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The leverage arbitrage: Why everything feels broken


Something fundamental has shifted in how power works, and most of our institutions haven't noticed. We're living through what might be called "leverage arbitrage divergence"—a growing gap between...

Meanwhile, the institutional commons that make civilization possible—shared truth, democratic discourse, economic mobility, social cohesion—continue degrading because they depend on lower-leverage maintenance that can't compete with higher-leverage extraction. If we don't develop conscious approaches to managing leverage arbitrage, we risk a future where technological capability advances exponentially while social coordination capacity deteriorates linearly—a recipe for civilizational breakdown. But if we can build leverage literacy into how we design institutions, raise children, and structure careers, we might create coordination mechanisms sophisticated enough to harness exponential technological power for genuinely beneficial outcomes.

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