I don’t know if I qualify as part of the small percentage of people without a smartphone. I keep an old iPhone without a plan and use it essentially as an iPod. The pressure to conform, at least in my experience, is real; the rachet is real.
I hope you take the next step and offer some alternative paths beyond the one this free market has handed us—something concrete or high-minded or specific examples of things you’d like to see or whatever.
I wonder if more bike infrastructure could help? I was an exchange students in the Netherlands, they had pedestrian only areas in cities and bike only paths/roads into cities in many areas. In my wi suburban city, we have beautiful bike paths but they're intended for recreation and not very practical for errands etc
Yeah very similar. I think both are a kind of path dependency. If I were pretending to be an economist I might call this “path dependency with asymmetric substitution.” But one-way ratchet is easier to say haha
I worry that AI will accelerate the requirements in society to have a smartphone. The more companies can try to offload labor the more the rest of society will have to interact with their workflows.
Interesting that all three examples (cars, smartphones and cashless) are especially challenging for kids:
-Cars - because they don't have drivers licenses
- smartphones: because they're bad for kids as you noted
- cashless: because minors can't qualify on their own for credit cards
Good point!
I don’t know if I qualify as part of the small percentage of people without a smartphone. I keep an old iPhone without a plan and use it essentially as an iPod. The pressure to conform, at least in my experience, is real; the rachet is real.
I hope you take the next step and offer some alternative paths beyond the one this free market has handed us—something concrete or high-minded or specific examples of things you’d like to see or whatever.
I wonder if more bike infrastructure could help? I was an exchange students in the Netherlands, they had pedestrian only areas in cities and bike only paths/roads into cities in many areas. In my wi suburban city, we have beautiful bike paths but they're intended for recreation and not very practical for errands etc
This phenomenon seems sort of related to Kahn's "Tyranny of Small Decisions" but not quite the same thing.
Yeah very similar. I think both are a kind of path dependency. If I were pretending to be an economist I might call this “path dependency with asymmetric substitution.” But one-way ratchet is easier to say haha
I worry that AI will accelerate the requirements in society to have a smartphone. The more companies can try to offload labor the more the rest of society will have to interact with their workflows.
Excellent essay. I have come across these examples of getting locked into development path dependencies and it’s great that I now have a name for it.
One way ratchet, the evil twin of the network effect!