Week 2: Diminishing Returns Before It Was Cool

Involution had a life before the internet — in peasant economies, guild ladders, and the slow inflation of "entry level"

1 March 2027

Outline#

• Alexander Chayanov’s theory of the peasant household: labour allocated past the point of marginal return, absent an alternative use for it
• guild apprenticeship ladders whose length tracked congestion in the trade, not its difficulty
• a short history of the credentialing creep behind “entry-level”
• what distinguishes these precedents from a meme: no algorithm available to assign the blame to