Earlier quoted context omitted.
And many of our problems are collective action problems: where it makes sense for individuals to defect on their own, and they can only raise the standard for the group if they act together. At different scales this means unionization and professional organizations, government regulation, and international regulation, to prevent whole countries from defecting - this is in large part what the EU is about, and a signif…
As I see it, the corruption challenge of collective action is because it is so often not carefully, purposefully structured. Government is constructed with the express purpose of checking power. I read a bit I liked a while back about early feminism, in which members rejected wholesale the idea of power structures & authority, and established no authority. The author relates, however, that the power vacuum was natura…
It's important to make governments that are "about laws - not about men". Because if governments are built around single people, those people will concentrate power. When a system leads to the person in power hands off power to the next person, it's a way to distribute power.
The second principle that is a huge problem today is concentration of power into the hands of the wealthy. Thomas Piketty put his finger on the problem - in the 1970s, most obviously in the US, billionaires began to figure out how to use their wealth for persuasion. In that way they use their wealth to take more of the profits in the economy for themselves.
I think this is the problem of our time: How do we stop oligarchs and billionaires from funding a propaganda machine designed to break democracies so they can accumulate more wealth?