Taleb made this comment on Facebook yesterday. Seems relevant:
Another attribute of small is beautiful: (what we call) democracy.
The idea of democracy is to take the citizens’ location as fixed, and the identity of those in government as variable, the “representatives” matching the preferences of the people. But you can get similar results of representation, even under dictatorships, by varying the people’s location instead.
Assuming you are able to move to the canton or municipality where you feel the dictators represent your tastes & beliefs, such competition would put pressure on local municipal dictators to please taxpaying constituents so they stick around. So the smaller the size of political units (and the larger their number), the more democracy we get in the system.
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Taleb made this comment on Facebook yesterday. Seems relevant:
Another attribute of small is beautiful: (what we call) democracy.
The idea of democracy is to take the citizens’ location as fixed, and the identity of those in government as variable, the “representatives” matching the preferences of the people. But you can get similar results of representation, even under dictatorships, by varying the people’s location instead.
Assuming you are able to move to the canton or municipality where you feel the dictators represent your tastes & beliefs, such competition would put pressure on local municipal dictators to please taxpaying constituents so they stick around. So the smaller the size of political units (and the larger their number), the more democracy we get in the system.