I’ve been giving this idle thought recently—it feels like what we have worldwide right now is a scaling problem. Forms of government that worked great for small countries are not necessarily adapted to govern countries with tens or hundreds of millions of people. Especially in the era of specialization, there are people who specialize in hacking the government to their advantage. Our only response in modern democracies is—for everyone to make the right decision. Other systems so far are even worse, because they have a single point of failure (the ruler) or at most a few (the central committee, or whathaveyou).

I don’t know what defense-in-depth against government capture looks like, but it doesn’t look like anything we have.