I still believe the Poli Sci theory that if the government can not govern all parts of society that other institutions will step in and perform the governing.
My first thought is “Bring it on!” In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the U.S. government has collapsed into a pathetic joke, and territories all over the world are governed privately. I call this the “snow crash scenario.” It is dystopian in the novel, but not in my mind.
My second thought is that conservatives make the converse point that when the central government steps in, this undermines civil society and local government.
I think that the point that governance is needed from some institution is absolutely correct. But the institution does not have to be a corporate entity. It can be a standards-setting body, or a set of common-law precedents, or a popular religion, or a set of norms enforced in a decentralized manner by people who are passionate about those norms.
So what we might call the “law of conservation of governance” likely holds. Where governance is needed, what government fails to supply will be supplied by other institutions.
It is also worth thinking about what determines the need for governance. My thoughts are these:
1. Population density is a factor.
2. Interdependence is a factor. That gets back to the Alchian-Demsetz theory of the firm.
3. Complexity is a factor. The Internet requires a lot of governance. Fortunately, the Internet Engineering Task Forces handle the plumbing issues. Unfortunately, many people look to Facebook to govern their attention. I think you are better off using blogs for that purpose.
I probably worded too strongly as I angling closer to other institutions do step in. And for the most of US history, local governance and religion tended to be the main governance players in people lives.
1) I do believe the decline of local governance started around 1900, mostly because with the car, railroads, telephone and, later airplanes and internet has allowed for more cross country and international business and communications. It amazes people how much of the country had Prohibition before 1920 and with cars, the movement needed to to go national.
2) I still think large corporations will continue stepping into this governance position. The government is not dealing with Colin Kirtpartrick, Laura Ingrahm or James Damore and it is corporations laying down the law. Being very large and a big employer automatically gives large corporations a big voice in the socio-political system.
3) Let us not Andy Griffin past corporations and local governance. The local factory used to dominate local and state politics is (and was) very swampy. In terms of films greatest cheer for small town America, It’s A Wonderful Life, the town great villian was the big banker, Mr Potter. (Note Mr. Potter probably did a lot civil engagement & charity and if I remember was head of the local WW2 draftboard. ) Or many 1950s Westerns focused on the big rancher controlling water rights at the expense of small family farms.
4) Who is filling in for the decline of churches? It takes a lot of effort to keep churches going and they are losing their impact. And some of the very religous writers, Douthat and Dreher, do not trust global capitalism here and are Trump interested for his promises to revive the WWC local towns.
This post reminds me of a novel called “Station 11” by Emily St. John Mandel. It is also post-apocalyptic, set in the aftermath of a highly fatal disease. The characters pass through a variety of communities of survivors, each with their own systems of governance.
The novel illustrates one trade off quite widely: smaller, local institutions leave more room for success–and more room for failure.
I also read that. Very sad book, worth reading.
Sounds vaguely like Watership Down.
Well, the unwritten part of this post is that public goods will be supplied privately. By public goods, I do not mean the examples that you provided in your 2015 post (health and education), which can be provided privately. What about law, in particular contracting law that governs commerce. I am aware of the analysis of the laws merchant of the middle ages, but modern commerce has become much more complex and impersonal to be governed by differing rules. Nor is reputation a solution because of the fact that modern commerce is impersonal. In fact, I think that the analysis of contracting is one of the major gaps in development economics. The process of development is of increasingly impersonal and complex transactions. Do you have suggestions on how contracting law could be privately supplied and enforced.?
Law enforcement, like soldiering, doesn’t work well on a contract basis because it relies on a fundamentally different approach to morality than capitalism does. Jane Jacobs’ Systems of Survival is worth reading on this point, but the basic idea is that a guardian who can be bribed is no guardian at all. Guardian morality rigorously and ostentatiously spurns trading because it is necessary to signal to one’s allies that you will be dependable even in the face of severe temptation (which combat is full of).
The minimum State variable. Pun intended but not pun.
There are some transactions that keep happening, to most of us. They peek up above the chaos, the minimum thing we agree on. Any resolution is better than no resolution and institution is born, the annoyance becomes avoidable.