Re: Effective government; was: Willful Ignorance
Posted by
Russ Abbott on
Oct 06, 2008; 6:56pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Re-Effective-government-was-Willful-Ignorance-tp1301649.html
I see this as involving two fundamental issues: governing a commons and group effectiveness.
- There is a lot of current work on governing a commons. The best known name is Elinor Ostrom.
- The issue of groups, their effectiveness, how evolution selects on groups as well as on individuals has been studied (and publicized) most recently by David Sloan Wilson.
Both of these issues are extraordinarily important. They are both relevant to effective government. But they don't offer simple one-line solutions.
-- Russ
On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 11:04 AM, glen e. p. ropella
<[hidden email]> wrote:
Thus spake Steve Smith circa 10/06/2008 10:46 AM:
> That said, I'm not offering a better plan, though I agree that big campaign
> contributions are a problem in almost every case.
But big campaigns (and big campaign contributions) are just a symptom of
non-local (big) government. As long as we have a single government that
governs 3.5 million square miles, we will have complex laws with lots of
loopholes and aggressive special interests who drive campaigns (with money).
The problem, in my view, lies with the way government accumulates upward
to a peak. Granted, we have a decent system so that government
accumulates upward to 3 (or 4, if you include the free press) peaks.
But, it's still going from 300 million humans and 3.5 million mi^2 up to
3 peaks and 68 mi^2.
I would suggest that the myriad problems with our government don't lie
in any one identifiable cause, but are instead peppered throughout the
accumulation... the way household government accumulates to neighborhood
associations, villages, cities, counties, states, feds, etc.
I'm totally ignorant of political science; but I wonder how much
coherent work is out there on various objective-satisficing methods for
accumulating government? I'm not talking about silo'ed research like
"methods of state government" or "methods of county government", but
methods for accumulating all the way up from (psychological)
self-government of the individual to President, Congress, and the
courts. Surely there exists some (by now, half-insane) systems theory
people out there who've been ranting about this sort of accumulation, eh?
--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
http://www.friam.org