I hope this will make people realize that we need to abolish centralized institutions in our highly complex world. They are single points of failure which introduce significant systemic risks.
CDC also dropped the ball on this one. In Washington state local authorities discovered the outbreak only because they defied federal regulators.
We need better organization at the local level, and we need it now.
Running the WHO seems hard. Alarm people too often and they will tune you out. Miss an alarm once and they will call you incompetent (“you had one job!”).
But that’s a judgement against the United States’ federal government, not the WHO. The WHO does not actively constrain governments, they just offer guidance (as far as I know!).
In order to be efficient decision makers, local organizations should be concerned with acquiring expertise related to local issues, and then, through cooperation, global expertise becomes an emergent property. It's not like every central institution can marshal expertise on every local issue.
One reason you want to avoid centralization is due to the fact that decision making occurs under imperfect and incomplete knowledge, or bounded-rationality as Herbert Simon called it.
By decentralizing the process of decision making, you mitigate the risks, since you are allowing entities to tackle a problem in parallel, and if one of them turns out to be wrong, the fallout is localized. Whereas in a centralized system, one bad decision can spell trouble for everyone.
True, but maybe we disagree on how easy it is for every locality to acquire expertise. Plenty of local governments in the United States are already stretched thin fulfilling the simpler functions of policing, schooling, and basic infrastructure. Adding a staff epidemiologist seems very hard for such places. The same proviso applies to many poorer states and nations. That is why I think it makes most sense to direct effort toward having a competent central authority.
> By decentralizing the process of decision making, you mitigate the risks, since you are allowing entities to tackle a problem in parallel, and if one of them turns out to be wrong, the fallout is localized. Whereas in a centralized system, one bad decision can spell trouble for everyone.
On the flip side, decentralizing makes coordination harder. In coarse terms, there are game-theoretic considerations in an epidemic. For example, if localities are purely self-interested, an unaffected region may attempt to quarantine and keep all of its medical infrastructure ready for itself rather than lend it to nearby affected regions. In such cases a coordinating mechanism can be extremely helpful.
I'm not arguing that one kind of organization is always better or worse. To me it just seems complicated.
Reality is already ahead of you. [1] Switzerland is currently having trouble receiving masks and other medical supplies that were commissioned out of state:
Being landlocked, goods bound for Switzerland necessarily have to pass through a different country first, in this case Germany. Germany has a decree by which Corona-related medical supplies must not leave the country - and right now, this even applies to goods destined to Switzerland that are just arriving at a german port.
A fully "decentralised" world full of self-interested microstates would see a lot more of this stuff.
Perhaps technology could help in this regard, at least to some degree. Bitcoin has proven coordination in a low trust environment is possible. Imagine if we could make coordination easier in other industries too.
> I'm not arguing that one kind of organization is always better or worse. To me it just seems complicated.
I agree, it is indeed complicated. But we need to start seriously considering concepts such as scale, systems thinking with its centralization/decentralization paradigms, and incomplete knowledge/risks if we want to design better institutions. Then we can thinker with turning the knobs one way or the other.
There is a difference between a potential, or even a certain, pandemic and an actual one. You and the WHO knew what it meant when you looked at that egg. But only now has it become an actual chicken.
I would not trust the unstoppable gushing torrent of dubious information that is Twitter over whoever may be giving the World Health Organization its information.
Even if you 100% trust everyone you follow, and also believe them to be entirely impartial, the nature of Twitter makes it so easy to spread misinformation (mixed in with real stuff.) Twitter is optimized for viral content, not true content.
Similar to how the number 1 problem with the UN is that it has absolutely zero power to do anything.
> He urged the public to remain calm, saying WHO wasn’t recommending “measures that unnecessarily interfere with international trade or travel. (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/30/who-declares-china-coronavir...)
WHO fucked up big time IMO. thousands of employees there, most probably appointed politically by country of origin and who have nothing to do with science.
Oh, I thought you were going to say this teaches us why international trade and travel is bad, and relationships between countries should be minimal.
While I too favor decentralization, what we really need to do is return merit to our institutions. We need a social climate that encourages Pattons and Churchills and the like. Unfortunately to return to such a time of competent leadership (not just in government, but society at large) would require undoing decades of propaganda that convinced some two generations of children that we all have equal ability and any of us can do anything. The dangerous downside of giving everyone a trophy across society is that now people have grown up less able to judge competence and merit in others.
For example, I would argue that the "propaganda" that anybody can do anything isn't that old yet. On the other hand, certain political groups have been sabotaging government leadership for so long - by claiming that government is always incapable - that there's just no good leadership left in many places and it's become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I suspect it has a great deal to do with decades of people blaming government for their problems and increasingly less faith in government institutions, to the point of some politicians running on the idea that government doesn't work. It strikes me as difficult to get competent people for your organizations when the term "unelected bureaucrats" is used as an epithet, the pay is below equivalent work in the private sector, and the people at the top are selected for idealogical reasons instead of anything related to effectiveness, expertise or capability.