Hi Tim, you said:
The _costs_ of extending beyond the Schelling point boundaries is deemed to be too high, and the boundary persists.
This reminds me of the transactional theory of business units. Working from memory, the optimal size of a business unit is positively related to the cost of the transactions conducted between units, other things being held constant. Thus, in a place where it is "expensive to do business" the dominant form of company will be large. Conversely in a cheap business environment, small companies will predominate. This notion spurs one to examine the transactional costs and to decide (or not) to lower them... The interesting part for your family context is that falling transaction costs have purportedly produced a shift away from large companies to smaller units. Those falling costs are in the sphere of digital communications, other technology, and regulation. If such were to apply to the context of families, upbringing children and education in general, one might predict that the size of the family should shrink. In a sense we might have already seen this. The extended family is really just a memory for most westerners, but is still the norm in poor countries. And I guess we have seen a strong increase in the number of single-parent families in most western countries. One would then be lead to ask, if you are proposing that Internet technologies in general and crypto in particular are influences on the Schelling points related to the family rights set, can this result in smaller family units? That is, the cost of providing (net) education falls, and the ease of crypto communication allows children to grow up as individuals in the big wide Inter-world rather than the shoolyard. If I were permitted to ramble without judicious limit, I would talk about the economic unit becoming a single person, and that person becoming responsible for their own success, regardless of their age. In this view of the future, a child is an economic unit, and is responsible for his own education, and thus must learn for the future. Obviously there is a bootstrapping problem here previously known as birth, and this could be addressed by well-meaning investors purchasing educational rights to a mother's future child (in effect, buying an unborn baby). The child then becomes the ward of the investor, who attempts to raise the child to produce the maximal return. Of course, in order to eliminate the distorting effects of love and child-like whims (I don't want to log into teacher today), there would have to be a free market for raising rights, based on caveat emptor examination of progress. Thus would be exist an informational approach to encourage the child's attention to books, and of course, towards a successful career as an investor in the youth of tomorrow. This would also allow specialisation of investment, those that concentrate on the early years, those on the teens and those that reap the final rewards of first productive working years. The arisal of these strata would lay to rest for ever that old saw of the economists by showing that there is no market failure in education, and thus no need for regulation. And in answer to those anticipated questions from concerned parents, no, I don't have any children, and yes, in the new world, senior citizens can contract to investors to provide granny services, so that they won't be unemployed. But perhaps I should really have placed a judicious limit on my ramblings :-) -- iang iang@systemics.com