"And that's why we can't have nice things", a statement that csawyer uses very often. More often than not, she was referring in a nearly tongue-in-cheek manner, but sad to say, this can be the truth in the real world.
The fundamental problem that contributes to this perspective is the tendency of people to "game" the system. Of course, when I say "game", I mean "treating the system in question as an optimisation problem and trying to solve it". There're many examples of this: the "grade inflation" problem as shown by the increasing number of students who are doing increasingly well in classes, the number of people who are actually in middle class now compared to 20 years ago, and even the gradual increase in wealth of the countries in general.
While I'm not advocating that "gaming" the system is a purely "bad" thing, what I'm trying to say here is that such behaviour is almost expected of us under any situation. It is an instinct that is strongly tied to the concept of survival; the one who can produce the most "optimal" outcome will be the one who has the highest chance of survival.
Which is why we cannot have nice things. Because the moment something nice is put in place, some unscrupulous people will start to "game" the system and then cause the infamous Pareto distribution to occur.
Okay, starting to be rather incoherent. I shall stop here.
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