In two words, rent seeking.
Re:Misidentifying talent
by blaser-waffle on Tuesday February 22, 2022 @12:19PM
(#30430611)
There was an academic, Mercur Olsen, who had a point that a lot of human ills, be it capitalism, race riots, instability in the Byzantine Empire (and feudalism in general), et al, were mostly due to rent seeking behavior.
Re:Misidentifying talent
by openfuture on Tuesday February 22, 2022 @07:05AM
(#30426852)
They also face denial of service attacks in the form of all sorts of nitpicks of presentation and ofc all funding sources have strings attached.
Re:Misidentifying talent
by nopenopenopeno on Tuesday February 22, 2022 @05:36AM
(#30426212)
Well said. This is American society in a nutshell.
I am starting to think this is a broader trend in human societies and is probably the primary failure mode of human enterprise more broadly.
People who aren't inclined to creative rational problem solving must still produce labors for the masters if they do not want to starve in the street like the examples we leave there to suffer publicly as a reminder of the cost of disobedience.
So, they obfuscate and manipulate the perception of competence and disenfranchise the creative rationalists to survive in the forced competition for artificially scarce basic necessities.
This evolves incrementally until there is no remaining economic activity except theft and fraud, the creative rationalists evacuate to the frontier, everyone else follows as things start sucking less over there, and the cycle begins anew.