“An even broader point :-) is that democracy doesn’t scale well.
There are lot of things which might work well in some 4,000-people towns and don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell in a political unit with many millions of people in it.”
I’m cognizant of that, and am proposing we learn something from what engineers do when trying to create an entirely new thing: Start with a tabletop model, and see how and to what extent it can be scaled. In finding how it can be scaled, the concept is likely to evolve considerably.
Start with a tabletop model, and see how and to what extent it can be scaled.
The problem is that running the test—adjust—test—adjust… cycles requires not just speculation about what the result might be, but actually throwing the model into reality and looking at how it does.
That’s… difficult when we are talking about adjustments to political processes :-/
I wouldn’t take it so literally, and I’m not trying to put the world on my work table—just casting a meme upon the waves.
Something like this “scaling up” occurred when in the late 1770s and early 1780s, former colonies tried many models of state constitution, and the results were, according to some historians, beneficial to the design of the U.S. constitution. Maybe some 1775-6 pamphleteer could be said to have been somewhat in my position when he wrote “here’s something we might try...” (and maybe he was ignored and I will be too).
I’m cognizant of that, and am proposing we learn something from what engineers do when trying to create an entirely new thing: Start with a tabletop model, and see how and to what extent it can be scaled. In finding how it can be scaled, the concept is likely to evolve considerably.
The problem is that running the test—adjust—test—adjust… cycles requires not just speculation about what the result might be, but actually throwing the model into reality and looking at how it does.
That’s… difficult when we are talking about adjustments to political processes :-/
I wouldn’t take it so literally, and I’m not trying to put the world on my work table—just casting a meme upon the waves.
Something like this “scaling up” occurred when in the late 1770s and early 1780s, former colonies tried many models of state constitution, and the results were, according to some historians, beneficial to the design of the U.S. constitution. Maybe some 1775-6 pamphleteer could be said to have been somewhat in my position when he wrote “here’s something we might try...” (and maybe he was ignored and I will be too).
Oh, no problems with that. But the ocean is vast… :-)