# "Modern economics assumes that we can get people to NOT coordinate"

Source: https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1783142518600696256
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Modern-economics-assumes-that-we-can-get-people-to-NOT-coordinate?index=0x662925d663131d27f310112b9ecac50966c525c2307e5a888bc4d120ebddc6cc175b4a6a
Submitted by tim on 2024-04-24 UTC, 2 upvotes, 0 comments

## Summary

Modern civilization rests on the assumption that people can be kept from coordinating with one another, and that assumption is becoming harder to sustain. The article lists examples including the separation of church and state, antitrust rules against corporations in one industry colluding, secret ballots, and witness independence. It argues that a century ago non-coordination held largely because communication was hard, while today executives, politicians, or other leaders could form a strategy in a chat group within minutes. The author says the main remaining barriers are personal morals and the fear that a collaborator might inform on others, and suspects the alternative is messy and still being worked out.

## Article

This is a far more key problem than almost anyone appreciates imo.

Not just modern economics, but much of modern civilization, is built on the assumption that we can get people to not coordinate with each other:

* Separation of church and state
* Antitrust (corp A and corp B in one industry)
* Politics (anti-bribe rules)
* Voting (secret ballot)
* Political contributions (eg. rules against foreign participation)
* Witnesses not being influenced by other parties to a case
* Strong versions of free speech (by which eg. organizing mobs to fire people is a violation)

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2020/09/11/coordination.html

And a hundred years ago, this worked reasonably well, because *communication was hard*. Non-coordination was the default, and there was already a high technological hurdle to coordinating.

Today, *communication is easy*. It takes only a few minutes for the CEOs of all major corps in some industry, or a CEO and a politician, or the pope and the president, or any one of a number of other possible pairings, to get into a chat group and start organizing a strategy.

The main disincentive against nefarious collusion is people's morals - both people's moral inclinations to not collude, and people's fear that someone with whom they try to collude will rat them out.

This remaining barrier is significant, but it's far lower than what we had 100 years ago. And so leaning as hard on non-collusion / separation / non-communication as we have been before is increasingly untenable.

What is the alternative? I don't know yet... I suspect it's messy and it's being figured out in real time.