Dangers of Competent Governance

In most places, most areas of life are dominated either by competition between multiple units, or by the governance of a single organization. Of course governments have usually themselves faced competition at larger scales, and governance often makes use of internal competition at smaller scales.

A key social and political question has long been: how much of society shall governments run? In the ancient world, the answer was mostly: only a small part. There were a few experiments with more totalitarian governance, such as in ancient Egypt and China, but mostly government was limited. Also, most private orgs were quite small, and so needed little only modest governance.

We can evaluate governance by three criteria: preference, effectiveness, and adaptiveness. How much do people just like to have more government, all else equal, how effective is government as solving the areas and problems it is assigned compared to the competitive alternative, and how adaptive is the resulting society (in the standard biological sense).

Effectiveness and adaptiveness of governance will depend on demand and supply factors. How severe are the market failure and other coordination problems for which governance seems especially appropriate, and how competent are the governance mechanisms available to deal with such problems?

Plausibly most societies were pretty adaptive until a few centuries ago, and so typical governance levels were roughly adaptive. And that is plausibly because governance was then not very competent at dealing with most social areas, compared to competition. Places with more severe coordination problems, like those arising from large scale irrigation opportunities in ancient Egypt and China, tended to have more governance.

In the last few centuries the world has greatly increase its average governance levels, having governments do more to manage more areas of life, and at larger spatial scales. Non-government orgs have also greatly increased their scales. In fact, this org scale increase is plausibly THE great change of the industrial era, with other changes resulting more from this key change.

One plausible cause of this change is a great increase in the competence of governance, compared to competition. Other possible causes include an increase in the preference for governance, due to a drift to forager attitudes, and an increase in the severity of coordination problems, due to larger scales of war, production, trade, and culture.

I’m a tenured professor at GMU econ, which is famously libertarian, and with my colleagues I do in fact tend to think that we have too much government today, even in the US. But I’m not an axiomatic libertarian, using primarily moral reasons. My stance has been more about seeing both less severe coordination problems, and less competent existing governance mechanisms.

However, I also happen to be the proud inventor of a new governance mechanism, futarchy, that promises to be vastly more competent than prior mechanisms. And so I have to admit that if this mechanism is as successful as I hope, we’d then get a lot more governance:

In such a world orgs should be larger, as their more effective governance reduces the scale diseconomies that limit org sizes today. Governments and nonprofits may also encompass more social activity, if they can learn to adopt simple robust futarchy outcome measures. This plausibly cuts their disadvantages relative to for profit orgs today. We might well even get bigger national alliances, or even a world government. (More)

A key question then is: to what purposes would this new stronger governance be directed? I’ve hoped that we could use it to solve our big key problem of cultural drift, and in fact I can’t actually think of a more promising solution to that problem. But I have to admit that most societies may in fact direct it to other purposes.

In the past, weak governance may actually have been a big reason why we’ve had so much competition, which has induced so much cultural evolution. Stronger governance could let places function with much less competition, which then results in much less adaptive cultural evolution. Which would then allow those cultures to drift even worse into dysfunction.

So if our world soon acquires a much more competent form of governance, we might then suffer a new much larger variance in adaptability. Places where this governance is directed toward maladaptive goals would become more maladaptive even faster, while places where this new power is directed toward adaptive goals could become far more adaptive, reversing the decay of prior cultural drift.

Overall, in the long run, this variance would be highly adaptive of course. But there might be quite painful transition period.