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January 08, 2006
Replacing central planning through subsidiarity
One of the ideas spread by Peter Drucker among others was that central planning's not very well adapted to the system we have today. The principle of subsidiarity -- top Google link today; I know nothing at all about Acton or Bosnich or their ideas -- gets us more effectively and efficiently to better results. There's no point in communication all the way up a hierarchy and all the way back down if the decision affects only a few parties communicating peer-to-peer, and those few parties understand all the relevant facts.
Notice subsidiarity doesn't prescribe eliminating all centralizing aspects of planning, just the aspects that reasonably can be done with smaller, simpler, decentralized structures. There may be some activities better coordinated centrally. Many sense a tendency, however, especially among those reaping benefits out of planning centrally, to overemphasize the number of activities requiring central planning. I'm one of the people who senses that tendency. That sense reinforces my feeling that republican forms are imperfect. They cannot take subsidiarity very seriously in practice.
What sort of a system would take subsidiarity very seriously in practice? I haven't experienced one yet. Some say we already have the best possible alternative, market-based republican democracy. We may have the best alternative of what already exists, but is it the best possible alternative? Or can a more subsidiarian system exist?
This reminds me of the old joke about the mathematician, the physicist, and the engineer. The three get jailed by an evil tyrant. The tyrant leaves them in their cells with nourishment in tin cans, but with no utensils to open the cans. All they have are whiteboards and whiteboard markers. The tyrant goes away and forgets about them.
A month later, the tyrant comes back to see who's survived. He finds the mathematician dead from starvation next to a whiteboard proof showing how a tin can be turned inside out through any point on the tin's surface.
The physicist is dead as well. The whiteboard is covered with equations, and there's a tiny slit in the top of one of the cans, but the pieces of food inside were too big to get through the slit.
In the engineer's cell the whiteboard bears a few seemingly unrelated doodles. Various tins have been bashed open. The food has leaked out and smeared onto the floor, ceiling, cell bars, and so forth. The engineer is alive though.
If a more subsidiarian system exists, there may be some worthwhile time spent thinking about it, but there may also be a need for heavy prototyping. Who knows how violent the prototyping would need to be. With luck any necessary violence could be directed at inanimate tin can-like things. The proof would be in survival at the end. The problem might well look unsolvable initially.
As Gilles said the other day about the problem of getting a globally unique value from a weakly synchronized distributed system, the general case is not solvable. But all the specific cases end up either being solvable, or the problem gets redefined.
Posted by Mark at January 8, 2006 09:33 AM
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Comments
Except for the "parties understand[ing] all the relevant facts," subsidiarity sounds like one of the companies I've worked for.
Posted by: Andy at January 9, 2006 10:19 PM
Rob claims to have read the part about understanding is prerequisite for having good democratic decisions. Otherwise you're back to random choices.
Posted by: Mark at January 10, 2006 02:13 PM