The problem is scale – and the change from differences of degree to differences of kind.

Control is not an illusion at a small scale, within reasonable bounds. From a young age and as I grow up, I learn that I can control many events in my life. I go to school, and get instruction, textbooks to study, problems to work, and exams that assess my progress. If I work hard, I can do well.

It’s that way in a number of areas beyond schooling. Eat well and exercise, and I can be healthy. Practice regularly, and I can master a musical instrument or a sport. Show up on-time and work diligently, I can earn a living. And so on.

So the notion that we can control events in our life sort of fits with our experience. It’s not a illusion – again within reasonable bounds and at the scale of an individual. And when there is a failure, it’s a Black Swan, something unforeseeable. “He exercised regularly and ate well, but still died of cancer.” Tragic, but not a reason to not eat well and exercise.

A few months back here at the BC, I wrote that I know for a fact that single-payer health care works at the scale of a family, because I run a single payer system in my household. My wife and I see to the health of our children every day, and they have yet to pay a bill for any of it. It works because of the strong bonds of love and commitment that are possible between parents and children.

But human relationships – particularly those as intense as family relationships – don’t scale (see the Dunbar Number). This simple reality is the reason I’m certain that a single-payer system won’t be sustainable at the scale of 300 million people. The complexity grows, and the power of interconnection weakens. The very reasons that health care works in my family don’t obtain at the scale of a nation.

The proponents of centralizing power point to benefits that come from having the “best and the brightest” working on the problem. But if the “best and the brightest” are an order of magnitude smarter, but the problem is 6 orders of magnitude more complex, the likelihood decreases that any solution will be found.

The tricky situation here is that because our personal life experience says that we can have control (of a sort), so when policy wonks (who got their job, by the way, by being exceptional at working the artificially defined environment of academia) tell us that we can set up a system that can effectively regulate (i.e. control) a sector like health care or financial services, it doesn’t sound implausible. After all, I can keep my weight down by eating right, and balance my checkbook by spending within my means; the country should be able to do the same, right?

Wrong. The human body is not the body politic. They operate at different scales and complexity.

Experiments are done very day in an attempt to find drugs that can cure a disease like cancer. Typically, the effort to find a drug starts with cells, then moves to mice, then larger mammals, and eventually humans, then entire populations. As we move up the line, treatments that work at one level fail at the next.

Rules are made every day in an attempt to deal with a social problem like illiteracy. Typically, the effort to find an effective program begins with a single person, then moves to a family, then a neighborhood, and eventually a larger community like a city, state, or nation. As we reach greater scale, solutions that work at one level fail at the next.

As we scale up, the differences are ones of degree. A neighborhood is more complex than a family, but the same solution may work with more resources (one reading tutor for a family, 10 for a neighborhood). The differences between what works are differences of degree; the same approach, just more of it.

But at certain points, the solution has to shift. If one tutor can teach a family to read, and 10 can teach a neighborhood, it might take 100,000 tutors to teach a nation. But you can’t coordinate 100,000 people like you can coordinate 10. It’s no longer a human scale problem. The problem is different, so the solution must be different, and the differences are differences of kind. It’s a different kind of solution. A group of 10 can self-organize in dozens of different ways; a group of 100,000 must organize in a market or a hierarchy.

An attempt to circumvent this process by imposing top-down solutions will inevitably fail. Taleb highlights a big reason why that will be true – top-down approaches inevitably suppress information needed by the system. But there are others, including perverse incentives of the rule makers, the adverse selection of people who enter the system, and so on.

This is why restoring self-governance is the only way to save our republic. By concentrating power into top-down entities like the federal government, we assure that the system will eventually fail. It doesn’t matter how smart the people are that we elect to serve in Washington DC; we’re facing problems that do not have a solution at the scale of 300 million people, no matter who is in charge.

Our Constitution was written when there were about 3.5 million Americans. Today, there are more people in my hometown of Houston. The framers didn’t trust federal power at that scale, and yet our current system puts more power in the hands of Washington DC bureaucrats than in the hands of our mayor. Go figure.

So, we do need an “intellectual revolution” that stops thinking about “national problems” that need “national solutions.” This thinking infects almost all of the think tanks in Washington DC, from Brookings to Heritage. They want to solve the problem. Good for them. But bad for us.

Nothing short of a massive dispersal of power will work at this point. By returning the locus of decision-making to a smaller scale, solutions will be available – different kinds of solutions, not smaller versions of federal programs.

What will those solutions look like? Which ones will work?

I have no idea.

Which is the point.

L3