But it’s 29 years old, written when the true internet era was still just a gleam in Al Gore’s eye. You could further argue that the passage predicted the Great Stagnation that Tyler Cowen identified in 2011, the productivity slowdown and disappointing economic growth that followed the initial 1990s-era internet boom. Writing for Quillette, he argues that globalization and homogenization have reduced cultural competition in roughly the way that the “Lost World” passage describes. It’s not just that we’re forgoing opportunities to improve our macro cultures. Shouldn’t we expect that macro cultures, when selection is weak, will drift into dysfunction just as firm cultures do?

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Persons: Marc Andreessen, Michael Crichton’s, Crichton’s, Ian Malcolm, ” Malcolm, Al, John, Tyler Cowen, Malcolm, Crichton, Robin Hanson, It’s, Hanson, ” Organizations: Benetton, Western, George Mason University Locations: Bangkok, Tokyo, London, Al Gore’s, John Hammond’s, Davos, South Korea