http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Re-Willful-Ignorance-tp1301339p1304525.html
Well, the reliance on competence is relative to the difficulty of the task.
> -----Original Message-----
> From:
[hidden email] [mailto:
[hidden email]] On
> Behalf Of glen e. p. ropella
> Sent: Monday, October 06, 2008 5:23 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] government hierarchy (was Re: Willful Ignorance)
>
> Thus spake Marcus G. Daniels circa 10/06/2008 01:49 PM:
> > I expect capable, intelligent managers are a subset of the
> population.
> > If a local government represents too small of a region, there won't
> be
> > competent people available to run things.
>
> Good point. However, a complement is that if you have a small enough
> region, only those within that region can _possibly_ be competent
> enough
> to run things. A great example is an individual human. If _you_ can't
> manage your own mind/body, then nobody else has any hopes of doing it
> either.
>
> > I've seen plenty of
> > incompetence and outright corruption in local governments too.
> > Allowing for some expensive mistakes (and expensive successes) may
> > encourage people to pay attention and engage -- they have something
> on
> > the line.
>
> Yes. The beauty of local government is that it's easy to put someone
> in
> charge and it's easy to remove them, too. Sure, there's plenty of
> corruption and incompetence at any level; but the degree of
> accountability, installation, and removal scale, too. Likewise, the
> stakes for success and failure scale.
>
> One reason for the "nasty" politics we see is this very scaling. If
> you've got someone in an aggregated seat of power, then a) it was
> difficult for them to get there and b) it will be difficult to get them
> out of there. The trick is to find the critical spot in the hierarchy.
> And that usually turns out to be illegal behavior (based on nefarious
> and ridiculous nooks and crannies of the law) or _disgrace_. So, we
> politick by calling people hypocrites, racists, or whatever epithet may
> fit the bill because these control points trigger catastrophic
> collapses
> of the inertial systems built up in the government hierarchy. Of
> course
> politics for heavily inertial aggregated government positions will
> hinge
> on nasty cheap shots and sound bites.
>
> As much as I hate the idea, we _need_ things like President Bush's
> immunity from prosecution for decisions he made while doing his job.
> We
> need it to preserve the stability of the office in correspondence with
> the amount of effort it took to put him in that office.
>
> But what this leads one to (I think) is the conclusion that high office
> should be pressed upon the unwilling rather than sought out by those
> who
> want to hold that office. Perhaps we should make it a requirement of
> citizenship that you can be drafted into office when a "jury" of your
> peers decides that you're the best person to fill that role? Of
> course,
> that would lead to an entirely different selection mechanism that would
> encourage the occult jockeying for nomination, false modesty, etc. But
> I wonder how different (or how much worse) it could be than what we
> have
> now? It may even result in a "brain drain" where all the people at
> risk
> for being drafted move to Canada or something to avoid being forced to
> play President. ;-)
>
> --
> glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846,
http://tempusdictum.com>
>
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