Does Social Evolution Necessitate Decentralization?

Brainpolice — Wed, 21 May 2008 21:36:00 GMT

Social evolution can be thought of in terms of increased complexity. Simple forms of organization are uniliteral and homogenous, while more complexity in an organizational structure implies pluralism. Increased plurality, combined with a finite number of variables or resources to work with, implies smaller units. The more complex that a pattern is, the harder it is to understand or calculate or predict it from a central point or plan. The more simple and centralized that an organization is, the harder it is to keep track of all of the variables involved (I.E. the calculation problem comes into play).

It follows that as the complexity of an economy or society increases, entropy occurs as attempts at central planning fail and become increasingly obsolete methods for organization. Social evolution would seem to point in the direction of increasingly smaller social units and an increase in the diversity of social units both relative to eachother and in terms of their internal nature. This would seem to imply the long-term inevitable collapse of states and large organizations in general as being "unfit" for the proper environment for human developement. In short, at some point the social and economic interactions of people in and of itself starts to outpace currently existing institutions.

While the calculation problem is usually used to show how state-socialism is an impractical failure, it also implies its ultimate demise. And it additionally functions nicely as a much more broad theory of institutional analysis in general that may extend to certain non-governmental institutions. An organization is an organization and the calculation problem is ultimately an organizational theory in addition to being an economic theory. The calculation problem essentially proves that decentralization is more efficient than centralizaton as methods of economic organization. When integrated with theories of spontaneous order and social evolution, the calculation problem starts to have a new and increased significance.

But while social evolutionary and economic theories are very helpful in understanding such matters, ultimately sucessful social evolution depends on the driving force of social revolution and some degree of beneficial change in the general ideological atmosphere. Progress results from sucessful and beneficial deviations from the norm, which in turn implies concepts such as civil disobedience and education. Societies start to stagnate when they become too apathetic to develope and use independant mechanisms to counter the negative and harmful traits of the existing organizational structure. That is, the seeds of sucessful social evolution are to be found as far outside of and as independant from the existing organizational structure as possible.

Brainpolice : Economics, The Calculation Problem

Does Social Evolution Necessitate Decentralization?