[merlinnn]

A corollary of economies of scale is high opportunity cost for maintaining small organizations. Partly because of this, many institutions providing the benefits of small organizations have high costs of entry---sport/country clubs, boating groups, HOAs, social clubs, etc. The opportunity cost is real, and it must be paid.

This has made membership to small organizations unaffordable for some portions of society. Especially students, fresh graduates, and other young people in formative parts of their lives. The result is a disenfranchised youth with very weak ties to a disparate and diffuse set of communities, and often none of those communities are robust enough to supply the empathetic benefits mentioned by Tao in the post.

It seems like this trend is only increasing in the near term.