The incursion of markets into domains that have traditionally been placed beyond the reach of markets is having a profound cultural effect on global society.
The world is now undergoing a more severe form of modernity.
The best things in life are free because they are given with the grace of God. Pushing the reach of a consumer society to the point where those free goods will have to begin to be priced is not a trivial matter. That market incursion of the pricing of those things that should by rights be gifted is what we often call prostitution.
The question is what's the relationship between prostitution and the resource curse? The resource curse is about the lack of self-restraint on the part of those who would administer the common wealth. The ruling elite needs to safeguard the power and the dignity of those they lead. That safeguarding belongs to traditional values. It is a matter of appreciating the qualitative over the quantitative, the design within bounds rather than the raw acquisition of power.
Self-restraint and the respecting of limits, which comes with the adherence to standards and practices, are all issues of design and architecture rather than optimization, which is what unfettered engineering is all about.
The first law of thermodynamics, the conservation of matter and energy, is about quantity; the second law, the law of entropy, is about quality.
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