Hey, John.

It's a bit more nuanced than that. In The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), Joseph Tainter looked at societal collapse. His conclusion was that "Solutions create complexity & bureaucracy that outweighs the benefits of solving them. This leads to societal collapse when investments in social complexity yield diminishing returns."

Imagine free-market capitalism (which led to the ridiculous $5,000 electrical bills.) Creating laws to govern capitalism incentivizes law firms to hold up prosecution, and eventually the cost of that lawyering exceeds the societal loss. As an example, the Exxon Valdez disaster was a huge boon to GDP because of the cleanup work, lawsuits, and so on—but was hardly valuable to society.

That's why I said "regulation seldom works." You can regulate the commons, but a tragedy still happens, because capitalism treats the future as an externality. What you need to do is change the Nash Equilibrium (or switch a finite game to an infinite one, as Simon Sinek would suggest.) That means finding new equilibria with better incentives.

I think we're seeing that today as the world shifts from atoms to bits. Whether it's an unjust arrest or pieces falling from an airplane, the amount of first-hand information, and the ability for direct representation, is a game changer for many aspects of free-market economies.

Anyway, if we're going to change the way things are, we need to subvert the status quo—which is the point of the book.