I've served on a jury, for example, and I was impressed by the common-sense, level-headed approach taken by the other 11 members. (I was just there for the free sandwiches.) It was not a case that - as far as I know - any of us had had to deal with before, but we listened to the evidence, took notes, and came fairly quickly to a unanimous verdict.

Get a few guys together and they can talk about cars - or computers, depending on the generation - for just about any length of time without the least sign of animosity. Even sport, with its strong team rivalries, is usually a safe topic.

As soon as the subject of politics is raised, though, the debate becomes heated, and almost invariably devolves rapidly into yelling and swearing. Unless everyone in the room happens to barrack* for the same team.

I have a theory as to why this is so, and it is this:

People don't know what they are talking about.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work. Consider the family. The family is, in essence, pure socialism. Mum** and Dad earn the money, and it gets spent where it's needed. Centralised planning, from each according to etc etc. This works because it is a family, and everyone has everyone else's best interests at heart.***

Obviously a good thing, right? But when you try to scale it up to running an entire country, you end up with millions of people dead.

When you try to scale a process, things change. Talk to an industrial chemist about it sometime.**** Factors that might be insignificant on the small scale come to the fore. Those same factors were present in your small scale experiment, but they scale differently - some might grow linearly with N (the size of the group), but others might grow as Log(N), or as N² - or even as something scary like 2^N or N!, though such things grow so fast that theories affected by such scaling tend to get wrecked by ugly fact pretty quickly. The factors of accountability and greed and the costs of centralisation and information flow were all there in the family, but with a group that size they didn't matter. With a hundred million people, they predominate.

What it boils down to is that most people have no idea about how to run a country, because they never have run a country. And because it's complicated, and it is not at all obvious how the scaling rules apply to even one element, let alone the huge number of disparate and conflicting elements needed to make a country run successfully.

Which is why even the people who do have this experience mostly just muddle along, making small changes and hoping they don't screw things up too badly.*****

I have a cure for this. If I get it right, it might even make me rich... If I ever get time to actually work on it.

* Root, but Australians attach another meaning to that term.
** Yes, Jen, hee hee.
*** It works in my family, anyway. No, I don't want to hear about your family.
**** But don't blame me when you can't get him to stop talking.
***** And relying on the scientists and engineers to drive economic growth and generally improve things.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:13 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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