Embedded Growth Obligations

Embedded Growth Obligations (EGOs) are structures built into institutions in times of growth that assume growth will continue. An institution must therefore grow to meet its EGOs, or its leaders must lie about the presence of growth. This compromising of incentives causes institutions to tend towards exploitative or sociopathic behaviors, as their leaders face selective pressures to maintain the status quo. Eric Weinstein first publicly introduced the idea in his first appearance on The Rubin Report on January 6, 2017.

History

Embedded Growth Obligations became prevalent during the stable, broadly distributed, technologically-led economic growth following World War II.

Physicist and historian of science Derek de Solla Price first mapped embedded growth obligations in his 1961 book Science Since Babylon, where he noticed that science was on an exponential trajectory that could not reasonably be sustained.

Examples

• Pension plans
• Social security
• Corporate ladders
• Student loans for higher education

Child Theories

Eric Weinstein contends that the embedded growth obligations are generative (parents) of major problems in modern society, and that these are a specific instantiation of institutional derangement due to embedded growth obligations.

• H1B Visas as a mechanism to suppress STEM wages
• Manipulation of Consumer Price Index
• Student debt crisis
• Mask and PPE shortages in the Coronavirus pandemic as a result of institutional failures
• String Theory as a dead-end in physics
• The reproducibility crisis in the social sciences
• Campaign finance corruption and unfairness

Further Discussion

Embedded Growth Obligations are the way in which institutions plan their future predicated on legacies of growth. And since the period between the end of World War II in 1945 and the early 70s had such an unusually beautiful growth regime, many of our institutions became predicated upon low-variance technology-led, stable, broadly distributed growth. Now, this is a world we have not seen in an organic way since the early 1970s, and yet, because it was embedded in our institutions, what we have is a world in which the expectation is still present in the form of an embedded growth obligation. That is, the pension plans, the corporate ladders, are all still built very much around a world that has long since vanished.

We have effectively become a Growth Cargo Cult. That is, once upon a time, planes used to land in the Pacific, let's say, during World War II, and Indigenous people looked at the air strips and the behavior of the air traffic controllers, and they've been mimicking those behaviors in the years since as ritual, but the planes no longer land. Well, in large measure, our institutions are built for a world in which growth doesn't happen in the same way anymore.

-Eric Weinstein on The Portal #18 @ 13 min

"We have effectively entered a period in which we cannot trust our experts. I think that what began as a desire to contribute and to do real work, ended with an understanding that we’ve got two generations of institutional experts that are corrupted, and that we cannot wake up from this crazy fever dream that we’re all in, because we can’t figure out who we can still trust.

The doctors are compromised. The professors are compromised. The Journalists are compromised. The politicians are compromised.

About the only thing that isn’t badly compromised are people with an independent source of sustenance — individuals and very small groups are about the only thing that is free of this disease of the Embedded Growth Obligation (EGO)."

-Eric Weinstein

On X

2016

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Large institutions built on implicit growth expectations don't die when growth runs out. They simply become pathological in steady state.

12:39 AM · Sep 20, 2016

2020

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

So far as I know have never seen this phenomena before.

Only one generation is stewarding our collective future. *Every* research university has loaded up mountains of student debt, armies of unwanted administrators, foreign STEM workers, and soaring tuition costs.

Every one.

11:35 PM · Jan 25, 2020

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

As recently as the 1980s, the median age of a university President was 51 I believe or thereabouts. That would be *more* than half of them Millenial and GenX.

We have simply never experimented with one generation as dominant and as unconcerned for the collective future before.

11:35 PM · Jan 25, 2020

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Any attempt to question their stewardship results in allegations of agism, xenophobia, elitism and sour grapes.

But look at the graphs of any research university. They all tell the same story. You don’t even have to tell me which one. It’s a coming time-bomb.

This is E.G.O.s.

11:39 PM · Jan 25, 2020

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

People ask why I’m on about masks. I’m not focused on them. I’ve been trying to tell you about my theory of Embedded Growth Obligations and how our *entire* civilian lead leadership has become deranged by them.

Masks just show us they‘re willing to kill, and without blinking.

4:26 PM · Mar 31, 2020

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

2008 was about the theory of E.G.O.s. And it looked like this. Sooner or later we‘ll get to serious armed conflict w/ developed nations if we want to sit & wait for that.

I guess I have a vague hope that we will wake up earlier when we see Doctors & Nurses in Queens put at risk.

4:26 PM · Mar 31, 2020

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

But maybe this is getting boring. I mean, it’s just our governmental & world organization leaders pushing us in front of a train to cover for their failures so that their careers aren’t interrupted with so much as a hiccup. So same old, same old.

Frankly, I want off the Titanic.

4:26 PM · Mar 31, 2020

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

There is some rule that leaders never pay w/ their careers or their freedom. That didn’t use to be true. We used to jail people, clawback their gains, and promote based on vigor/ability. And we will again. We just have to flush two generations of leaders that changed our rules.

4:26 PM · Mar 31, 2020

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

So no, it’s not about masks. It’s not about forest fire management. It’s not about central bank tampering. It’s not about campaign finance. It’s not about H1B. It’s not about String Theory or a reproducibility crisis.

It’s about their parent theory: Embedded-Growth-Obligations.

4:26 PM · Mar 31, 2020

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

The simple through line is this: your leadership was selected for based on an ability not to upset their own and other institutions while those institutions had to lie about their success & inability to grow.

This leadership cohort is generation ponzi. That’s their superpower.🙏

4:26 PM · Mar 31, 2020

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

“What happened in 1971-1973?” maybe the most underrated question of our time.

There are roughly two schools. The larger more prestigious school thinks it was about economics.

The smaller school thinks the economics were downstream of science and Embedded Growth Obligations.

4:02 PM · May 6, 2020

Michael P Gibson

@William_Blake

WTF Happened In 1971?

Very much understudied era in history. The fork in the road, when stagnation began to spread. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com

8:22 PM · May 5, 2020

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

The larger school has the gold standard/Breton Woods, female entrants into the labor pool, Arab oil embargo, Watergate etc... on its side. If you want somewhere to start, start there.

My school simply says that it was destined to blow up & we just chose the path. A very bad one.

4:02 PM · May 6, 2020

Horus Virahanka

@HorusVirahanka

Just Mikovits makes a compelling case against Bayh-Dole act accelerating the problem in 1980.

4:06 PM · May 6, 2020

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Eilberg act in 1976 was first. Then Bayh-Dole undermined the Vannavar Bush endless frontier arrangment.

4:07 PM · May 6, 2020

Related Pages

• Boskin Commission
• CPI
• The Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (The DISC)
• Gated Institutional Narrative (GIN)
• Horse-and-Rider Problem
• Immigration
• Jessupization
• Kayfabe
• Kayfabrication
• Labor Shortages
• Managed Reality TM
• Peer Injunction
• Peer Review
• Quantum Gravity
• String Theory

Links

Eventually, this page should be a fuller explanation of EGO, but for the time being here are a few links to things we were able to find doing a Google Search.

• Rebel Wisdom: Glitch in the Matrix II (5:18–9:13)
• Rubin Report: Jun 29, 2018 (27:47–31:57)
• Why We Can No Longer Trust Our Experts
• Eric Weinstein Intellectual Dark Web
• Child Theories
• The Portal: Eric Weinstein on Embedded Growth Obligations
• Peter Thiel and Eric Weinstein: Why Universities Have Failed