David Brooks in the New York Times: The Protocol Society
“In the 19th and 20th centuries we made stuff: corn and steel and trucks. Now, we make protocols: sets of instructions. …A protocol economy tends toward inequality because some societies and subcultures have norms, attitudes and customs that increase the velocity of new recipes while other subcultures retard it. Some nations are blessed with self-reliant families, social trust and fairly enforced regulations, while others are cursed by distrust, corruption and fatalistic attitudes about the future. It is very hard to transfer the protocols of one culture onto those of another.”


