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Notes -
I was debating doing up a China post today but I think this recent WSJ article connects too well to yours to leave it unposted here:
WSJ: A New Challenge for China’s Economy: ‘Involution’
(The archived link is taking a long time to process, I can put it in later.)
It's the following that I want to connect to your post:
"Involution" is not a new concept although it is a new word. (Interestingly the Wikipedia page is titled by its Chinese equivalent, "Neijuan" instead of the English word.)
The phenomenon that competition eventually drives down profits is basically inherent to market economies. It's really just a restatement of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, from the point of view of the asset being made efficient.
The solution to "involution" is also not new: you make and regulate monopolies. Monopolies drive out competition, allowing prices to rise, allowing for greater profits and slack in the market.
This once formed an entire era of American capitalism. This was the end-state of the Gilded Age of Robber Barons. The big capitalists like Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller knew that competition was driving prices low and destroying any attempt at making serious money. So they consolidated. This is the era that gave us Standard Oil, US Steel, J.P. Morgan, IBM, "Ma" Bell, the American Tobacco Company, United Fruit, etc. If you go back and read the political debates the idea that competition was ruinous and consolidation was the future even played a role in the merger of Manhattan and Brooklyn into one unified New York City.
The other solution is to offer some kind of unique value that can't be replicated by competitors, like Coca-Cola, although this is also a kind of monopoly. (Coke has a monopoly on the patent for Coke.)
As I'm writing this I think I remember Peter Thiel concluding something like this in Zero to One: competition is for losers. All the value in business comes from doing something unique that no one can imitate and then charging for it. (Looking it up now, Thiel makes a distinction between monopolies and "cartels," but I think this is a matter of taste, our blessed homelands your barbarous wastes.)
To get back to the point:
There's more competition now, over everything. Competition creates stress. Stressed organisms eventually break down and stop living or stop breeding (which is essentially the same thing). The Social Darwinists were wrong.
There's a balance to be struck as life without struggle and combat is not life at all. (I think Kaczynski was onto something important when he says that "The Power Process" is only fulfilled when those who struggle have a good chance that they will actually win.)
In this respect, I think AI is a lateral change: you add more complexity and you add more capacity to deal with complexity, some people will cope, some won't, most people weren't coping very well with complexity anyways. You give people UBI or Trump Account SpaceX stock, and circuses -- they'll breed like rats in cages, which is to say they won't mostly won't breed at all. Same as it ever was.
In theory, isn't that what patents are for? You get to reap the commercial benefits for 20ish years, society gets to benefit after that. In practice is another question entirely. Maybe China's proclivity to steal ideas makes such a system impossible to manifest and is contributing to this 'involution'. A very brief search suggests China does have a patent system, but I don't know how much of it is enforced, and to what extent.
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Competition is always better for the consumer though. Social media censorship make this clear. There are still no good alternatives to Meta.
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