Some people don't see the value in individuality. "Oh, the world would be better if we just did this once and shared it." To which I say "yeah, but only if they DO IT RIGHT." It's a utopian idea: "let's make everybody do the right thing, because mistakes are killing us."
No. The biggest problem to solve in human activity is the problem of error. We make mistakes, and we don't know they're mistakes. The problem is that the future is unknowable. When we take action to affect the future (but action can only affect the future, so action is always speculative) we don't know if that will be the right action.
Centralizing decisions doesn't solve that problem, but it increases the cost of the inevitable errors.
Here is a selection of my blog postings concerning mistakes: value-transactions, taxes-spent-badly, monopoly-and-market-power, feature-not-a-bug, centralization-vs-distribution, and buy-my-mistakes.
posted at: 17:29 | path: /economics | permanent link to this entry