Any agent whose existence is justified by a problem is paid to keep the problem, and, when the loop is inverted, rewarded for failing to fix it. Failure doesn’t cost the failer authority; it becomes the argument for giving them more. Not only a government pathology.
Links: Plato’s Ship of State (specimen that spawned this), History Repeats — Small-Pain-Tolerance, Government Formation (the exit-cost ratchet), Fiscal Pressure Must Leak Somehow, Business Cycles, The Gödel Governance Problem, Scope Confusion
“If the problem gets solved, there is no longer a reason for them to exist anymore. Plenty of incentives to create problems, plenty of disincentives to fix those problems.”
Three escalating forms:
The small-pain note says the feedback loop never closes on the actor: the consequence lands after they’re gone. Failure-as-mandate is the stronger claim, that the loop closes inverted. It is the misattribution link in the delegation loop from the Ship of State discussion: delegation → lag → misattribution → consolidation → complexity → delegation.
Chris, earlier (therapy debate): a perverse incentive to extend treatment is real, “but I don’t think this is good enough to say it is not ‘working.’” That page’s formulation: a perverse incentive predicts inefficiency, not failure. Billable-hour law and fee-for-service medicine both carry the incentive and both work.
So the incentive alone is not the ratchet. Proposed (Claude, open for Chris): the incentive becomes a ratchet when the discipline is missing:
Where both are present you get inefficiency. Where both are gone (monopoly, consolidated jurisdiction, decades of lag) you get the inverted loop. This would explain why the government case is the worst case: it is the agent most able to foreclose exit and the one with the longest lag.
IP removes the competition discipline. Chris: “this is usually addressed by those who want to see IP removed. If the company has the IP, there is no competition to keep things in check.”
Insulin. Chris: insulin was discovered decades ago, “and yet even past IP, insulin makers continue to modify the formula in order for their IP to stay current.” He knows diabetics, and grants the new formulas “do provide value due to ease of use and less side-effects, but that the market doesn’t provide all levels of coverage might be the failure of IP.”
Chris’s IP position: moderate, not abolitionist. “I am not completely against IP. I think copyright has its benefits for artists who make their living off of it, but I would agree we are erring on the side of too much protection.” The downside he names: “companies being able to rent stuff that was normally purchased, and use it to prevent right to repair.” (This updates the earlier “IP set aside” note in LZ course 03.)
The unifier, therapy = democracy. Chris:
“I do think the therapy ideas and the democracy ideas are similar. It is hard on the ‘customer’ to know when they no longer need service!”
Claude, prior art: this is the economist’s credence good (Darby & Karni, 1973), a service whose quality or necessity the buyer can’t judge even after consuming it, because the seller is also the diagnostician. The therapist, the doctor, the mechanic and the politician each tell you whether you still need them. So the attribution discipline sharpens into: can the customer tell when they’re done? The electrician is only partly a credence good (the lights come on); therapy, chronic treatment and governing are almost fully credence goods.
Revised discipline condition: the incentive stays as mere inefficiency while (1) a rival can collect the reward for solving the problem (IP and regulatory moats remove this) and (2) the customer can judge when the service is finished (credence goods fail this). Government fails both, as usual.
What the vault would add over these: the inversion (form 3) and the discipline condition (why the incentive sometimes stays as inefficiency and sometimes becomes a ratchet).