> 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.
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.