A possible countertrend would be something like diseconomies of scale in governance. I don’t know the right keywords to find the actual studies on this. Still, it generally seems to me like smaller nations and companies are better run than bigger ones, as the larger ones develop more middle management and organizational layers mainly incentivized to manipulate themselves rather than to do the thing they’re supposedly doing. This does not just waste the resources of the government itself, it also damages everyone else as the legislation they enact starts getting worse and worse. And the larger the system becomes, the harder any attempts to reform it become.
That is a good point. Still, the fact that individual companies, for instance, develop layers of bureaucracy is not an argument against having a large economy. It’s an argument for having a lot of companies of different sizes, and in particular for making sure that market entry doesn’t become too difficult and that competition is always possible. And maybe at the governance level it is an argument for many smaller nations rather than one world government.
Still, the fact that individual companies, for instance, develop layers of bureaucracy is not an argument against having a large economy.
This is true in principle, but population growth has led to the creation of larger companies in practice. ChatGPT when I asked it what proportion of the economy is controlled by the biggest 100 companies:
For a rough estimate, consider the market capitalization of the 100 largest public companies relative to GDP. As of early 2023, the market capitalization of the S&P 100, which includes the 100 largest U.S. companies by market cap, was several trillion USD, while the U.S. GDP was about 23 trillion USD. This suggests a significant but not dominant share, with the caveat that market cap doesn’t directly translate to economic contribution.
And if the population in every country would grow, then we’d end up with larger governments even if we kept the current system and never established a world government. To avoid governments getting bigger, you’d need to actively break up countries into smaller ones as their population increased. That doesn’t seem like a thing that’s going to happen.
A possible countertrend would be something like diseconomies of scale in governance. I don’t know the right keywords to find the actual studies on this. Still, it generally seems to me like smaller nations and companies are better run than bigger ones, as the larger ones develop more middle management and organizational layers mainly incentivized to manipulate themselves rather than to do the thing they’re supposedly doing. This does not just waste the resources of the government itself, it also damages everyone else as the legislation they enact starts getting worse and worse. And the larger the system becomes, the harder any attempts to reform it become.
That is a good point. Still, the fact that individual companies, for instance, develop layers of bureaucracy is not an argument against having a large economy. It’s an argument for having a lot of companies of different sizes, and in particular for making sure that market entry doesn’t become too difficult and that competition is always possible. And maybe at the governance level it is an argument for many smaller nations rather than one world government.
This is true in principle, but population growth has led to the creation of larger companies in practice. ChatGPT when I asked it what proportion of the economy is controlled by the biggest 100 companies:
And if the population in every country would grow, then we’d end up with larger governments even if we kept the current system and never established a world government. To avoid governments getting bigger, you’d need to actively break up countries into smaller ones as their population increased. That doesn’t seem like a thing that’s going to happen.