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He did not say whether socialism is better versus democracy. He said human institutions have an optimum size. An institution or system that works at small scal
by j7ake 3y ago
He did not say whether socialism is better versus democracy.
He said human institutions have an optimum size. An institution or system that works at small scale is not guaranteed to work at large.
That is not common sense, and in fact many contemporary people believe in scale-free properties of institutions, which have led to catastrophic failures (eg large interconnected banks that all fail together).
- earthboundkid 3y agoI'm not even saying he's wrong. I'm saying the whole structure of the argument is bullshit, but it's really good rhetoric, so you don't notice it. The argument is an extended analogy between biological systems and society, and the analogy cannot bear the weight placed on it. In the end, the conclusion he makes might be correct or not, but if it is correct, its correctness is not correlated with the argument he makes for it.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoThere is no need to insist in separating ideas about biology from ideas about society. The two are intimately connected. Studying something like political science is really a study of animal behavior.
- earthboundkid 3y agoBut he’s not a sociologist. The stuff about animals is stuff he studied. The stuff about society is just him spitballing.
- pwndByDeath 3y agoMaybe sociologists could benefit from a biologist mentor?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Turskarama 3y agoThere is no reason to think it's a bad analogy, and in fact it seems obviously true. All you need to do is look through history to see that larger empires have more complex bureaucracies. In a village all you need is an elder, in a country even a dictator needs teams of accomplices to get anything done. Really the thing his argument gets wrong is that he says Socialism where I think what he actually means is Anarchy.