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 ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
