Trying to uncouple a few thoughts:
* As a whole, my belief that people do not materially change except in response to incentives is at odds with the fact I think a lot of modern culture discourse is driven by people being whiny babies with dumb expectations (elite overproduction)

* Humans can change along a pareto bound specified by physical technological determinism and pareto sentiments, shifted around step by step (path dependent?) with incentives

* If some degree of expectation management fixed some degree of culture, that would show I'm wrong about mutability of culture without change in incentives
* Different people respond to high thrive situations better than others.

* It is unclear if the sense of inability to change things is driven by physical technological determinism, or with significant intersection with state of bureaucracy.

* Running counter to all of this, and I can't find the tweet, is @lymanstoneky 's link about birth rate dropping when it occurred to people that they could just...have less kids.

* When I say path dependence of incentives, I mean culture at point A responds to incentives at point A, which leads them to pass bills, which (combined with other physical results of point A) lead to incentives at point B, and so on

. @Isegoria - via one of your commentators, who is my irl best friend, I had many discussions of the CPSOT stack of an ancient blog you used to
engage with, I think? Committee of Public Safety or something like that?