Capitalism is great at the lower layers of Maslow's hierarchy but terrible for the higher layers, where optimization destroys meaning.
But we use it for both!
From other episodes
- A way to clean up lower layers in a system: first, inject a higher layer above it in the right shape.2026-08-03
- An "inductively knowable" UX works great with reasonable defaults.2026-01-06
- The force that separates things into pace layers is the rate of change.2025-09-29
- Centralization at the higher layers matters more than at the lower layers.2025-09-15
- It's best to abduct sugar layers out of real usage of lower layers of the system.2025-06-30
- The lower layers in a system don't go away, they just get more boring.2025-03-17
- It doesn't matter if lower layers are decentralized if the top layers are centralized.2024-03-18