A Diagram of Upward Motion
June 25, 2025
Multiple worlds with people embedded from multiple places
There is something about the nature of the modern world that is the following:
- If you are a specialist career (software, physics, finance, medicine, research, basically almost every category of career) there are conferences which take place in different cities or even countries. For example, NeurIPS, Gordon Research Conferences, VueConf, APS Global Physics Summit, International Carotenoid Society. If you have high mobility and know how to travel easily, then your chance of connection increases at conferences.
- Even though many fields are specialized, some specialist jobs do not pay well, such as introductory college lecturer.
- Even though trades may make money, the culture and types of people will differ from specialized fields (That being said, trades in wealthy California may significantly differ compared to Mississippi). Operational subsistence roles have significantly different culture and low pay.
- There is high transportation so people try to move to developed areas.
- Therefore for those in a specialist field, their main path is to keep moving forward, start their own business, marry someone financially stable, or move to a decent locale to work a simple operational role.
What I see more or less is that the above is the scene for the federal or global economy. In places such as the American South or Midwest, it seems like there is a strong group feeling that they are from those places, so even though they might not be competing in a specialist economy or leading in their field, they do the templating for local businesses such as a local marketing firm, local software shop which may serve the local university, hospital system, car dealerships, airport, etc. of which connection is more important than skill.
The rough explanation for how American society got into this position is likely a combination of the internet (increased communication), increased transportation, and the large population size.
Economic Hierarchy and Upward Motion
This is a rough diagram generated with Claude.
Blocking Factors that prevent movement from Imitation to Leading Economy:
- Limited cognitive ability from birth
- Family conditions & background
- Lack of educational opportunities
- Insufficient money/resources
- Geographic isolation
- Social connections
┌─────────────────────────────────┐
│ LEADING ECONOMY │
│ (Creates worlds & rules) │
│ • Scientists & Labs │
│ • Corporate Executives │
│ • Political Leaders │
│ • Curriculum Writers │
└─────────────────┬───────────────┘
│
┌───────────┼───────────┐
│ │ │
▼ ▼ ▼
┌─────────┐ ┌─────────┐ ┌─────────┐
│Templates│ │Templates│ │Templates│
│& Rules │ │& Rules │ │& Rules │
│ │ │ │ │ │
│Software │ │Account- │ │Engineers│
│Engineers│ │ants │ │Lawyers │
│Doctors │ │Analysts │ │Consult- │
│Police │ | │ │ants │
└─────────┘ └─────────┘ └─────────┘
│ │ │
▼ ▼ ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────┐
│ IMITATION ECONOMY │
│ (Students in their youth) │
│ (Aspires to Leading Economy) │ ▲
│ │ │ Wants to
│ ┌─────────┐ ┌─────────┐ │ │ move up
│ │College │ │Graduate │ │ │ but most
│ │Students │ │Students │ │ │ can't make
│ │Young │ │Young │ │ │ the jump
│ │Professionals│Academics│ │ │
│ └─────────┘ └─────────┘ │ │
└─────────────────────────────────┘ │
│ │
▼ │
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ REPEATER ECONOMY │
│ (Follows templates) │
│ │
│ Specialized Repeaters: Basic Repeaters: │
│ ┌─────────────────────┐ ┌─────────────────────┐ │
│ │ • 3rd/4th Tier │ │ • Retail Workers │ │
│ │ Colleges │ │ • Service Staff │ │
│ │ • Specialized but │ ──────▶│ • Enlisted Soldiers │ ───┘
│ │ not leading roles │ │ • Warehouse Workers │
│ │ • Distribution of │ │ • Food Delivery │
│ │ leading ideas │ │ • Subsistence Ops │
│ └─────────────────────┘ └─────────────────────┘
│ ▲ ▲
│ │ │
│ │ ┌─────────────────────┐│
│ └────────│ POPULATION ││
│ │ (Largest) ││
│ │ ││
│ │ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ││
│ │ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ││
│ │ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ││
│ │ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ││
│ └─────────────────────┘│
│ │
│ Informal/Gig Economy: │
│ ┌─────────────────────────────────────┐ │
│ │ Home Bakers, Rideshare Drivers, │ │
│ │ Subsistence Farmers, Local Services │◄┘
│ └─────────────────────────────────────┘
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘Upward motion is natural given our present state
Many humans naturally leave high entropy areas and seek to join low entropy areas. The perennial question is whether those moving to the high entropy areas are capable of recreating it, maintaining it, or destroying it.
Given that we have high mobility in the society and economy, people are crowding into cities. They will find that cities are often not the destination, but it was better than where they came from. (I suspect the really good neighborhoods are hidden away somewhere local and not on the internet).
Exit, voice, and loyalty gives a good model. People may believe their current place is unfixable and they have the ability to leave, so they exit. Or it will take too long to fix: their current skills and the place they could join are significantly better than their origins.
Or those around them simply don’t understand or are unwilling to change things. (This is why quality food is important, it increases our adaptive and understanding ability, but some limits from birth are not fixable).
It is difficult to create loyalty if for example, a person comes from a place where there is no running water or toilets, yet the people there see no problem with it, so this is why a young person may leave the countryside/suburbs because they will come to see their former countrymen as crass and rude.
The location of a college is highly underrated because many of the people you know will come from that specific area and end up settling there. Just look at the LinkedIn alumni locations.
Existence as connection
People’s connections are a gradient and not absolute. Someone may be affiliated to a top school, yet they lack the money to rent good housing near their town. Someone may be a wealthy business owner, yet still blue-collar and not in a social world. Some people lack all of the aforementioned, and can only work simple repeater jobs. One might be in a small and insignificant town all things considered, but they have community and do well.
For example, being in a certain city affiliates you with: people from certain industries and colleges, a Costco, an IKEA, a specific airport, etc. While being out in a very remote area affiliates you with very little. In the Muqaddimah, sub-Saharan Africa and Russia were known to be poor because of their distance away from areas of trade such as the Mediterranean.
I’ve listed what I believe to be the most significant factors from most to least: your cognitive ability from birth, your family conditions (unless you separate from them such as going to a top boarding school on scholarship), your educational experiences and intellectual milieu, money, the city your family lives in, the country and passport you have, friends.
One and two are a bit interchangeable. In the long term (1) should do better. All of these factors are also tightly coupled to each other. You need contrast in life to experience what you do have. Friends become more important later in life. In the beginning everyone has to do their own career.
Repeater Economy
We must clarify the two types of “repeaters” in the economy. The first type is subsistence operational roles of low skill, such as working in a supermarket, warehouse, security guard, or food delivery. The second are “repeaters” but in a specialized role or industry, who might aim to lead in their field (though it is competitive).
The specialized repeater economy such as your third or fourth tier colleges, despite not being original work, actually serves a use. Distribution of the ideas of the leading economy.
Basic Repeater Economy
Those in a Home Depot, a Target, or other stores are in a “repeater” role, where the headquarters does the mental templating of the stores while those working operationally are living in their worlds. This might also include your enlisted soldiers (as opposed to NCO/officers).
We are reaching a point where those local are increasingly less independent, for the lack of connection to neighborhood and people. A local grocery store owner knows the people, a Walmart worker does not. A person may know doing something is reasonable, yet the laws do not permit this discretion.
As a general rule in the United States, people who do these positions live for their emotions, have present preference, tend to be consumptive, and may not really care about how they do in their jobs.
A contradiction exists when people have college education and awareness of their position in life, and potentially the ability to do well if they had a sufficient job opportunity, but the only jobs available for them are Subsistence Operational Roles, yet the majority of the people in these roles are the type of the previous paragraph.
If there was less of a difference in attitude, culture, and remuneration, I see no reason why I couldn’t work in a grocery store or gas station. They were quite nice in certain places I visited such as Cologne or Taipei, and certain parts of the United States. However, virtue, competence, quality, and excellence, etc, do not stand out in these positions.
Moreover, a second contradiction exists when certain jobs and colleges that should select for those with the adaptability and conscientiousness to run things well actually select for those who merely appear such due to the prevalence of factors such as increased college expenses, grade inflation, cheating, etc.
Even though students may come from good families, their own temperament and ability may not suit them to achieve the same level of career renown, social connection, and remuneration as their expectations may hope.
Leading Economy
This allows you latitude in creating worlds and experiencing them. You have the mobility to do things. These include your leading scientists and labs, executives at the major companies, those in the political world, and so on. This includes the people who write the AP curriculum and standardized testing, rather than the teachers who grade to a standard.
However, one thing I’ve noticed from a few conversations is that leaders don’t exercise their powers nearly as much as they could. Some of them don’t realize that they can independently change the world and are following the patterns of life others set for them.
Even if you are a highly remunerated white collar role, you may still have to do the templating of others’ actions for a while before reaching a place where you have some ability to create your own decisions.
Informal/gig
The informal economy is the taxi scalper at the train station, the person who bakes food at their home and sells them, the person living off of subsistence agriculture or selling their vegetables at a farmer’s market, or someone who offers local cleaning services or dog walking.
The gig economy is a formalized version of the informal economy that seems to arbitrage the decline in community and trust due to the internet age. Rideshare drivers, handymen, delivery drivers, and so on.
I don’t think we see as much subsistence agriculture these days because the world is more “built,” so working these informal and gig jobs provides better material condition than remotely living in wilderness and growing your own food. Furthermore, agriculture’s benefits historically scaled with population: it’s unlikely that you’d find multiple willing to join you in this activity given our present day and age.
Agriculture itself now requires technology to be competitive, and technology being a craft comes from the cities.
Why does society turn into this form?
In the beginning, you just have hunter-gatherers and nomads. Then some cities and agricultural civilization. Agricultural villages then distribute themselves based upon distance to each other because so much land supports only so many people. From these come commercial cities, focused on specialized production of goods (crafts). At some point, companies come into existence. The transportation system expands significantly. Companies start competing against each other and acquiring each other whereas previously they were separated by legal barriers (think East Germany companies going under after reunification).
Old-style agriculture is not as efficient compared to mechanized types. Smaller cities disappear due to the young leaving because having things together in a metropolis allows for denser specialization and more jobs, and it grows piecemeal as more people move in. Often this can be very disorderly and leads to driving from one end of the city to the other taking over an hour. The exceptions to small cities disappearing seem to be those with anchor companies such as Zeiss in Oberkochen, Crown in New Bremen, Epic Systems in Verona, ULINE in Pleasant Prairie. Might be wrong, but I think Germanic companies have a tendency to do this.
When you operate a company, what you want is something close to a monopoly. You want to create the worlds that others live under so that they have no choice but to use the infrastructure you provide, either because there is no other choice or your offering is just that much better. For example, Apple’s M-series laptops. Apple makes the highest quality laptops: good battery life and fanless design, aluminum unibody chassis, glass trackpad that doesn’t actually move, G3 continuity corners, a OS that isn’t bloated like Windows. Nvidia chips are supposedly unparalleled. It can be hard to get distribution of your app without using one of the major channels such as Google.
At some point, your organization becomes like water: everyone needs it, so your work and means of existence naturally lead to supporting that created world, unless you choose to not live in it.
You have to drive a car in Dallas, and if you want to live there you support the car industry by buying a car (raising its value because buying things increases its value and selling decreases).
Accumulated levels of skill, expertise, and built worlds make it difficult for others to challenge, except in the case of new paradigms coming into existence.
If it becomes untenable for someone to use the existing paradigm (for example, almost all foods including vegetable oils) or if the publishing industry/Google charged prodigious rents or if a reserve currency becomes weaponized, then alternative paradigms will sprout into existence if others have the capability to do so. People only choose to live in your world if they consider it just and fair.
The current state
Operations of scale seem to be more efficient, so large companies gobble up smaller ones in mergers and acquisitions. Decision making becomes more centralized due to communications and transportation, and actual difference between regions diminishes. People with high skill become like gods and unwilling to give up their luxury, others get sidelined into repeater roles.
Since smaller local companies don’t exist anymore (this is true: the major businesses in a town might be Costco, Starbucks, Walmart, Home Depot, the local hospital, Dollar General, etc.), people are funneled into universities in a rat race: either get to one of the major companies or get stuck in a subsistence operational role.
There is usually also a network of inherited wealth within the city that depends upon networking/connections.
Less individual, localized attention can be given to things. Low quality housing springs up everywhere, such as university housing with laminate floors near large universities to account for the increase in student population growth. Despite that, construction isn’t enough to keep up with rent price increases.
One might choose to opt out, but staying in your local area doesn’t seem as effective either: since the world is now categorized by centralizations of skill and knowledge, you won’t learn as much locally nor have much income.
Thus, inequality is more a function of population size within the country because the language barriers and legal limits naturally form a “barrier” for companies and organizations, preventing too large of an aggregation. This competitiveness certainly seems to apply to India, China, and the United States, but what about countries such as Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, or Brazil?
We see the interests of the government by the people and the interests of companies are at odds. Government creates money through programs: SSI, Medicaid, mortgages, etc. But the interest of companies is often not in the welfare of the people they serve but in their own profit, so they may follow rules nominally to just deliver something of low quality or even harming their patients.
Why does the leading class of the United States not re-distribute to the population? My opinion: simply because they are not dependent upon the country’s population itself to maintain their position, so it is not in their self-interest.
The leading universities pull in people from American International schools, private boarding schools of which well-known ones include Andover and Exeter, which then get funneled into the top employers. There was this McKinsey application question about whether someone went to school in England, Germany, or Japan. Their cities are New York, San Francisco, Boston, DC, London, etc. They can offshore to other countries for the simple work. They’ll never set foot in the interior of the country, they will not have any group feeling for them or what it’s like to live in such ways.
In the end I think we’ll see small towns become connected by transportation to larger cities and in a way become suburbs connected to those metropolises, breathing some life into them. I can imagine this happening to Providence-Boston, or connecting Scranton to NYC. But not everybody will be able to escape the big city and create their own developed small town somewhere nor achieve a level of economic security to do so.
Who were those homeless people on the street? For the most part I’d imagine they used to be part of a family somewhere. Direct wealth transfers (SS, Medicaid) won’t solve the lack of connection to rural areas due to transportation inefficiency or missing group feeling. An old person with no family nor friends can only depend upon the charity and responsibility of others.