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You are framing this as an either-or situation but, if you read the wiki page, there are 3 strategies to dealing with wicked problems and you missed the "collab

You are framing this as an either-or situation but, if you read the wiki page, there are 3 strategies to dealing with wicked problems and you missed the "collaborative" category. It's clear the authoritative "mussolini" solution is undesirable from a liberal perspective in which we prefer to have a shared say over how we organise things. However, it's also increasingly clear that the way we implement the competitive strategy -- you so aptly suggest the Ayn Rand protagonist as the better option -- is also flawed and incapable of solving these difficult problems. The nature of modern capitalism is to tend toward monopolistic/oligopolistic dynamics in the market, which ultimately leads to a concentration of power and a lack of shared control over such issues. Our economy has only ever made our impact on the environment worse and worse, and is driving us ever closer to catastrophic climate change. Not to mention other examples, such as healthcare, etc. Why not try something "collaborative", where instead of hoping for either a top-down governmental, or top-down corporate solution to problems, we truly decentralise power and give all people agency and freedom to live in this world? For instance, if we stopped letting the profit motive squeeze us for every possible thing, people would have more free time with lower living expenses and less demanding jobs, and could spend more time repairing/restoring possessions, rather than buying new, or gardening and cooking, rather than eating out, or cycling everywhere, rather than taking cars.

hirundo 7y ago
Because private property is the sin qua non of decentralized decision making. It is in fact a bundle of rights to make your own decisions about the disposition of things. Anything short of it is also less decentralized. Collaboration with less competition has fewer independent decision makers, and therefore searches the solution space more slowly. Creative destruction is ugly as hell. It incorporates all of evil. But it is also the engine of adaptation; the inverse of lithification. To the extent that we limit it, we limit the parallelism of adaptation. The fact that businesses can be so easily destroyed outweighs all of their manifest ugliness. Very few noncompetitive institutions have that feature. Fast search means rapid destruction and creation. There is a very real human cost to that, and many, maybe most people will never be convinced that it's worth it.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Talking about minutiae of capitalism here is sort of detracting from the core issue (that also underlies the problems of capitalism). The core problem is: humans can't coordinate at scale. Working together towards a shared goal comes naturally to us when we're in small, tightly-knit groups. The larger the group, the harder it gets. Once the group reaches ~hundred members[0], coordination generally collapses, and the group succumbs to the usual breed of prisonner-dilemma's-like problems. Or, it develops a governance structure. If you look at history of civilization through the lens of coordination, you'll notice that all the governance structures, all the economies, up to and including democracy and the free market, are essentially a mechanism of coordinating larger and larger amounts of people. A government cuts trough prisonner-dilemma's-like problems. Its hierarchical nature lets direct coordination costs scale as O(n log n) instead of O(n^2) - but that's still not efficient enough for smaller and more localized problems. There, markets come to the rescue: they let people coordinate on smaller and more local issues, often without even explicitly noticing them - all gets handled by the feedback loops around prices. The core observation here being: the market works at efficiently coordinating groups of people with diverse interests and smaller, more localized problems. It absolutely sucks at responding to a problem requiring to coordinate large groups of people. That's where you want the top-down solution. It's reasonable to look up to the government to solve a coordination problem below its level[1], that's what governments are for. -- (And you do need both a government and a market to limit each other's power. For instance, you mention that "businesses can be so easily destroyed". That only holds true in a spherical-cow free market that never existed. One of the features of capitalism is that profit compounds; a successful company has more resources to protect itself from its competition, ensuring further success. A successful company can't be easily destroyed. The end-goal of competing businesses is monopoly, but society needs the competition, not the victory - so you need the government to ensure the victors get struck down and competition continues.) -- [0] - Dunbar number is ~150, which may or may not be a coincident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number [1] - Governments have their own coordination problems at the international level; geopolitics is essentially a completely unregulated free market.

hirundo 7y ago

Because private property is the sin qua non of decentralized decision making. It is in fact a bundle of rights to make your own decisions about the disposition of things. Anything short of it is also less decentralized. Collaboration with less competition has fewer independent decision makers, and therefore searches the solution space more slowly. Creative destruction is ugly as hell. It incorporates all of evil. But it is also the engine of adaptation; the inverse of lithification. To the extent that we limit it, we limit the parallelism of adaptation. The fact that businesses can be so easily destroyed outweighs all of their manifest ugliness. Very few noncompetitive institutions have that feature. Fast search means rapid destruction and creation. There is a very real human cost to that, and many, maybe most people will never be convinced that it's worth it.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Talking about minutiae of capitalism here is sort of detracting from the core issue (that also underlies the problems of capitalism). The core problem is: humans can't coordinate at scale. Working together towards a shared goal comes naturally to us when we're in small, tightly-knit groups. The larger the group, the harder it gets. Once the group reaches ~hundred members[0], coordination generally collapses, and the group succumbs to the usual breed of prisonner-dilemma's-like problems. Or, it develops a governance structure. If you look at history of civilization through the lens of coordination, you'll notice that all the governance structures, all the economies, up to and including democracy and the free market, are essentially a mechanism of coordinating larger and larger amounts of people. A government cuts trough prisonner-dilemma's-like problems. Its hierarchical nature lets direct coordination costs scale as O(n log n) instead of O(n^2) - but that's still not efficient enough for smaller and more localized problems. There, markets come to the rescue: they let people coordinate on smaller and more local issues, often without even explicitly noticing them - all gets handled by the feedback loops around prices. The core observation here being: the market works at efficiently coordinating groups of people with diverse interests and smaller, more localized problems. It absolutely sucks at responding to a problem requiring to coordinate large groups of people. That's where you want the top-down solution. It's reasonable to look up to the government to solve a coordination problem below its level[1], that's what governments are for. -- (And you do need both a government and a market to limit each other's power. For instance, you mention that "businesses can be so easily destroyed". That only holds true in a spherical-cow free market that never existed. One of the features of capitalism is that profit compounds; a successful company has more resources to protect itself from its competition, ensuring further success. A successful company can't be easily destroyed. The end-goal of competing businesses is monopoly, but society needs the competition, not the victory - so you need the government to ensure the victors get struck down and competition continues.) -- [0] - Dunbar number is ~150, which may or may not be a coincident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number [1] - Governments have their own coordination problems at the international level; geopolitics is essentially a completely unregulated free market.