Self-sufficiency is very inefficient. By pooling our resources, we can live much more sustainably and prosperously. Let's draw a parallel to cloud computing ve

Self-sufficiency is very inefficient. By pooling our resources, we can live much more sustainably and prosperously. Let's draw a parallel to cloud computing versus standalone computing, for the sake of familiarity. While you sure can get reliable and scalable storage services for less money from a fat cloud provider, they're not equivalent to personally owned storage. For example access times and performance differ, mutually shared human language and the communications infrastructure become critical. Let's draw a parallel to a windmill for flour production or a castle for military defence within a small community. What you wind up with is a de-facto political hierarchy emerging from centralization with its own dangers and overheads. In summary perhaps nature has shown us that population-wide specialization is inefficient in the long term, and we should encourage diversity to survive black swan events... there is a middle ground between total self-sufficiency and totally shared infrastructure. The important thing is that we preserve a mix of approaches.