On competition in the education sector: if you allow institutions to compete with each other, they will compete, but at the margin it is in general easier to improve the quality of an institution by improving its intake (i.e. becoming more selective) than it is to improve the quality of the teaching. That means that the vast majority of the effort made by institutions will be to become more selective, not to improve themselves. This is the application of marginal cost thinking to the problem of education: a purely economic idea.
In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel says you don’t want to be competing directly. You want to create a mini monopoly in some area where you have an absolute advantage. This applies generally. I was just thinking about the piracy cost being imposed on container ships at the moment. Pirates are in fact incentivised to extract from ocean transport exactly as much value as it generates - no more, because then people stop trading; but no less. But if all big innovations are always subject to corrosive value-leaching like piracy, then the incentive to create new structures goes away. Hence - and I’m missing a few steps here - the need for government.
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