Vitalik Buterin: belief

Transcript context

…Because even sunshine trading, where you would think the information asymmetry would be away, there’s still a bid-ask spread. It may be lower, but not as much lower as you might have thought. Final question: what’s the most fundamental reason why there seems to be a cost disease in, say, healthcare and education? Is this also rent extraction, or is it something fundamental about teaching humans and fixing them up? I can’t say I’m an expert on cost disease topics, though if I had to blab from my knowledge of economics and personal experience, both with North America and places like Asia that have less of them — first of all, it definitely is the case that places that seem to not have cost disease have more of a “just get things done” culture. Whereas places that do seem to have more of this culture of “oh, you need five kinds of approvals” — and I don’t even mean just regulatory. It could even be intra-institutional conformism of some kind. It could also be because, if you want to get things done cheaply, then you have to get in people’s way. And getting in people’s way is more difficult in more established societies where people have more expectations about things. It’s a fancy way of the equivalent of “Building a subway is cheaper if you can bulldoze a bunch of people,” but that applied to many more contexts and in much more abstract ways as well. Another one is probably like Robin Hanson’s argument that wealthier societies tend to do more signaling expenditure. A lot of the higher costs may have to do with increasing comfort and enjoyment, even though people aren’t willing to admit that that’s what they’re optimizing for. When you think of universities having impressive campuses instead of being based in piles of cheap real estate scattered across downtown, I think that’s part of why that happens. Then another thing is that there are cases where higher efficiencies are only possible because of economies of scale that just aren’t there in some contexts. In the case of land transportation infrastructure particularly, you go to Asia. China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, all have very impressive fast trains. You might ask, “Well, why don’t we have them here?” Then you look at people that are actually trying to build those trains, and it’s like, “Oh, five billion dollars for how many people?” Cost disease is part of it. Also, I think part of it is that, especially in lower-population-density environments, there are going to be contexts where more decentralized solutions — and in this case, I mean decentralized even as in uberPOOL — actually do end up making more sense. Vitalik, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you very much.…

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