This is the kind of political analysis I've come to be very, very critical of lately. It's not even that I disagree with everything here; it's a truism in anthropology that more complex forms of political organization, like states and empires, are substantially less stable than less complex ones. The author just makes assertions without providing evidence or demonstrating his thought process in any way.
And a lot of it is just plain wrong when you take a moment to think it through. For instance:
> Over time, legal systems seem to similarly become more complex, interdependent, and resistant to change. Sometimes legal systems are “refactored” to increase flexibility, such as when the Roman emperor Justinian arranged for a restructuring and simplification of the Roman legal code. This Justinian code was later adapted by Napolean [sic], who spread it across Europe, after which European conquests spread it across the world
This the kind of generalization you often see from dabblers and rarely see from actual historians or even amateurs with a solid understanding of history. The complexity and rigidity of legal systems in various parts of the world varies greatly depending on the era, the health of the political and socioeconomic systems in that era, whether or not the systems in question are based in civil law or common law, etc. And the idea that there's a straight line from Justinian to Napoleon is ludicrous as well. It glosses over 1300 years of legal history showing large fluctuations in the level of legal complexity because it's either inconvenient for the author to deal with or because the author is unaware of it. Regardless of the reason for the omission, it's a sign of the author's laziness.
I get that this "paper" (author's words, not mine) is just a blog post but IMO this is lazy, reductionist thought and we should demand better when people want to chime in on political or economic issues.
Agreed with your comment. I find this kind of amateurish blog post typical of sites like LessWrong, OvercomingBias, or the writings of minor internet celebrity Eliezer Yudkowsky. Somehow they remain popular in nerd circles.
Nerds consistently seem to undervalue actual expertise in the humanities and instead assume that they can just work through these ideas on their own with limited training.
And because so many people are interested in these topics but are also uneducated, they find amateur analysis to be convincing.
I think it is less an issue of STEM vs humanities and more of an issue of empiricism vs idealism/rationalism. Biologists or physicians might disparage the humanities (and often they definitely do), but by training they are wary of any great theory of anything extracted from three anecdotes. Whilst in this circles there are people who don't deal with empirical evidence at all (programmers) or who do so in fields where you can safely generalize from a single piece of properly obtained evidence, like physicists.
Another problem of non-empirical science, or sciences that happen only in the lab, is that nobody prepares you to deal with evidences of uncertain, or definitely poor, quality. A biologist knows that a lot of samples from the field are taken by humans and there is some margin of error. Or maybe they are contaminated. Or maybe conserved poorly. And so on. So they can perfectly understand historians who say how much of our "data" about pre-1900 societies are poorly collected, guesses themselves, or manipulated for political aims, or simply modern inferences based on archeological data but subject to interpretation. Instead a programmer or a physicist looks at a graph with "number of laws, 1000-1900" and "GDP per capita,1000-1900" and think that the quantities represented are actual, objective data and that there are not 18 different and equally sensible estimations that would make the graph look completely different.
Combining these two factors, you get all these posts that supposedly explain the iron laws of every society ever with a bit of deductive logic, some "common sense" arguments the reader can relate to, and three graphs that show correlation and not causation between variables nobody actually measured
> […] this is lazy, should demand better when people want to chime in on political or economic issues.
Or entrepreneurship, or nutrition, or (yelp) underestablished engineering issues too! Carelessly thought leadership should go the way of "statistical significance" / p < 0.05 sophistry of yore.
> This the kind of generalization you often see from dabblers and rarely see from actual historians or even amateurs with a solid understanding of history. The complexity and rigidity of legal systems in various parts of the world varies greatly depending on the era, the health of the political and socioeconomic systems in that era, whether or not the systems in question are based in civil law or common law, etc. And the idea that there's a straight line from Justinian to Napoleon is ludicrous as well. It glosses over 1300 years of legal history showing large fluctuations in the level of legal complexity because it's either inconvenient for the author to deal with or because the author is unaware of it. Regardless of the reason for the omission, it's a sign of the author's laziness.
I don't really get this criticism in response to what you quoted. He's talking about the dynamics, not the state. Your statement that the level of complexity waxes and wanes in different eras is perfectly compatible with a dynamic trend towards greater complexity in the absence of exogenous shocks (e.g. revolution, war, etc).
You seem to be confusing noise around the trend with its structural non-existence. The fact that things move around and occupy different levels at different times does not negate the existence of statistical structure.
I'm not convinced that the trend towards greater complexity and rot exists in and of itself. That smacks of a teleological interpretation of human history and one that's grounded in a very brief and aberrant period of our species' history. I also don't think that periods of fluctuation are noise around the trend, but rather part of a larger historical trend itself.
I'm not saying the author is completely wrong: it's obvious (and kind of a surface level observation) that sometimes complex systems become less well-adapted to their circumstances. But the author doesn't make the case that the bodies responsible for international cooperation are a world government in any meaningful sense of the word or that their existence would constitute a point of failure (would the collapse of the World Trade Organization really threaten human civilization?). He also doesn't support his argument, think it through in any careful way, or even describe the mechanisms by which rot occurs.
I stand by my assertion that this is lazy thinking that makes broad generalizations about human systems and applies them without any kind of careful analysis.
> I'm not convinced that the trend towards greater complexity and rot exists in and of itself. That smacks of a teleological interpretation of human history and one that's grounded in a very brief and aberrant period of our species' history. I also don't think that periods of fluctuation are noise around the trend, but rather part of a larger historical trend itself.
It sort of seems to me that the phrase "in and of itself" is doing a lot of lifting there. I agree that it is far from established in a grand teleological sense that all systems tend towards rot and complexity. However, we can make observations about the systems we have and that humans have created, and there certainly seems, thus far, to be such a pattern. It could reverse tomorrow, of course, but generally we make inferences and extrapolations from what we're given, which is the best we can do.
> I'm not saying the author is completely wrong: it's obvious (and kind of a surface level observation) that sometimes complex systems become less well-adapted to their circumstances. But the author doesn't make the case that the bodies responsible for international cooperation are a world government in any meaningful sense of the word or that their existence would constitute a point of failure (would the collapse of the World Trade Organization really threaten human civilization?). He also doesn't support his argument, think it through in any careful way, or even describe the mechanisms by which rot occurs.
I think he's making a point about fragility. "World government" is certainly a loose concept here, but its precise technical specification isn't critical to his point. At it's core, the argument he's making is from induced correlation.
These forms of governance, whether explicit or implicit (e.g. by social convention rather than formal power structure) induce behavioral correlation among nations of the globe. They begin to respond to things similarly and use similar decision making processes to arrive at their actions. This is, as compared to a pre-modern globe composed of tribes with zero or very minimal contact with one another. Our world is much more correlated at the top level.
That sort of correlation is fine if we've figured out the right way to do things, of course. Spreading democracy, abolishing racism and sexism, or establishing human rights, etc are forms of "induced correlation" in this sense. Some parts of the world have decided that these precepts are the right way to do things, and are intent on establishing them as the norm in the rest of the world. This has the consequence of making the world more homogeneous and therefore less diverse. Less diversity can be a good thing sometimes, when we are eliminating "bad" diversity. But the argument he's making is that cultural and political diversity is narrowing.
A consequence of winnowed diversity is fragility and instability. Specifically, larger scale systems have lower short term variance and larger long-run variance. The tails get fatter. Mono-cultural systems can be highly efficient, because everything is standardized, and everyone can pull in the same direction at the same time. However, they are vulnerable to unforeseen and unanticipated shocks, and those shocks can be devastating, because they impact the whole system, for exactly the reason that we got those efficiency gains: they impact the entire system all at once. This is Nassim Taleb's argument about fragility and anti-fragility.
To address your specific point about the WTO collapsing, I think that is missing the point. The WTO does not have to collapse. We are certainly not relying on its continued existence in any material way. What the WTO is doing is inducing correlation and reducing diversity. It is inducing mono-culture, fostering specialization via Ricardian comparative advantage, etc. These things are good! The WTO is making global trade far more efficient than it used to be, reducing global inequality and improving the pace of technological innovation. I don't mean to argue this is bad in some narrow sense. It is, however, a Faustian bargain that not enough people understand. The price of this improvement is correlated risk, the bane of insurance companies everywhere. When all the countries of the world pull in the same direction, they are vulnerable to the same risks. And what 200 years ago would have been a recession or crisis in one country suddenly becomes global. Think of the US housing crisis and its near global impacts. That could not have happened in the absence of entities like the WTO and the IMF (that is, it would not have had global impact, it still could have happened here, but it would have been localized).
This argument doesn't hinge on whether you consider the WTO a government or not in some technical sense. What matters is the reduction of diversity (which is its intended goal) that it produces. Countries are not forced to follow the WTO, but they do. The same way farmers are not forced to use Monsanto's seeds, but they do. They do it because it increases the expectation of their annual profit, at the expense of long-run variance. In the long run the farmer may be dead, but society writ large is not. This is the mechanism by which individually, locally rational choices add up to systemic risk.
Was going to say, a comment on the page was really good but it looks like you just copy and pasted it there. This point, that the premise is not even really examined says a lot, ironically on a site called "overcoming bias."
Actually, whoever posted that copied this comment (glad my timestamp is first edit: just so we can avoid any drama over authorship). Which is fine, IDC, but you telling me it was there is the first I heard of it.
The structure of the Napoleonic Code and some of its content originates in the Code of Justinian, through the mediation of Southern French written law, but *a lot* of it also comes from the Custom of Paris and all the regional customs aggregated around it, that is French common law.
It's a case of top-down thinking vs bottom-up thinking. Historians build from bedrock and are able to directly work out causation, whereas these Programmers with a hobby in studying other systems don't get the feedback at that level of nuance, but they get an intuition from building many different smaller systems and getting plenty of feedback from those. They take the learnings they got building software and apply it to other systems. This is important - as feedback drives learning - and software provides the most feedback ever, and thus I would argue that programmers are the best systems thinkers we've ever had.
The reality is we need both, as Silicon Valley might say, middle-out thinking. And I don't criticize the author or yourself for pushing their viewpoint, because the only way we move forward is bringing the Historians with the Systems thinkers. That's what this comment section is for. Better still, if we can find a Historian Hobbyist Systems thinker who can play both parts, like David Graeber did for the topics he was interested in. Although even he got criticized for basically your exact argument here.
So don't criticize the author for having a top-down viewpoint, give him concrete examples of his examples where he is wrong, point him in the direction of books you know that cover the things that he is talking about, he will appreciate it. He doesn't mean to be lazy, but it takes skill to know those things, and the skill he has acquired is elsewhere. This is the power of specialization.
Does law act like software, where a law written at the wrong abstraction level spirals out of control? What causes code and law to metastasize and be unable to refactor? Why was git, a source control system written in 2 weeks by Linus able to dominate the software space, when Microsoft had a team working for years on their source control system? What software are examples of systems that evolve over time? What software builds up so much spaghetti that it is best to throw it away? Joel Spolsky's argument is that answer is never, and refactoring is always preferable to starting fresh. Is that a good argument that laws should keep going forever? How do we know we found the law equivalent to git? There are many many more questions to ask, let's continue asking them.
Oh man, as a programmer who fancies themself a systems thinker I do find this argument a little seductive. I'm not going to argue that software development doesn't promote strong systems thinking skills but I don't know how much of that is because I truly believe that it's sharpened my abilities and how much of it is because I want to flatter myself.
My discomfort with this line of thinking is that I've seen a lot of systems thinking hampered by bad abstractions. In fact, I'm currently working on one now. Given the extraordinary complexity of human society, we're much more likely to make bad abstractions and to ignore or even completely fail to observe critical feedback.
I also disagree that I shouldn't criticize him for his method of thinking. Criticism is our best path forward to refining our thought.
Lastly, I'd like to note that I think this comment was the kind of thoughtful and nuanced thinking I'd like to see more of. Even if we don't agree, you're asking better questions and attempting to synthesize different positions and processes. I appreciate that.
I will say that I'm a huge fan of SlateStarCodex's epistemic status system, where before posts where he is unsure of he will clearly state how far he has gone down the rabbit hole, and such a status would have made for a better blog post, and that such a status would have made your argument less required or more pointed depending on what he put as his status.
At the very least we need to be asking these questions...
1. What has global positive or negative externalities?
2. What has country-level positive or negative externalities?
3. What has local positive or negative externalities?
If you aren't at least asking those questions, you are never going to arrive at the correct level of abstraction. Should we have a World Government? We have global externalities, so probably. What should that government do? As little as required.
> thus I would argue that programmers are the best systems thinkers we've ever had.
Certainly, many of the best systems thinkers are programmers. Most programmers are pretty poor systems thinkers, though, and systems thinking doesn't do a lot of good if you don't have a deep understanding of the elements of the system.
> So don't criticize the author for having a top-down viewpoint, give him concrete examples of his examples where he is wrong, point him in the direction of books you know that cover the things that he is talking about, he will appreciate it.
Did the author engage the person you are chastising as an educator?
What kind of sick mind will want a giant borg cube with 3 billion humans miserable at being overpowered by the other 4 billion? Even in US, half of population is perpetually angry and miserable because the other half gained power. How fun is it going to be for US and China to vote on each other's culture? We should go in the opposite direction of allowing California and Texas to be more like Netherlands and Poland, able to run their own affairs while central body gets involved only when absolutely necessary, say for trade and common defense. Then let people move and self sort based on how they want to live.
Isn’t this how the U.S. federal government was originally intended, regulating only interstate commerce? The EU also started out as just a trade block, regulating trade between member states.
The problem with only regulating trade is that most of what a government does ties back into trade. Any form of subsidies or tax benefits creates an unfair advantage to one country’s businesses, so any attempt at regulating trade will find itself regulating taxation and subsidy regimes. Any mismatch between product standards will make it difficult to trade, so inevitably you will see environmental and product safety regulation creep in. Devaluing a coin can benefit one country over another, so it becomes necessary to have a common monetary policy (see: the euro). Everything that the EU does, and it does a lot of things, has derived in some way of the attempt to regulate trade.
Add a sincere attempt to ensure human rights into the mix, and a global government will inevitably find itself regulating everything.
The main difference is that EU allows countries to leave the union, US doesn't. If EU starts to become corrupt and expand its influence like USA did over their states then countries will just leave.
> If EU starts to become corrupt and expand its influence like USA did over their states then countries will just leave
That just happened with UK. And it might happen again with Poland and Hungary.
Eu is not a supers state but it tries to become one. And the peoples of Europe do not like how a bunch of beaurocrats and politicians who they didn't even vote, are trying to change the way they live their lives, tell them what to do and mess with each country's internal affairs.
>But for a long time the EU was moving towards ever closer integration.
Some time ago people have more faith in the EU. But since EU derailed, beaurocrats and politicians started pushing EU towards a progressive and leftist dystopia. And people don't like that.
They have their history, their culture, their way of life, their customs and they want to live how they used to, without being told by the others how to live their lives.
No one apart from the far left wants Europe to become a melting pot in which nations, ethnicities, languages, customs, cultures dissappear.
>What kind of sick mind will want a giant borg cube with 3 billion humans miserable at being overpowered by the other 4 billion?
They don't call themselves sick. They call themselves globalists, progressives. In their generosity they want to impose others by force their own ideas, convinced that they know what is best for each of the World's 7 billion individuals.
That is not what globalists or progressives are fighting for at all.
Even being as critical as one can be about progressives, they are quick to preference the (perceived) rights of the minority over the will of the majority.
The problem is that more authoritarian governments don't take kindly to freedom-of-movement, and even if they did, "leaving your country" really means "and your job and family and social life and legal system and culture and language and..." so there's lots of sources of unavoidable friction that get in the way of a "free market of governance".
Case in point - we have "red states" and "blue states" with pretty substantial difference in policy, from taxes to abortion rights, but national red/blue party votes seem to indicate they're only split 60:40 or so in terms of their population, if that. Even though "immigration" across US state lines is as low friction as you can hope for.
> Even in US, half of population is perpetually angry and miserable because the other half gained power
The US has either the worst government, or very nearly so, of all established democracies on measures of effective representation, popular satiafaction with government, etc.
“Even in the US” is, thus, a weird lead in here since it suggests that the US is the best of the best but even it still has the problem described, when it is very much not the best of the best, and there is plenty of research establishing the particular structural choices that cause that.
Interesting how this idea is almost exclusively pushed by first world citizens. If we had global election, everyone other than the first world (the vast majority) will basically vote for “give me your wealth”. So how is this in the interest of the first world? The day we have a global government on earth is the day Mars travel is really gonna take off.
> What are the key parameters that determine renewal versus rot, and how can they be mapped onto systems of global governance?
I would say one of the key parameters would be how well a system actor models the system in which it exists. In other words, do the internal rules of a system actor, whether it be an organism or a legal code, anticipate stressors from the outside and avoid them?
As two examples, an organism on earth needs to have a model of gravity to avoid falling from a dangerous height and dying. Likewise a legal system needs to have a prohibition against murder to prevent feuds that rip society apart.
If a system actor is really well-adapted to its niche it can forestall rot. However because the actor is always just a part of the system, it cannot model everything. There's simply not enough space to store the model. So all system actors rot and die due to unanticipated stressors.
The system itself, however large we define its scope (valley, earth, universe), will always outlast a system actor because it does not need to rely on a model but is big enough to contain all the information the model attempts to compress.
Renewal is when a failed model is discarded by the system which has more information. Rot is when the model is failing. I'm less worried with an absence of renewal than I am in how long I might have to live with rot.
I see no way to construct a world government that does away with conflict. External stressors are necessary to "keep the model honest". We can try very hard to build good models of governance, and we should, but we should also know that we will always fail. The risk is that fear of discarding a failed government, because of the loss of pride, tumult, and short-term regression, pushes us to maintain an oppressive, maladapted order.
World government has the potential to rot for a very long time.
The point of a government is to avoid war. The ruling class is made up of the more intelligent and more aggressive population, who make a pact of no aggression among them and that evolves into a government.
The whole European Union was born because of fears of repeating the WWII tragedy. WWI hadn't ended with a surrender, it had been an armistice. Defeated germany polarized and Hitler ascended to power. So, after WWII, France wasn't allowed to grab the coal and iron mines from Germany, and so on.
You want to improve a government and to stabilize it. War has a few winners and the rest are losers. And not inconvenienced losers, dead or enslaved losers.
What human institution has endured? For more than say a few centuries? Of those few, how many served any of their original purposes, but instead optimized for the continuation of the organization to the exclusion of the stated mission?
"Gimme that old time Religion" and "here come the New Boss"
Those were Malthusian times, before industrialisation and widespread literacy and the internet. We don’t have evidence that this time is different. But we can’t reject that hypothesis, either. The biggest thing we currently lack is a culture that believes it can break the cycle.
We should be able to look at how well institutions last and see in gradually grow, modulo certain black swan events. Before the 1900s, how many banks lasted more than a hundred years? Now many of our banks can trace their lineage that far back. Constitutions and national borders also seem to be growing more stable over time.
> Before the 1900s, how many banks lasted more than a hundred years?
Lots of banks. Honestly, I have a hard time finding a bank that is large today that were created in the 1900s. Most seems to come from 1700s and early 1800s.
I think the biggest reason you don't see more banks is that the concept of a bank is fairly novel, and they exploded in popularity with the printing press and industrialization. World war 1 and 2 didn't end these big banks, and if they can survive those then they can survive most things.
It depends, the populations from present-day Mexico didn't ally between themselves when Cortez (who might just have been an alien to them) arrived, quite the contrary, some of them became allies of Cortez against the Aztecs.
Literally every culture believes they have fortitude and grit. That's just another platitude. I was talking about what implementable standards would it take. Elections and democratic rule were a pretty big advance. I think built in transparency may also be helpful.
Do you think more transparency would have changed recent US politics events? Do you believe objective measures and systems would solve for certain belief systems? It’s easy to argue my points are platitudes, but I’d argue that the problems we face are collectively emotional.
I don't know. That's why I was asking the question. I agree that much of the problem is emotional, but I do believe technocratic solutions exist. We probably aren't anywhere near those solutions because we still can't separate emotion fr governance (maybe we never will). I didn't mean to insult your response, just that I was looking for something more concrete -- opinions about solutions.
The Roman Catholic Church is less than 1700 years old. The Council of Nicea was in 00325 CE, and the bishops derived their authority from their local congregations rather than from a pope until roughly the Council of Chalcedon in 00451. If you believe that it's closer to 2000 years old, you must also believe that its original purpose was to prepare for the end of the world and the Day of Judgment within the lifetimes of the first Christians. More plausibly, its original purpose was to remove the threat Christianity posed to the political stability of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire fell in 01453, almost 600 years ago.
> The Roman Empire fell in 01453, almost 600 years ago.
The Eastern Roman Empire, more commonly known as Byzantium or the Byzantine empire, fell in 1453. They weren't under the authority of the Catholic church ( great schism and all that).
It's not like it has remained stable all those years.
It changed pretty significantly with the donation of constantine, and more recently, the second vatican council made some pretty big changes. Opinions can be had about whether that was a long overdue overhaul, or the church succumbing to the heretical evils of modernity, what can't be denied is that they were pretty significant.
"...but instead optimized for the continuation of the organization..." This sums it up. It takes a very narrow / well-defined focus to avoid optimizing for the organization. Power corrupts. I wonder if it would be possible to have a built-in / designed reset. Or if it's even possible to have a narrow enough or well defined enough focus that the target of the reset is understood and agreed upon.
Australia has had people living in it for 60,000 years, with basic animal husbandry, fish traps, basic agriculture, a messaging network, a national trading network - we don't know how long each of these aspects existed of these 60,000 years (for wooden evidence doesn't conserve well) but it'll definitely be much, much longer than European institutions
Printing presses became popular about 500 years ago, any large scale organization was really hard to run before then as there was no cheap and easy way to create and distribute large amounts of information.
Over a long enough time period, a small scale organization is kind of likely to just get blown up by a catastrophe because it isn't big enough to absorb it. At least that would be my guess.
Well, consider my example in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29286002 of al-Azhar University, which is 1050 years old. It was founded under the Fatimid Caliphate, which fell 200 years later after a century of civil war, replaced locally by Saladin's Ayyubid Sultanate. Another 80 years later Cairo fell to the Mamluk Sultanate, which held Egypt for 270 years until the Ottoman conquest, which the Ottomans lost 350 years later to Napoleon. Five more governments later (if we count Nasser, Mubarak, Morsi, and Sisi as a single government), here we are, and al-Azhar has survived the fall of nine governments, all of which entirely ceased to exist. This suggests two points:
1. There are a lot more small organizations at any given time than large ones. There were only two Caliphates at the time of the Fatimid Caliphate (the other being the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate, to which we owe Western Civilization, such as it is), and they covered the entire Middle East. But at the same time and in the same place there were thousands of schools and universities, some of which did get blown up by catastrophes (like the House of Wisdom in Baghdad) and some of which did not.
2. There are a lot of catastrophes that are harder for a big organization like the Fatimid Caliphate to absorb than for a smaller organization like al-Azhar University. More generally there are certain kinds of organizations, such as universities, that are very resilient.
ty. And the French monarchy. Can we consider all European monarchies as part of the same institution? They did have some similar titles and sucession rules
The British monarchy lost most of its power in the Magna Carta in 01215, was interrupted by the establishment of the Commonwealth in 01649, was replaced by the Glorious Revolution in 01688, lost most of its remaining power to Parliament in 01689, and became British in 01707. I'll give you the Roman Empire, which lasted close to 1500 years, and also, for example, the Imamate of Oman, the Japanese Imperial Family (which has lost and regained its power over Japan two or three times), and Al-Azhar University, which celebrated its thousandth birthday about 50 years ago. There are a few other examples.
Political rot is inevitable. Small political units (e.g. committees, HOAs) rot into pettiness. Large political units rot into despotism. I would take pettiness as the lesser evil. Also, the human brain was never designed to handle social groups much larger than 100. Perhaps in politics we have traded effectiveness in favor of efficiency. Can one human being truly represent a thousand (or even a million) people?
> Also, the human brain was never designed to handle social groups much larger than 100.
The human brain has only approximately 7 registers, therefore all of humanity's accumulated knowledge and culture can't have come into existence because 7 registers per computational node is insufficient?
These cognitive limitations are better understood as challenges, not fundamental barriers. Culture is an immensely powerful tool. Indeed, one might argue that culture is so powerful that as our capacity to construct and leverage culture grew the selective pressures and evolutionary need for further increasing other, primitive cognitive limits diminished.
Isn't that pretty much how we actually manage huge organizations ?
A top general in ww2 (modern armies are much smaller despite the world having tripled in population) could manage literally millions of people in a direct chain of command for a single purpose, mostly through the use of hierarchically nested units which each had similar substructures.
In large organizations, culture and instructions don't flow down with only through the chain of command.
Think about a large company like Google. Lots of energy is spent on ensuring alignment, common culture etc., and this isn't achieved primarily through manager->subordinate communication.
Maybe armies are a special case due to the limited instruction set.
Despotism tends to be more efficient than representative democracy at decision making. Representative democracy tends to be more efficient than direct democracy at the same. Effectiveness is another matter.
How can anyone (seriously) propose such a question right after the debacle of COP-26 ?? All the leaders just got together and proved their collective powerlessness in the face of the most pressing issue facing humanity.
"We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous wisdom councils and communal decision-making. Power was centralised in the hands of increasingly specialised 'elites' and 'experts' who not only failed to achieve all they promised but used secrecy and the control of information to deceive the public into allowing them to retain power over community resources that they ultimately looted." — Robert Steele
I like the idea of comparing the relatively new world organizations with other forms of organization. I do notice some predisposition from the author towards a certain narrative, as he begins by calling these organizations World Government. I think it's a stretch to give them the "Government" characteristic as they lack the Sovereignty required to be compared with other sovereign organizations. But still it's interesting to compare and wonder how they will adapt in the future given how young they are compared to other forms of organization such as national governments.
It's a strange old world when someone says "governments working together will help deal with CO2" and I have to immediately wonder if this seemingly boring statement is actually meant to rile up people from a certain sub-group.
Googling his name and climate change brings up a tweet in which he says he's been in the room when climate scientists attempt to make climate change seem worse than it is, which is fascinating.
Government's typically last about 250 years and then either stagnate or are replaced. Here's an essay making that case: http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf, but it is also pretty obvious that governments don't last forever just by thinking about when they start and end. Even China, which has a more-or-less continuous political history going back thousands of years, still had periods of chaos during which no central government really existed and then periods of reconsolidation and expansion.
Modern governments in the West seem to be entering another period of crisis so I'm very skeptical that any global government would succeed in their place.
Global government is a monoculture and like all monocultures its lack of diversity leads to high susceptibility to disease and low resiliency to environmental change.
Dunbar number works for countries as well. A hundred countries can talk to each other, trade and make agreements. Much more than that and it becomes a mess. So we get another layer of governance, called unions. You see USA being a union of 50 states, or EU being a union of 28 states. Expanding such a union to the whole world defeats the point.
Country and state are interchangeable terms. USA is a state that is a union of states. Or, as the federal level started to expand their influence the states aren't really states any longer, but for historical reasons they are still called states. But the original intention was to make the states self govern with high degree of autonomy, it was supposed to be a union and not a country.
The bigger they are, the more ineficient they become. The bigger they are, more and more people start realizing that their interests are not well served by those institutions.
But we don't have yet a World Government and that is a dystopia we might never live in.
If we had world government, the Chinese Communist Party would have about 134 seats, Australia 1½.
The only thing I’m absolutely certain about is that International Socialism, regardless of characteristics, is not a solution to any problem, I won’t be voting for it.
And a lot of it is just plain wrong when you take a moment to think it through. For instance:
> Over time, legal systems seem to similarly become more complex, interdependent, and resistant to change. Sometimes legal systems are “refactored” to increase flexibility, such as when the Roman emperor Justinian arranged for a restructuring and simplification of the Roman legal code. This Justinian code was later adapted by Napolean [sic], who spread it across Europe, after which European conquests spread it across the world
This the kind of generalization you often see from dabblers and rarely see from actual historians or even amateurs with a solid understanding of history. The complexity and rigidity of legal systems in various parts of the world varies greatly depending on the era, the health of the political and socioeconomic systems in that era, whether or not the systems in question are based in civil law or common law, etc. And the idea that there's a straight line from Justinian to Napoleon is ludicrous as well. It glosses over 1300 years of legal history showing large fluctuations in the level of legal complexity because it's either inconvenient for the author to deal with or because the author is unaware of it. Regardless of the reason for the omission, it's a sign of the author's laziness.
I get that this "paper" (author's words, not mine) is just a blog post but IMO this is lazy, reductionist thought and we should demand better when people want to chime in on political or economic issues.