Long Space

I play a lot of long games. I am patient and can defer reward from one particular venue in my life for quite some time hoping it comes to realization on its own. I enjoy the fruits of other orchards in the mean time. I am almost definitely a part of the self-control elite and I have the incredible fortune and privilege to think about how to play the next decade of my life rather than just the next week or next few hours. Once your basic needs are met, you start to pursue ‘higher’ goals. Higher is just another way of saying ‘long-term’. I think anyone who reaches a certain level of security is incentivized to play these long games.

Organizations also ascend Maslow’s hierarchy - first they attempt just to survive. They are focused on recruiting members, as well as retaining and growing their capital.

5000 years ago the Yellow River Valley in China was populated by different peoples in little villages. Their floodplain settlements were unsurprisingly prone to devastating floods every few years. The solution to their problem was simple, known and would benefit everyone - a dam upriver that would hold excess water during the occasional heavy rainy season. However, each individual village lacked the resources to send workers, materials to the build site and stem the flood. Why, after all, should they donate to the long-term future of everyone in the floodplain even if they had the resources to do so? Why should they risk leaving themselves defenseless and without a potential backup crop for a hard year?

Over the years a few of them built up enough spare grain and time to build weapons and wage war against their neighbors. One particularly successful crew blessed with a bumper crop and ample energy, hopped from village to village, uniting the floodplain under one authority. Victorious, that authority sat with the surplus of a whole valley and nothing to do - and turned its attention to building the dam.

The lesson here for me is clear: Institutions can be trusted to do the right thing after all harmful options have been exhausted.

Today, we have tech companies that are sitting on $50 billion+ in cash. 30 years ago there were few countries that had the same level of disposable assets. The Catholic Church also sits on an incredible treasure trove of wealth, not just money, but art, land, and mindshare in populations across the globe. What do these institutions do once they have such an incredibly long leash? What does one do with the kind of wealth that used to bankrupt nations? And, the most important question to me: why do they get to play long games in a way that others don’t?

Anand Giridharadas points out the distorted way planning for long-term futures for society has been coopted by very wealthy people instead of in the hands of collective-power-imbued state authorities in his book Winners Take All. The long space has become polluted with actors as big and ancient as the Catholic church and smaller actors like tech billionaires, all fighting for dominance over a future and sort of ignoring the present. This is perhaps the crux of the problem with inequality - the people dispensing money in our society are not urgently connected to the problems of the average person. They have the time to detach and anticipate problems like the rise of an AI that will dominate all of humanity and begin to construct a plan to fight that AI with six-figure jobs writing software and calling it the most effective altruism.

Perhaps the worst offenders in this are colleges with their endowments, and specifically that one in Boston that slowly keeps buying up all the property around and screwing over its own workers and students. Harvard has accumulated so much money and prestige it has no organizational imperative now but to spread and take over. A university that could provide free education to every student every year for a very long time instead focuses on continuing to grow its wealth.

There isn’t much to bemoan here, I suppose. It’s decidedly not great that a few individuals can deploy massive amounts of moneyto shape the future of certain areas and act like kings. We are NOT in the age of kings and we definitely don’t want to return to that kind of history. However, isn’t it inevitable that as we get wealthier as a society, incredibly wealth and power will sometimes accrue to a few who can then convert between the two as they wish to shape the world as they want? Maybe I’m too fatalistic about this. I, for one, do not welcome our billionaire overlords.