CONCEPT
Why Good-Enough Is Not Good Enough
Crawford's argument that market-rewarded adequacy systematically hollows out the practices that produce excellence — a trajectory AI dramatically accelerates.
Why good-enough is not good enough names Crawford's argument that the market's systematic reward of adequate work over excellent work, and the acceleration of this pattern by AI, represents a specific form of civilizational impoverishment that productivity metrics cannot detect. The market measures external goods. It cannot distinguish adequate code from excellent code if both compile and pass the specified tests. It cannot distinguish an adequate brief from an excellent one if both satisfy the client. A culture that evaluates cognitive production exclusively through metrics of cost, speed, and functional adequacy will converge on adequate, because adequate is what the metrics reward. The convergence is rational by the metrics' own lights, and progressively destructive of the conditions under which excellence is produced.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Crawford's argument is structurally Aristotelian. Excellence is not merely a property of outputs but of practitioners — the specific virtues of judgment, taste, and care that develop through the sustained pursuit of standards higher than the market demands. The