or less intelligent, but as long as the farmers could plow their fields their intellect was sufficient for the job. The higher intelligent farmers would naturally become community leaders and occasional inventors. With jobs now bifurcated by intellectual capability the "lower skill" jobs are essentially only occupied by lower capability individuals. There is limited interaction among individuals of different capacity as many of our social circles are dominated by work colleagues. Lower skill jobs atrophy with no innovation and no leadership. Hence the gross incompetence of many fast food restaurants and the disaster of manual construction and landscape labor. It genuinely was better service in the old days, when a diversity of intellects occupied these jobs. Conversely, the "high skill" workplace is now almost entirely staffed by high intellects. The menial jobs that would still have required interaction across intellects have been replaced by computers.
AI may be the great leveler. Robots are increasingly good at "high skill" jobs, but can't (yet) perform the types of physical tasks that even a 70 IQ individual can do. If job loss in "high skill" industries occurs en-masse, we may see the intellectual class starting to perform "low skill" jobs, with positive benefits for all.
I may have been one of the few people who thought that Buy'N'Large was one of the greatest human achievements ever depicted in film
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