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Comment by edanm | Hacker News Reader

This is a point I've often wondered about. For most of history, "the people" have had more power collectively than the rulers. And yet the rulers had all the wealth, and consequently lived much better. Why did "the people" put up with this?

This is just as true today, by the way. Collectively, the people in most Western countries could do amazing things to help world hunger, world peace, and so on. And yet for the most part, not much is done.

I think this is the same reason most people don't even think of starting their own company. It just never occurs to them that they can chose what to do with their life; most people just "go with the flow" in a manner of speaking, and let the world around them choose for them.

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Non-hierarchies are unstable because there are super-linear cumulative rewards to climbing towards the top of the pyramid, even if it's only a local pyramid, and even if that means the sum output of all the people put together is reduced because they are formed into a hierarchy.

But it's also more complicated. There are significant rewards for specialization, and leadership is also a specialization. A group, even a hierarchy, with a good distribution of specializations, will beat the loose affiliation of individualists any day of the week.

It is the same paradox that comes with the power of special interests. Special interests are small. They have shared objectives. They pool their resources. They are following Napoleon's dictum:

"In a battle, as in a siege, the art consists in concentrating very heavy fire on a particular point. The line of battle once established, the one who has the ability to concentrate an unlooked-for mass of artillery suddenly and unexpectedly on one of these points is sure to carry the day."

In contrast, the people, on average, want nothing. They believe that their efforts will be undone by those opposed, or not alter the ponderous inertia of the status quo, or that factions or (no surprise) special interests will be able to absorb the vast majority of legislative attention and resources. So the average is apathy.

It's not thought all the way through, though. If a special interest can do it... so can you.

It's not just that. The transactions costs of a truly popular movement are massive and difficult both to initiate and to sustain. That's why so many popular movements turn out, on further investigation, to be the false populism of a charismatic would-be dictator.

Human beings are incapable of deliberately solving coordination problems larger than 50-person hunter-gatherer tribes. Anything that happens on a larger scale is driven by mob physics and the decisions of individuals and small groups who aggregate power under those mob physics.

Read Rise and Decline of Nations by Mancur Olson. http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation-Rigid...

It explains this phenomenon. Basically, for a group of size n, members only get 1/n of the value they contribute towards any collective goal, so noone bothers, unless coerced, like with unions.

The rulers also generally prevented other rules from invading your land, taking your things, raping your wife, and killing your children.

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