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Will World Government Rot?
- DeathArrow 5y agoSome institutions are too big to not fell. The bigger they are, the more ineficient they become. The bigger they are, more and more people start realizing that their interests are not well served by those institutions. But we don't have yet a World Government and that is a dystopia we might never live in.
- travisgriggs 5y agoI enjoyed this read quite a bit. Right balance of layman but not over simplified. I even went and learned more about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking . But the article just stops right when it’s getting going! I wanted more. Still glad I read it, but it makes you want “the rest of the book.”
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoIt's a strange old world when someone says "governments working together will help deal with CO2" and I have to immediately wonder if this seemingly boring statement is actually meant to rile up people from a certain sub-group. Googling his name and climate change brings up a tweet in which he says he's been in the room when climate scientists attempt to make climate change seem worse than it is, which is fascinating.
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- hliyan 5y agoPolitical rot is inevitable. Small political units (e.g. committees, HOAs) rot into pettiness. Large political units rot into despotism. I would take pettiness as the lesser evil. Also, the human brain was never designed to handle social groups much larger than 100. Perhaps in politics we have traded effectiveness in favor of efficiency. Can one human being truly represent a thousand (or even a million) people?
- tines 5y agoIf a person can represent two people then he can represent a theoretically unlimited number (just arrange everyone into a binary tree).
- rahimnathwani 5y agoThat's like saying someone who can manage a team of 7 can manage an organization of unlimited size, because each of those 7 can manage 7 others etc.
- daveguy 5y agoGood point. N**2 is probably the maximum, unless you're also adept at managing the management.
- PeterisP 5y agoIsn't that pretty much how we actually manage huge organizations ? A top general in ww2 (modern armies are much smaller despite the world having tripled in population) could manage literally millions of people in a direct chain of command for a single purpose, mostly through the use of hierarchically nested units which each had similar substructures.
- rahimnathwani 5y agoIn large organizations, culture and instructions don't flow down with only through the chain of command. Think about a large company like Google. Lots of energy is spent on ensuring alignment, common culture etc., and this isn't achieved primarily through manager->subordinate communication. Maybe armies are a special case due to the limited instruction set.
- wahern 5y ago> Also, the human brain was never designed to handle social groups much larger than 100. The human brain has only approximately 7 registers, therefore all of humanity's accumulated knowledge and culture can't have come into existence because 7 registers per computational node is insufficient? These cognitive limitations are better understood as challenges, not fundamental barriers. Culture is an immensely powerful tool. Indeed, one might argue that culture is so powerful that as our capacity to construct and leverage culture grew the selective pressures and evolutionary need for further increasing other, primitive cognitive limits diminished.
- h2odragon 5y agoWhat human institution has endured? For more than say a few centuries? Of those few, how many served any of their original purposes, but instead optimized for the continuation of the organization to the exclusion of the stated mission? "Gimme that old time Religion" and "here come the New Boss"
- framecowbird 5y agoThe British monarchy managed about a thousand years, as did the Roman empire
- kragen 5y agoThe British monarchy lost most of its power in the Magna Carta in 01215, was interrupted by the establishment of the Commonwealth in 01649, was replaced by the Glorious Revolution in 01688, lost most of its remaining power to Parliament in 01689, and became British in 01707. I'll give you the Roman Empire, which lasted close to 1500 years, and also, for example, the Imamate of Oman, the Japanese Imperial Family (which has lost and regained its power over Japan two or three times), and Al-Azhar University, which celebrated its thousandth birthday about 50 years ago. There are a few other examples.
- Shacklz 5y ago> 01215 Why are you prefixing the years with a zero, is that a thing? Are you preparing for those who might read this in a few millenia after us?
- Jensson 5y agoIt is octal, write '01215' in a browser javascript console and you get '653'. (Not sure if that is what he meant, but if he did that for ease of parsing it will just make it harder)
- lordnacho 5y agoMakes it easier to cater for events in the span of 30-40k. I'm the grim darkness of the future, there will in fact be long lived institutions.
- jackcosgrove 5y ago> What are the key parameters that determine renewal versus rot, and how can they be mapped onto systems of global governance? I would say one of the key parameters would be how well a system actor models the system in which it exists. In other words, do the internal rules of a system actor, whether it be an organism or a legal code, anticipate stressors from the outside and avoid them? As two examples, an organism on earth needs to have a model of gravity to avoid falling from a dangerous height and dying. Likewise a legal system needs to have a prohibition against murder to prevent feuds that rip society apart. If a system actor is really well-adapted to its niche it can forestall rot. However because the actor is always just a part of the system, it cannot model everything. There's simply not enough space to store the model. So all system actors rot and die due to unanticipated stressors. The system itself, however large we define its scope (valley, earth, universe), will always outlast a system actor because it does not need to rely on a model but is big enough to contain all the information the model attempts to compress. Renewal is when a failed model is discarded by the system which has more information. Rot is when the model is failing. I'm less worried with an absence of renewal than I am in how long I might have to live with rot. I see no way to construct a world government that does away with conflict. External stressors are necessary to "keep the model honest". We can try very hard to build good models of governance, and we should, but we should also know that we will always fail. The risk is that fear of discarding a failed government, because of the loss of pride, tumult, and short-term regression, pushes us to maintain an oppressive, maladapted order. World government has the potential to rot for a very long time.
- catlikesshrimp 5y agoYou don't want a goverment to fail. The point of a government is to avoid war. The ruling class is made up of the more intelligent and more aggressive population, who make a pact of no aggression among them and that evolves into a government. The whole European Union was born because of fears of repeating the WWII tragedy. WWI hadn't ended with a surrender, it had been an armistice. Defeated germany polarized and Hitler ascended to power. So, after WWII, France wasn't allowed to grab the coal and iron mines from Germany, and so on. You want to improve a government and to stabilize it. War has a few winners and the rest are losers. And not inconvenienced losers, dead or enslaved losers.
- kieselguhr_kid 5y agoThis is the kind of political analysis I've come to be very, very critical of lately. It's not even that I disagree with everything here; it's a truism in anthropology that more complex forms of political organization, like states and empires, are substantially less stable than less complex ones. The author just makes assertions without providing evidence or demonstrating his thought process in any way. And a lot of it is just plain wrong when you take a moment to think it through. For instance: > Over time, legal systems seem to similarly become more complex, interdependent, and resistant to change. Sometimes legal systems are “refactored” to increase flexibility, such as when the Roman emperor Justinian arranged for a restructuring and simplification of the Roman legal code. This Justinian code was later adapted by Napolean [sic], who spread it across Europe, after which European conquests spread it across the world This the kind of generalization you often see from dabblers and rarely see from actual historians or even amateurs with a solid understanding of history. The complexity and rigidity of legal systems in various parts of the world varies greatly depending on the era, the health of the political and socioeconomic systems in that era, whether or not the systems in question are based in civil law or common law, etc. And the idea that there's a straight line from Justinian to Napoleon is ludicrous as well. It glosses over 1300 years of legal history showing large fluctuations in the level of legal complexity because it's either inconvenient for the author to deal with or because the author is unaware of it. Regardless of the reason for the omission, it's a sign of the author's laziness. I get that this "paper" (author's words, not mine) is just a blog post but IMO this is lazy, reductionist thought and we should demand better when people want to chime in on political or economic issues.
- gone35 5y ago> […] this is lazy, should demand better when people want to chime in on political or economic issues. Or entrepreneurship, or nutrition, or (yelp) underestablished engineering issues too! Carelessly thought leadership should go the way of "statistical significance" / p < 0.05 sophistry of yore.
- gone35 5y agoP.D.: Related — Dick Feynman on 'experts' and "pseudoscience": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo
- dougmwne 5y agoGlobal government is a monoculture and like all monocultures its lack of diversity leads to high susceptibility to disease and low resiliency to environmental change.
- DanielVZ 5y agoI like the idea of comparing the relatively new world organizations with other forms of organization. I do notice some predisposition from the author towards a certain narrative, as he begins by calling these organizations World Government. I think it's a stretch to give them the "Government" characteristic as they lack the Sovereignty required to be compared with other sovereign organizations. But still it's interesting to compare and wonder how they will adapt in the future given how young they are compared to other forms of organization such as national governments.
- jeffreyrogers 5y agoGovernment's typically last about 250 years and then either stagnate or are replaced. Here's an essay making that case: http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf, but it is also pretty obvious that governments don't last forever just by thinking about when they start and end. Even China, which has a more-or-less continuous political history going back thousands of years, still had periods of chaos during which no central government really existed and then periods of reconsolidation and expansion. Modern governments in the West seem to be entering another period of crisis so I'm very skeptical that any global government would succeed in their place.
- m0zg 5y agoYeah, how about we don't go there in the first place? Of all the obviously bad ideas, the "world government" strikes me as a particularly bad one.
- cat_plus_plus 5y agoWhat kind of sick mind will want a giant borg cube with 3 billion humans miserable at being overpowered by the other 4 billion? Even in US, half of population is perpetually angry and miserable because the other half gained power. How fun is it going to be for US and China to vote on each other's culture? We should go in the opposite direction of allowing California and Texas to be more like Netherlands and Poland, able to run their own affairs while central body gets involved only when absolutely necessary, say for trade and common defense. Then let people move and self sort based on how they want to live.
- DeathArrow 5y ago>What kind of sick mind will want a giant borg cube with 3 billion humans miserable at being overpowered by the other 4 billion? They don't call themselves sick. They call themselves globalists, progressives. In their generosity they want to impose others by force their own ideas, convinced that they know what is best for each of the World's 7 billion individuals.
- antifa 5y ago> They call themselves globalists Who calls themselves globalists?
- AussieWog93 5y agoThat is not what globalists or progressives are fighting for at all. Even being as critical as one can be about progressives, they are quick to preference the (perceived) rights of the minority over the will of the majority.
- s5300 5y agoWith regards to your examples, there is a much simpler solution. Build a wall around Texas, and give it back to Mexico. I must say, it is slightly cruel though. I like Mexico, they don’t deserve to be tied into Texas. However, I see it as a necessary evil.
- asmoolw 5y agoThe problem is that more authoritarian governments don't take kindly to freedom-of-movement, and even if they did, "leaving your country" really means "and your job and family and social life and legal system and culture and language and..." so there's lots of sources of unavoidable friction that get in the way of a "free market of governance". Case in point - we have "red states" and "blue states" with pretty substantial difference in policy, from taxes to abortion rights, but national red/blue party votes seem to indicate they're only split 60:40 or so in terms of their population, if that. Even though "immigration" across US state lines is as low friction as you can hope for.
- brg 5y agoAre governments not monopolies which eventually fail to serve their citizens the same way monopolistic businesses fail to server their customers?
- 8bitsrule 5y agoHow can anyone (seriously) propose such a question right after the debacle of COP-26 ?? All the leaders just got together and proved their collective powerlessness in the face of the most pressing issue facing humanity. "We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous wisdom councils and communal decision-making. Power was centralised in the hands of increasingly specialised 'elites' and 'experts' who not only failed to achieve all they promised but used secrecy and the control of information to deceive the public into allowing them to retain power over community resources that they ultimately looted." — Robert Steele [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/19/open-source-revolution-conquer-one-percent-cia-spy https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/j...]
- Jensson 5y agoDunbar number works for countries as well. A hundred countries can talk to each other, trade and make agreements. Much more than that and it becomes a mess. So we get another layer of governance, called unions. You see USA being a union of 50 states, or EU being a union of 28 states. Expanding such a union to the whole world defeats the point.
- DeathArrow 5y ago>You see USA being a union of 50 states, or EU being a union of 28 states. Expanding such a union to the whole world defeats the point USA is a country, a federation of states like Germany. EU is not a country and never will be.
- Jensson 5y agoCountry and state are interchangeable terms. USA is a state that is a union of states. Or, as the federal level started to expand their influence the states aren't really states any longer, but for historical reasons they are still called states. But the original intention was to make the states self govern with high degree of autonomy, it was supposed to be a union and not a country.
- datavirtue 5y agoYou always need more unions...not less. This is starting to make sense.
- eucryphia 5y agoIf we had world government, the Chinese Communist Party would have about 134 seats, Australia 1½. The only thing I’m absolutely certain about is that International Socialism, regardless of characteristics, is not a solution to any problem, I won’t be voting for it.
- cma 5y agoIt could allow individuals to vote rather than parties.
- kieselguhr_kid 5y agoThis is about as off topic as you can get. The author doesn't discuss some kind of proportional assembly at all. Why shoehorn this in at all?
- brap 5y agoInteresting how this idea is almost exclusively pushed by first world citizens. If we had global election, everyone other than the first world (the vast majority) will basically vote for “give me your wealth”. So how is this in the interest of the first world? The day we have a global government on earth is the day Mars travel is really gonna take off.
- fuzzfactor 5y ago>Will World Government Rot? What amounts to world government so far is already quite rotten.