One of the big wins of capitalism is that it creates strong private incentives for some kinds of social change. If someone has an idea for change, they can get investors and employees to work with them, in the hope of rewards if the change earns profits.

Alas, the most fundamental problem with social change in our world is that capitalism doesn’t encourage many other kinds of changes. Yes, under democracy elected politicians can get some weaker rewards for proposing changes. But for anything but small local changes, it isn’t worth a politican’s time to work out change details, explain it to voters, and organize support. That sort of thing is left to social movements and organized interest groups.

While many will deny it, the main promise that movements make to potential recruits is this: “If we win, you win”. Thus we mainly see movements around changes that can credibly make such promises. For example, crypto promises to reward investors with more money, and workers with valued job skills. Academic and technical movements promoting particular tools promise rewards to those who invest in these tools, relative to those who invest in competing tools.

Sometimes a movement has a vague label, and the real message is “As we ‘own’ this label, if our movement grows then we can send rewards to the high status loyalists among us.” Sometimes the movement’s implicit message is simply “We need to replace old folks with young folks like us in positions of influence.”

In entertainment and fashion movements, the reward can just be looking and sounding more knowledgable and “with-it”. For example, if I watch a lot of Game of Thrones, and it is popular, then in conversations I can relate to and say more about what others discuss. If locally sourced foods get popular, then I can seem more with-it when I cook such foods or recommend their restaurants. And if I grow or sell local food, I can gain even more. If I do or don’t wear masks, and then my mask side wins, I can brag that I supported the winning side.

The key point is that there are a lot of good ideas for change, including ideas that most people will admit are good ideas upon examination, where it is hard to organize supporting movements this way. For example, you can make a movement around a new way to teach kids, as you might start a school or be a teacher that uses it, or you might have your kid taught with it. But it is much harder to make a make a movement around the idea that there should just be a lot less school, unless you push a particular alternative to school.

Colleges rate professor teaching via student evaluations, which seems to have zero correlation with how much students learn, even though learning is the main reason given to attend college. But it seems hard to start a moment to fix this. We probably could construct ways to evaluate teacher effectiveness at student learning, but that would take resources away from other things, and would interfere with letting teachers teach any way they like. And a movement to just stop using current evaluations would admit to the public that we don’t care much about teaching quality.

More generally, when the public will mainly listen to people who specialize in X regarding changes in X, it is hard to make a movement to cut back on X. You can have movements to increase investments in X, or change how X is done, but the people who gain from cutting X are not the people listened to much on X.

Note that early on, movements can just promise gains via personal association with prestigious founders. It is later on when movements need to offer other rewards.

Futarchy would solve this, as it could give much stronger rewards for initiating changes. (At least for problems that government can solve.) But what would be gained by those who joined a movement to promote futarchy? The mechanism is simple, so there’s little to gain from investing in learning how to use it. It doesn’t promise to promise the young over the old, or to promote any particular policies for which we could identify the winners. Just making the world, or your nation better, inspires little passion.