Thomas Malthus started being featured as a byline, after he wrote “An Essay on the Principle of Population”. This gave rise to the concept of the multi-polar trap (or Malthusian Trap), driven by compeition causing coordination failure.

In a sufficiently intense competition, everyone who doesn’t throw all their values under the bus dies out – think of the poor rats who wouldn’t stop making art. This is the infamous Malthusian trap, where everyone is reduced to “subsistence”.

In an insufficiently intense competition, all we see is a perverse failure to optimize – consider the journals which can’t switch to more reliable science, or the legislators who can’t get their act together and eliminate corporate welfare. It may not reduce people to subsistence, but there is a weird sense in which it takes away their free will.

An example relevant to Happily Ever After

The utopia where all hospitals use the same electronic medical record system, or at least medical record systems that can talk to each other, so that doctors can look up what the doctor you saw last week in a different hospital decided instead of running all the same tests over again for $5000.

This gives rise to neo-reactionary responses such as the-opposite-of-a-trap-is-a-garden.