Robin Hanson quotes from a subscription-only New Scientist article by Deborah MacKenzie.
hierarchical control structures ballooned, with more layers of middle management. Such bureaucracy was what really brought people together in nation-sized units, argues Maleševic. But not by design: it emerged out of the behaviour of complex hierarchical systems. As people do more kinds of activities, says Bar-Yam, the control structure of their society inevitably becomes denser.
In a sense, I began thinking about this fifteen years ago.
Consider two evolutionary processes that could lead to a winner at a particular business.
a) natural selection. Many small firms enter the market and make decisions, and one of them has the skill and luck to make the fewest mistakes, becoming the dominant firm.
b) bureaucratic filtering. A single firm with a large bureaucracy faces many of the same choice points, and it uses its resource-intensive planning processes to sort out the decisions. These processes minimize mistakes, enabling the firm to reach the same point that would be reached in the natural selection process.
My guess is that process (a) will increase in importance in the future, and that process (b) will be less productive. The challenge with defending this guess is the fact that large companies with bureaucratic management are so successful at present.
That particular essay did not deal with the issue of nation-states. But it is consistent with the idea that industrialization and the nation-state would evolve at the same time, because bureaucracy was more important and effective in an industrial economy than in a pre-industrial or post-industrial economy.
industrialization and bureacracy may “evolve” at the same time by reinforcing each other, but only in the short to medium term. Evolution forks, and creates tremendous diversity over the long-term, AND sheds the burden of crushing refinement by sending species to the woodshed.
bureacracy is on the decline, along with the nation state. companies like IBM, even MSFT will not exist in the future as software is written open-source and adaptive to the diversity of human needs. large companies (aka IBM) cannot respond to anymore to customer needs- it takes fast-cycle Y-combinator companies.
The nation-state is going extinct. some will go bankrupt with demographics, but most are too schlerotic to provide required pensions, healthcare and education- and honestly almost none of them provide a military besides the USA.. These human services are much better scaled at the level of millions of people (city-states) than tens or hundreds of millions. plenty of scale for economics, but balanced against the diversity of the geography and individuals.
Scotland is the right size for a country- but they are too timid.
I recently read John Fiske’s ‘Civil Government in the United States’. On interesting observation he made is that we really haven’t figured out how to organize government for cities, as opposed to the successful use of direct democracy in the NE township and representative county governance in the more sparsely populated southern colonies/states (at least in 1886). The conflict seems to be because cities provide so many direct services, but are to large for a townhall and to vital to avoid problems with representation, not to mention needing a strong executive to get the services provided.
It appears to me, that the problems with city governance has percolated up through the state and federal government levels as communication and transportation developments have permitted more direct provision of services (and control) by those levels. The federal government today operates a lot like a city administration of 1900 but on a nation-state level. As city identity seemed to develop as the city became more of a center of production rather than a port or marketplace, so has the national identity peaked and now waned with the rise of industry and national markets.
In regards to the quoted material at the Hanson link about former colonies. Alan Macfarlane, in ‘The Invention of the Modern World’, pointed out the British empire was unique in that it used so few Brits in the far flung places. The British held the key positions but developed an indigenous bureaucracy, and even defensive force, whereas other colonizers tended to flood the colony with the home country’s nationals for governance and defense. It was, Macfarlane observed, the only way a small nation as Great Britain could run such an empire with such a small home population. This may be why the former British colonies have faired better, because they had a trained indigenous bureaucracy ready to step into the vacuum left by British withdrawal.