The Real Bottleneck to Progress

The real bottleneck to progress is coordination, not knowledge.

We are not held back by a lack of good ideas. Humanity has had blueprints for energy abundance, clean water, nutrition, and education for decades. The deeper constraint is coordinated action. Incentive misalignment, local optima, and entrenched institutional power structures prevent execution. Most problems persist not because we don’t know how to solve them, but because we can’t agree to.

Why it matters: Breakthroughs will come less from novel inventions and more from novel coordination protocols, whether tech, legal, or cultural.