You don't need governments to explain it. > a generation that pulls up the ladder as soon as they have something This is a generally dangerous catalyst for st

You don't need governments to explain it. > a generation that pulls up the ladder as soon as they have something This is a generally dangerous catalyst for stagnation. It has happened in technology much more than in the broader economy. The successful don't want to play by the same rules as the upcoming, even though they were once in the same position. They do this by changing the rules as soon as they have power, to lock out any contenders. Sure, homeowners have hacked the system to keep their "assets" rising. But tech is a better example. It was very fluid and disruptive in the early days. The victors, the Big-5, got there by quickly realising, as Lessig noted, that code could be used to modify the playing field. Sure, they bought regulatory laws like the DCMA, but even without that, non-interoperability, embrace-extend-extinguish, standards breaking, patent trolling and knowledge destruction, acquisition and mothballing of competition... all part of the same play-book to stop _you_ from doing what _they_ were able to. I don't think the problem of the pulled-up ladder, of self-modifying code, is given enough attention in dynamic macro-economics.