I have been thinking about the problems created by the slow rate of social progress and the accelerating rate of scientific (technological) progress off and on for a little while. My interest in this problem was first aroused by the dolphins’ proposal to retard scientific progress by appointing leading scientists to prestigious positions on committees, commissions, and advisory boards so that they would not be able to do very much science (The Voice of the Dolphins and Other Stories by Leo Szilard, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961. Pp. 122). Regarding governance by politicians, Szilard wrote: “A politician is a man who thinks he is in possession of the truth and knows what needs to be done; thus his only problem is to persuade people to do what needs to be done. Scientists rarely think that they are in full possession of the truth, and a scientist’s aim in a discussion with his colleagues is not to persuade but to clarify.” [p. 26] A brief review of the book can be found at http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3267&context=uclrev
Another input to my thinking was discussions with John Platt of drafts of the paper “Conditions favoring major advances in social science” (K. W. Deutsch, J. Platt, and D. Senghaas, Science, 171(3970):450–459, 5 Feb 1971). The principal results from studying 62 major advance between 1900 and 1965 were: “(i) There are such things as social science achievements and social inventions, which are almost as clearly defined and as operational as technological achievements and inventions. (ii) These achievements have commonly been the result of conscious and systematic research and development efforts by individuals or teams working on particular problems in a small number of interdisciplinary centers. (iii) These achievements have had widespread acceptance or major social effects in surprisingly short times; median times are in the range of 10 to 15 years, a range comparable with the median times for widespread acceptance of major technological inventions.” [p. 450]
I have recently argued that nation states with democratic representative governments are obsolescent. Speculating on possible characteristics of desirable successor governance systems, I have considered functional disaggregation and hierarchical decentralization of power and authority. This, of course, can lead to decreased complicatedness and increased complexity. It strikes me as absurd that a natural forest system should be divided by an imaginary line into Canadian and American forests. Water governance units for a river system at different hierarchical levels can be naturally represented by a tree-like graph associated with the drainage pattern. Hierarchies for other systems can be more complex; for example, the food production hierarchy might be based on contiguity, in which case a small unit could belong to many units at the next higher level of the hierarchy.
I am thinking the the principal functions of higher levels in the hierarchies should be (1) to collect, analyze, and distribute information and (2) to provide a forum for the lower units to negotiate agreements and resolve conflicts.