Reward Hacking at the 1937 World’s Fair

The "Paris 1937 World’s Fair" was a dick measuring contest. At the time, the world was on the verge of the worst war in history. The fair was an opportunity for powers to flex and intimidate each other. Who has more industrial might, more sophisticated engineering and better science? How do you measure that? Different countries were assigned different areas of the fair and were given freedom to build a “Pavilion”, basically a museum of how cool the country is. It was an important public relations opportunity to showcase your power. What is better, communism or fascism? Obviously, it's whoever can build a cooler pavilion, and whoever has a better pavilion is going to win the upcoming war! Soviet pavilion on the right, Nazi pavilion on the left The organizers placed the Soviet and Nazi pavilions right in front of each other, and it created a very competitive dynamic. The Russians built a giant modernist building from stainless steel with a statue-of-liberty-sized sculpture of two members of the proletariat. The Nazis built a modern replica of an imperial Roman building, beautifully ornamented, with statues of jacked Aryan Übermensches flexing. The Nazis even sent their spies to steal the plans for the Soviet pavilion so they could build theirs a few meters higher. What about liberal democracy? The liberals had their own pavilions. The first was represented by Britain, the biggest and most populated empire at the time and the “leader of the free world” [1] The British pavilion was a relatively small "plain, windowless white cube". Inside, there were floor-to-ceiling photomurals of random Englishmen, including a photo of Neville Chamberlain (leader of the free world) fishing. There was also a display of English pottery [2] and a cafe that served Yorkshire tea. The pavilion only cost a fraction of its Soviet/Nazi counterparts and was made last-minute, haphazardly. They even shared it with Canada to save on cash. the British “cube” The British media was furious: "penurious [...] mere box with a bleak, windowless and boring wall to the river", "embarrassing austerity", "cheap, tawdry, inadequate, a shop display, a one-class exhibition.", "Every Briton feels humiliated at the sight of it," etc. "How could we defeat those scary totalitarian regimes if we can't even make a decent pavilion?" Adolf and Neville. This fishing photo decorated a 40ft tall wall in the British pavilion. The American pavilion was even lamer than the British one. There was very little coverage of it and it’s not even mentioned in the 1937 World’s Fair wikipedia article. The Times reported: “The U. S. pavilion was considered so bad that most French editors passed it over in polite silence.” [3] Maybe this is why there is so little information about it? We all know what happened. It's now 2026, almost 90 years after the Paris World’s Fair. Communism and fascism are both long gone. We live in a liberal world dominated by Anglo ideas of markets, rule of law, human rights, and free trade. The liberals had decisive back-to-back wins against the totalitarians in WW2 and later in the Cold War. The Anglo-Americans steamrolled the fascists and then the communists. The liberal victory was so dominant that Francis Fukuyama called it: “The End of History”. We won despite having really lame pavilions... How?! The authoritarians were “reward hacking”, they confused the “proxy” (making a cool pavilion), with the “objective” (having a productive economy and a high quality of life). This led to their pavilion to look cooler than the Anglo-Americans despite having less productive economies and smaller industries. There are plenty of other examples of authoritarian reward hacking. First, the Nazis and their costly wonder-weapons that are cool but do little damage [4] , obsession over Stalingrad and its symbolic meaning or Dönitz’s tonnage war. In turn, the Soviets are often considered history’s greatest reward hackers: an intimidating but inefficient military, an industry obsessed with output weight, and “allies” that are more like hostages. Of course, the reward hacking was also fractal and there are examples of it in every level of their economies: from Hitler’s bunker / the Politburo all the way to the factory floor. Liberal democracies seem to be much more immune to reward hacking, at least at the grand-strategy level. The liberal state has many layers of defense against the hacking problem: frequent elections, free markets, separation of powers, the right to criticize the government, antitrust laws, etc. Liberal democracies have participated in “dick-measuring contests”, but far less often than totalitarian countries. Sometimes, the best way to win a dick-measuring contest is not to play. We call this strategy “big dick energy” and historically the US had a lot of it. ^ The other candidate for "leader of the free world" was the US, but it was much more isolationist and had little interest in foreign affairs. We will get to them later ^ With some items by renowned potter William Worrall. I don’t know who that is, but it seems that English newspapers from the time thought that Worrall’s work was the only impressive part of the exhibit ^ More gems from the Times article : The US exhibit had an unexplained draped pool table, busts of Rockefeller and Gandhi. A model of the Triborough Bridge (artificially moonlit!) and an empty space reserved for a new coming model ^ The Manhattan project was 20x more efficient than the V-2 project (measured in: kills / $) Discuss