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Is there any historical evidence suggesting that democracy can make enough people happy enough (to justify the pains of political negotiations) at the size/scal

• DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  No there isn't. Note that true democracy begins failing as soon as you begin leaving a small social group. By the time you get to the Dunbar Number, it's already failed and you have to move to some kind of representative system. Even representative systems fail, however, and for the same reason: human social interactions don't scale. So you might get to a Dunbar Number squared level, and decrease the feedback time, and make it work up to half a million or so. That's city or borough sized. From that point outwards it's just partisan power plays -- then you're really looking at how organized groups act -- which is a good reason to limit power more and more the larger the scale.