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> history doesn't favor distributed power In that case, why do we have ~200 nations instead of a single world government? Clearly, sovereignty matters to group

> history doesn't favor distributed power In that case, why do we have ~200 nations instead of a single world government? Clearly, sovereignty matters to groups of people. "Sovereignty of money does not matter to LARGE groups of people" - might be a more defensible argument.

manigandham 8y ago
We already have 3 superpowers today with potentially 2 more developing. The others don't matter at scale. It's more likely that the cities will become the dominant form of a citizen's home sovereignty rather than a nation, with only a few national boundaries around the world. People are inherently tribal and human behavior isn't changing anytime soon but countries are quickly becoming stretched too thin to keep up with all the varied and changing populations and their needs.
woodandsteel 8y ago
>In that case, why do we have ~200 nations instead of a single world government? The correct starting question is "why do we have 200 nations, instead of millions of individuals and families living autonomously?" and the answer is: human beings are basically tribal people, and military conquest. And then the answer to your question about why 200 is that military conquest never got any farther before the atom bomb eliminated direct warfare between major nations.
- mathnmusic 8y ago
  Why don't we have a single registrar for all TLDs? Why don't we have GitHub as the single repository for ALL software in the world? My point is that sovereignty, innovation etc. are valuables which centralization can't deliver. "Monopolies will maximize profits and therefore, under-supply the product" is Economics 101. So, yes, economics of scale and network effects do encourage centralization but there are counter-balancing forces. What we need is protocols that allow a sliding scale as opposed to non-interoperable silos. DNS, TCP/IP, Git delivered exactly that. While GitHub has the scale and network effects, plenty of people are happily using GitLab, BitBucket etc.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- oarabbus_ 8y ago
  Right... but that doesn't address the point that nations in modern day are still decentralized.
AndrewKemendo 8y ago
~200 nations instead of a single world government The long run trend is very obviously toward a single government. Consider that until the Sumerians established cities less than 7000 years ago, humanity was just thousands small traveling groups of nomads with no defined borders. Sovereignty gets a lot of lip service, but in practice most people don't really want it. It's a lot of work.
- riffraff 8y ago
  > The long run trend is very obviously toward a single government Is it? I believe there are far more countries now than 30 years ago. We seem to have some more powerful international organisations now than a century ago, but earlier than that we had world spanning empires, and Europe was less than 10 countries before WW1. I want to believe that we're heading towards a star trek like unified post scarcity planet, but I'm unsure we're not just seeing a local trend.
  - AndrewKemendo 8y ago
    It's misleading actually because unincorporated territories or completely unmanaged or ungoverned groups could be counted in a "sultinate" and it would effectively mean nothing. Much how King Arthur, Lord of the Britains was not known to the members of the anarcho-syndicalist commune.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- oarabbus_ 8y ago
  >The long run trend is very obviously toward a single government. Hmm, I think you will have to justify that statement, rather than simply claim it is a very obvious fact. Generally, there were fewer governments in the past as compared to the modern day.
  - zaphar 8y ago
    That depends very much on how you define government. If you are a band of hunter gatherers does the "Chief" or "Shaman" that your band looks up to for leadership count as your goverment? If the answer is yes then there were way more governments in the past than there are in modern day. If the answer is no then your point stands. However I tend to think that the answer is in fact yes and the trend does indeed seem to be toward centralized world government given a long enough time period.
ninguem2 8y ago
Yes, 200, but China, India, US, EU (ok, bit of a stretch there), Brazil and Indonesia is about half of the world's population.
- labster 8y ago
  The EU will be less of a stretch after the U.K. Brexits out of membership in the next nuclear superpower, in order to complete their transition to an offshore banking haven in the City. Or am I reading the situation wrong?
kordlessagain 8y ago
> why do we have ~200 nations instead of a single world government Deltas in space and time plus the fact face to face conversations give you a better idea of the sender's mental state. Comms over the Internet are untrustworthy, if you don't have prior experience with the sender. Also, language, which is related to deltas in time and space.
walterbell 8y ago
> why do we have ~200 nations instead of a single world government? It's easier for powerful central organizations to influence smaller countries which are divided against each other, while believing that they are relatively independent. Also: latency of information transfer and the speed of light, which lead to local variance and central filtering of changes which are allowed to diffuse elsewhere.
michaelchisari 8y ago
In that case, why do we have ~200 nations instead of a single world government? Clearly, sovereignty matters to groups of people. Italy alone used to be a dozen+ independent city states. Divided the world 200 ways seems like a lot unless you look at how much it's been divided historically. And in comparison, that's extremely centralized.
- aetherson 8y ago
  Italy used to be a dozen city states... And before that, Italy, France, Greece, Egypt, Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, a bunch of Baltic nations, England, and a bunch of others were all one state. The number of states waxes and wanes throughout history, there's not a clear trend.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- nostrademons 8y ago
  The history of political organization is driven by the history of military technology. Historically, the earth has flip-flopped from centralized to decentralized power several times, eg. Rome (legion) => feudalism (mounted knight) => Mongol Empire (mounted archers) => Rennaissance city states (crossbow, musket) => nation state (industrialization) => global superpower (atom bomb, ballistic missile). Basically whenever the dominant military technology is expensive to produce or benefits from large highly-organized armies, the trend is toward centralization, while whenever it is cheap to produce and gives the advantage to independent guerilla fighters, the trend is toward decentralization. There's some evidence (break up of Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Islamic terrorism) that we're headed toward a new era of decentralization, driven by microchips, the Internet, drones, and cheap encrypted communication.
  - doodliego 8y ago
    I agree with your main point, but not the last sentence. The complexity and expense of state of the art military technology is beyond the means of smaller nation-states, let alone rebel groups, and that trend has been accelerating since WWII. Stealth, space supremacy, global surveillance, carrier groups, strike wings, nuclear arsenals, reaper drones and all the other crazy battlefield robot tech in service or development can cut to pieces any obsolete nation state military, let alone some rebels armed with cheap 3d-printed guns.
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> why do we have ~200 nations instead of a single world government? Coase won a Nobel Prize for this. Simply, the trade-off between bureaucratic inefficiency and economies of scale.
Yizahi 8y ago
Only because current level of information technology is not able to support word government (in practice, not in theory). We can see the process of further unification looking at EU, which seems to a be current maximum level of unification.
- petre 8y ago
  Further EU unification is already falling apart, because they're trying to do it by dictate rather than voluntarily. And then there are language and cultural barriers.

manigandham 8y ago

We already have 3 superpowers today with potentially 2 more developing. The others don't matter at scale. It's more likely that the cities will become the dominant form of a citizen's home sovereignty rather than a nation, with only a few national boundaries around the world. People are inherently tribal and human behavior isn't changing anytime soon but countries are quickly becoming stretched too thin to keep up with all the varied and changing populations and their needs.

woodandsteel 8y ago

>In that case, why do we have ~200 nations instead of a single world government? The correct starting question is "why do we have 200 nations, instead of millions of individuals and families living autonomously?" and the answer is: human beings are basically tribal people, and military conquest. And then the answer to your question about why 200 is that military conquest never got any farther before the atom bomb eliminated direct warfare between major nations.

mathnmusic 8y ago
Why don't we have a single registrar for all TLDs? Why don't we have GitHub as the single repository for ALL software in the world? My point is that sovereignty, innovation etc. are valuables which centralization can't deliver. "Monopolies will maximize profits and therefore, under-supply the product" is Economics 101. So, yes, economics of scale and network effects do encourage centralization but there are counter-balancing forces. What we need is protocols that allow a sliding scale as opposed to non-interoperable silos. DNS, TCP/IP, Git delivered exactly that. While GitHub has the scale and network effects, plenty of people are happily using GitLab, BitBucket etc.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
oarabbus_ 8y ago
Right... but that doesn't address the point that nations in modern day are still decentralized.

AndrewKemendo 8y ago

~200 nations instead of a single world government The long run trend is very obviously toward a single government. Consider that until the Sumerians established cities less than 7000 years ago, humanity was just thousands small traveling groups of nomads with no defined borders. Sovereignty gets a lot of lip service, but in practice most people don't really want it. It's a lot of work.

riffraff 8y ago
> The long run trend is very obviously toward a single government Is it? I believe there are far more countries now than 30 years ago. We seem to have some more powerful international organisations now than a century ago, but earlier than that we had world spanning empires, and Europe was less than 10 countries before WW1. I want to believe that we're heading towards a star trek like unified post scarcity planet, but I'm unsure we're not just seeing a local trend.
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  It's misleading actually because unincorporated territories or completely unmanaged or ungoverned groups could be counted in a "sultinate" and it would effectively mean nothing. Much how King Arthur, Lord of the Britains was not known to the members of the anarcho-syndicalist commune.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
oarabbus_ 8y ago
>The long run trend is very obviously toward a single government. Hmm, I think you will have to justify that statement, rather than simply claim it is a very obvious fact. Generally, there were fewer governments in the past as compared to the modern day.
- zaphar 8y ago
  That depends very much on how you define government. If you are a band of hunter gatherers does the "Chief" or "Shaman" that your band looks up to for leadership count as your goverment? If the answer is yes then there were way more governments in the past than there are in modern day. If the answer is no then your point stands. However I tend to think that the answer is in fact yes and the trend does indeed seem to be toward centralized world government given a long enough time period.

ninguem2 8y ago

Yes, 200, but China, India, US, EU (ok, bit of a stretch there), Brazil and Indonesia is about half of the world's population.

labster 8y ago
The EU will be less of a stretch after the U.K. Brexits out of membership in the next nuclear superpower, in order to complete their transition to an offshore banking haven in the City. Or am I reading the situation wrong?

kordlessagain 8y ago

> why do we have ~200 nations instead of a single world government Deltas in space and time plus the fact face to face conversations give you a better idea of the sender's mental state. Comms over the Internet are untrustworthy, if you don't have prior experience with the sender. Also, language, which is related to deltas in time and space.

walterbell 8y ago

> why do we have ~200 nations instead of a single world government? It's easier for powerful central organizations to influence smaller countries which are divided against each other, while believing that they are relatively independent. Also: latency of information transfer and the speed of light, which lead to local variance and central filtering of changes which are allowed to diffuse elsewhere.

michaelchisari 8y ago

In that case, why do we have ~200 nations instead of a single world government? Clearly, sovereignty matters to groups of people. Italy alone used to be a dozen+ independent city states. Divided the world 200 ways seems like a lot unless you look at how much it's been divided historically. And in comparison, that's extremely centralized.

aetherson 8y ago
Italy used to be a dozen city states... And before that, Italy, France, Greece, Egypt, Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, a bunch of Baltic nations, England, and a bunch of others were all one state. The number of states waxes and wanes throughout history, there's not a clear trend.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
nostrademons 8y ago
The history of political organization is driven by the history of military technology. Historically, the earth has flip-flopped from centralized to decentralized power several times, eg. Rome (legion) => feudalism (mounted knight) => Mongol Empire (mounted archers) => Rennaissance city states (crossbow, musket) => nation state (industrialization) => global superpower (atom bomb, ballistic missile). Basically whenever the dominant military technology is expensive to produce or benefits from large highly-organized armies, the trend is toward centralization, while whenever it is cheap to produce and gives the advantage to independent guerilla fighters, the trend is toward decentralization. There's some evidence (break up of Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Islamic terrorism) that we're headed toward a new era of decentralization, driven by microchips, the Internet, drones, and cheap encrypted communication.
- doodliego 8y ago
  I agree with your main point, but not the last sentence. The complexity and expense of state of the art military technology is beyond the means of smaller nation-states, let alone rebel groups, and that trend has been accelerating since WWII. Stealth, space supremacy, global surveillance, carrier groups, strike wings, nuclear arsenals, reaper drones and all the other crazy battlefield robot tech in service or development can cut to pieces any obsolete nation state military, let alone some rebels armed with cheap 3d-printed guns.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago

> why do we have ~200 nations instead of a single world government? Coase won a Nobel Prize for this. Simply, the trade-off between bureaucratic inefficiency and economies of scale.

Yizahi 8y ago

Only because current level of information technology is not able to support word government (in practice, not in theory). We can see the process of further unification looking at EU, which seems to a be current maximum level of unification.

petre 8y ago
Further EU unification is already falling apart, because they're trying to do it by dictate rather than voluntarily. And then there are language and cultural barriers.