Paradoxes of Decentralization

I wonder what measures you are thinking about that go beyond mere decentralization of power.

What I think is needed, is mostly a new mindset. The mindset that centralized powers cannot be trusted, so power need to be decentralized. And that this is as obvious as breathing.

Centralization has been a natural tendency, because it’s easy and “solves” many coordination problems, but the results are rarely “good”. And even if they are good initially, the centralized institutions will become corrupted sooner or later.

The problem with decentralization is that it’s complicated, even though the results might be pretty good. It’s basically the same problem that true democracy suffers from, which is not too surprising, since democracy is merely one special form of decentralization.

1 Like