About 30 years ago, my mother gave me a Harvard paper on decentralization. I never read the paper, because I just thought it was one of those things parents do, give you some Harvard paper that they haven’t read, thinking it may make you smarter. Fortunately, I kept it. A few years later while working, I came across management books, and this made me read the Harvard paper in its entirety. It was echoing what many of the management books were saying about the powers of decentralized decision-making, autonomy, and a break from the centuries of Industrial Age thinking, of Taylorism and the centralization and pyramid scheme of everything. In Intro to Microeconomics we learned the powers of economies of scale but never the diseconomies of scale, and the economies of scale were extrapolated to Macroeconomies. I learned that government subsidized, protected, and supported oligopolies in the form of Japan’s zaibatsu’s and Korea’s chaebols were necessary industrial steps that allowed both countries to become economic superpowers. 30 years ago, Harvard saw the writing on the wall and proposed the most revolutionary idea in centuries, we needed to decentralize. Over time, I saw how decentralization was absolutely necessary in the Information Age, how China, Japan, and Korea were not advancing as quickly as America in the Information Age, because they were trapped in Industrialist, centralized thinking. Only ideas from the top were accepted, and brilliant ideas from the bottom had to carefully seep through the cracks of bureaucracy without offending or embarrassing anyone to see the light-of-day.
So why the fuck has our economy centralized more than ever before? Huge tech corporations are eating up smaller one at an astonishing rate, and so much so that tech entrepreneurs have a new business plan, get a load of investments, go deep into debt without ever turning a profit, sell your company to a tech giant, and make billions. Our news media is no longer hundreds of powerful independent companies but rather the subsidiaries of a few major corporations. After the 2008 Financial Crisis we are left with even fewer, larger banks whose failures would be even more catastrophic today! Too big to fail? Well, we made them even bigger! Walmart has destroyed hundreds of thousands of small businesses, and Amazon is sweeping up the rest of independent retailers. Most major brand consumer product from wine to laundry detergent is now owned by a few oligopolies. Over the last 30 years, the world has centralized like nothing before. It was all a lie!
One of the mistakes we make is in believing that revolutions will happen overnight, when in fact, especially when they confront systemic resistance, it either takes a monumental catastrophic failure or it just meanders along like a shallow creek, constantly finding dead-end ponds to wither away in scum. It was World War II that really sealed the deal for economic and political centralization and collusion in America. Perhaps it was nothing more than the socialist and progressive revolution of the time. They wanted bigger government and this inevitably meant bigger militaries looking for wars. Market liberalization had spread from Western Europe to America and made both incredibly rich during the Industrial Age, but there was nothing to stop the robber barons from buying up competition and then lowering costs and wages, increasing prices, and reaping gargantuan profits, destroying free markets.
The world reacted with collectivist ideologies in the form of socialism, progressivism, and Communism. You can’t really blame them. Market liberalization, however, doesn’t mean no rules. That’s the greatest myth in history. It actually means rules to ensure that no single player gets an unfair advantage. The collectivists never got that. They believed that the market needed rules governed by a central committee to ensure that nobody could operate their businesses freely. They actually gave some players remarkable advantages in the form of tax breaks, tariffs, competitive restrictions, subsidies, protection, and lucrative government contracts. If you thought the Chinese government was aiding and abetting their private companies, just wait until you uncover the American system.
So instead of protecting the public from shady big business that gamed the system to their advantage, we now have predatory big business protected by and subsidized by government, and we call this ‘collectivism’ aka progressivism, socialism, and Chinese-style Communism. In my opinion, it’s a whole lot worse than the robber barons who did not have government protection and subsidies and were only left to their own devices to loot and exploit their employees. As much as you can complain about Carnegie Steel, Morgan Stanley, Ford Motors, and Rockefeller, they were not aided and abetted by government anywhere near as today’s tech giants and financial institutions are. As much as Harvard can argue that we need to decentralize, the momentum of this new collectivist ideology is far too powerful to change overnight. The rich have gamed the system irreversibly. Flaccid attempts to reign them in like repealing Citizens United or reinstituting Glass-Steagall are doomed to fail. Perhaps one day, they’ll repeal anti-trust laws altogether (although that’s not necessary if they don’t even bother enforcing them). Campaign financing reform and banking reform will never happen unless a catastrophe greater than 2008 occurs, something similar to the Great Depression. This is not altogether unrealistic as the federal government continues to paint itself into a corner unleashing every monetary and fiscal expansionary, debt-fueled scam to prop up their bloated, fragile, diseased existence.
Reading this book is much like dreaming as a kid. You think that one day people will wise up, unshackle themselves, reform everything and liberate everyone. You dream of growing up to be financially well off, live in a nice house, drive a nice car, marry a beautiful person, etc. As you pass age milestones, as you encounter your mid-life crisis, as you basically get old, you start to realize, first, you’ll never be a professional athlete, and then all the other dreams die. You’ll never be a rock star, a world-renown novelist, rich, perhaps even married. This book is a kid’s dream, but I’m so cynical by now. I’ve seen the reverse happen in the last 30 years. Harvard may have been right, but nobody wanted to listen to them, not 30 years ago, especially not now. Perhaps even now, Harvard would never publish such a paper and threaten their lucrative deals with the centralized private sector that funds their research.
Short of another Great Depression, which is very likely, I don’t see the world (led by America) decentralizing in the next 30 years. In fact, without a Great Depression, I believe it will centralize even further. And even more skeptically, just like the 2008 Financial Crisis, Americans will be sold on the idea that the solution is not decentralization of financial institutions and the decoupling of government and banking but rather the greater centralization of financial institutions and an even more unholy union of government and banking. Call me an old cynic, but I see the world becoming a much more dark and ugly and centralized place before we ever even start to see the glimmer of hope of decentralization and true liberalization of markets and individual rights.
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A wonderful, albeit convoluted, over-intellectualized quote by James Buchanan, “Much of the growth of the bureaucratic or regulatory sector of government can best be explained in terms of the competition between political agents for constituency support through the use of promises of discriminatory transfers of wealth.” In other words, government has grown to rig the system in favor of wealthy campaign contributors.
Interesting to note that the author quotes four of my favorite thinkers, Friedrich Hayek, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Jane Jacobs, and Noam Chomsky.
The author argues that your vote doesn’t count because there is a two-party system, but this is cynical. In 1992, Ross Perot, an independent candidate, won 19.7 million votes compared to 44.9 for Clinton and 39.1 for HW Bush. 19.7 million Americans made their voices heard loud and clear about how unhappy they were with the two-party system. No, you won’t change an election by yourself, but along with 19.7 million other Americans, you can prove to other Americans that there is another option to the two-party system. I’m also watching the news now where a few thousand votes in Georgia and Pennsylvania could decide the election.
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One thing that the author misses is the fact that the larger the hierarchy, the worse off everyone becomes. Larger hierarchies have larger gaps between the decision-makers and those who suffer from the decisions, and it has a much larger pool of lackeys than leaders, exponentially so. While many are ‘leaders’ themselves, they are more lackeys more concerned with appeasing those above them than helping out those below them. Larger hierarchies are also fundamentally immoral and basically pyramid schemes where those on top are always looking out for themselves and maximizing their benefits while exploiting and essentially looting from those below. Their profit-sharing and bonuses are created by paying lower and lower wages to those below them, basically stealing money from them.
They can also coerce those below them to commit immoral acts for the ‘greater good.’ Larger hierarchies are fundamentally dehumanizing and undermine basic human potential including creativity, compassion, and intelligence. They are often breeding grounds for unhealthy people with no moral compass. People in large hierarchies lack personal responsibility and instead rely on leadership to define and interpret responsibility.
It is also a fear-based system which causes continual stress and anxiety leading to unhealthy coping mechanisms like alcohol abuse, domestic violence, drug abuse, and mindless consumerism. The incentives are also weak and empty including status, recognition, authority, and money. It goes without saying that the scum rises to the top, because all they have in life are empty desires for status, recognition, authority, and money. You can even go as far to say that people in large hierarchies are subhuman. They don’t exercise or eat healthy. They don’t enrich their lives. They don’t read to learn more. After work, much of their free time goes into pathetically mending the stress and anxiety caused by their work and committing endless moral offenses in their frazzled attempt to cover their asses, blame others, and please their superiors. Their colleagues and staff consider them assholes, and they know it. They rely on heavy doses of caffeine to get through the day and then heavy doses of sedatives to go to sleep. Perhaps the most deluded ones are those who convince themselves that they are not playing politics and resisting the bureaucratic bullshit with subtle subterfuge and cynicism. They’re considered impotent troublemakers and rabblerousers but in reality, they are equally cowards for continuing to work for and create profits for a fundamentally corrupt and abominable system.
If we agree that large hierarchies are fundamentally corrupt and for all intents and purposes, pyramid schemes, then why do we allow them to exist. The answer is quite obvious if you think about it. Anyone who is at the bottom of the pyramid scheme, and by bottom, I mean the 99%, has very little power by definition of the pyramid scheme. They’re the suckers, the hosts of the parasitic 1%. If you’re at the top 1%, and you read this book and go, gee whiz, large hierarchies are fundamentally corrupt and dehumanizing, the very next thing you’ll say is, ‘so what?’ Why change a system that enriches you? You’d have to be the most altruistic motherf**ker in the universe to let go of all your advantages in life and allow free competition to rule where you probably wouldn’t do all that well. In any system where the top 1% control half the known resources and wealth and most all the authority and power, nobody at the top 1% is going to promote change. The only way for this system to fail is either for it to collapse or for a more egalitarian system to beat it. Both of these possibilities are undermined when the government thinks you’re too big to fail and hence uses taxpayers to subsidize your losses and also when government makes it difficult for free competition, when the only way for a company to beat an existing monopoly or oligopoly is for it to bribe politicians with more money, as was the case with Uber.
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While the author points out the problems with modern science, he fails to point out some of the more glaring problems. The first is with this idea that some scientific principle can be applied broadly to humanity with a lot of misunderstanding and pure stupidity. Take Social Darwinism, Eugenics, and social engineering. Believers all pretended that science was on their side and used it to perpetuate and justify their own stupid racist, elitist world views. Of course today, Social Darwinism and Eugenics are largely discredited, but not social engineering. The Progressive movement along with many socialist and Communist ideologues believed that since science had helped advance technology, why not use this same paradigm to advance society? It seemed like a no-brainer at the time and hence it was thoroughly embraced. The social ‘sciences’ were created, one of the greatest scams in human history, the belief that through rigorous scientific or at least sciency study, many social problems could be solved. Yes, rigorous study and research can give you insights, but the social ‘sciences’ pretend that they are the real sciences and can actually prove things when overwhelming evidence indicates, they can’t prove shit.
Once you earned a Ph.D. in the social ‘sciences’ you could then enter the elite field of governmental or government-funded scientific management of society. Only you could intelligently make social policy, and through coercion and violence, only you could improve society. Only you could promote policies that resulted in the mass incarceration of blacks, urban sprawl, demographic segregation, and the utter dumbing down of America. Only you, because you had that scam doctoral degree in the social ‘sciences’ which have never and will never be real science.
In case you weren’t paying attention, today City Managers run the City and not the Mayor or City Council. The City Manager is considered the expert at running the City and not the Mayor or City Council whom are viewed as unsophisticated amateur civic leaders who just won a popularity contest and are often just lackeys of private developers. The federal government acts in a similar way with federal bureaucracies and secretaries running the show with occasional input or direction from the President.
This is how social engineering works. People don’t make their own decisions. Left to their own devices, people would resort to cannibalism and rape. Instead, the world should be run by an elite cadre of social ‘science’ experts who bloviate about sciency studies that prove that they must coerce the population into doing things against their will in order to benefit society in general, and to one extreme, this means giving prisoners, the mentally ill, and minorities diseases to study the effects of diseases and potential cures. Unfortunately, with social engineering, there are big winners and big losers. The big losers are eradicated, incarcerated, perform virtual slave labor as prisoners, or simply wallow in poverty. Anyone who argues with these sciency elites are considered unsophisticated, unscientific amateurs over-relying on prosaic, provincial, folksy, selfish, emotional sentiments.
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The book is more of a compilation of other people’s ideas and books on the subject, somewhat jumbled but organized into similar-themed chapters.
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The author doesn’t address the 800-lbs gorilla/elephant in the room, perhaps because this book would never get published if he had. What do you do about the existing rulers who have gamed the system and benefit from it. Besides getting an invite to Davos, how do you convince them to reform a system that is specifically engineered to enable their looting and hoarding of all the world’s resources? You could appeal to their conscience, but one would argue, they’ve long jettisoned that as deadweight. Yes, the world would be a better place with a less authoritarian, more decentralized political and financial system where the abundance of resources on this planet would be more fairly distributed eliminating mass poverty and creating this wonderful burgeoning middle class full of happy people who have the financial security to live healthy, independent lives. Yeah, they don’t give a shit, sorry. You could appeal to their fear. Authoritarian, centralized systems worked in the Industrial Age, but in the Information Age, decentralized networked systems will rule supreme, eat your lunch, and create a new class of rulers leaving you behind, impoverished to mingle with the grotesque middle class you abhor so much. That may do it. But they’ll want proof, and until that proof comes along, they’ll be happy with the status quo, one in which the top 1% has never been as happy and privileged and wealthy in the last 100 years.
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The social singularity as far as I can tell is a multi-faceted moment where we are all better connected and can make greater contributions and have greater freedoms in our interactions. I’m not entirely sure the author meant that we would all be part of a greater social hive and completely lose our individual identities as the ‘singularity’ may imply. Certainly, we would exist in a much greater collaborative, cooperative, conscious coexistence with each other instead of insulated, atomized, individualized, and alienated. We may certainly feel more connected and united with others, but I would imagine we would still embrace our own individuality albeit not as frenetically and obsessively as we do today, especially on social media where our lives seemed to depend on the approval of others and we are narcissists instead of collectivists. We are only collectivists so far as we aggregate with others to approve or disapprove of someone’s post.
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I’ve waited 30 years for Harvard’s paper on decentralization to manifest, and besides a few scarce exceptions, the world has centralized more than ever, and I’m not holding my breath another 30 years. The one caveat is that fewer supervisors and managers are Vietnam War vets who were inculcated in an abusive, authoritarian military system via the draft. More and more supervisors and managers are Gen-X growing up with better social skills and a greater appreciation for dialogue than command and control. So you may lucky enough to work with a cooler boss, but none-the-less, one unwilling to dismantle the existing authoritarian workplace system. He’ll use that stupid performance evaluation to keep you in line, but he just won’t yell and scream at you like a drill sergeant. Also, there are more female supervisors and managers now, most of whom have not been exposed to military training.
I’ll keep reading books espousing decentralization and anti-authoritarianism, preaching to the choir, solidifying my convictions, but I won’t expect it anytime soon just as I won’t expect everyone to have flying autonomous cars in 30 years despite the fact that this will eventually be the case. In perhaps a dark and cynical possibility, the criminal con-artist parasites on top will monopolize AI and use it for deception and conquest, spouting off about egalitarianism, anti-authoritarianism, peace, love, happiness, and all while behind the scenes stealing your privacy, selling your identity, undermining your individual rights, and creating an even more centralized authoritarian system under their command. Being a billion times more intelligent than you, you won’t even see it coming.
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