hoi.polloi » December 5th, 2016, 7:19 am wrote:
That's pretty astute. Luckily it's not universal. I have visited and been to communities that have found various ways (not some patented(TM) way) of solving it. And it's different for every community. You just have to travel enough out of the normal zone to find the threshold of the global insanity. It's like swiss cheese.
However, I think as you scale up this problem beyond
Dunbar's number to the size of massive corporations, incorporated townships, nations and continents, you increasingly find the need for
heroic levels of vision in the visionary people. And human weakness begins to take over at that point.
The most amazing and successful and self-sustaining communities I have seen have avoided the taint and evil of celebrity, which seems to be one of the main foods of parasites and what you call careerists.
Ya, I define my term careerists, as people who have not the slightest interest or care about the line of work they are in, instead they want money, higher position for status, job security, etc. I worked in banking for a number of years, and only on the rarest of occasions was there any pride in the work. It was all about cya and trying to hit targets whether it made any sense for the clients or not. It was really frustrating because with people who truly have no interest in a profession, they don't have the slightest clue on how the profession works or why there is the profession in society.
That Dunbar number sounds highly useful because it gives a scientific basis for how to divide into groups with independent decision making. It might not be perfect, but it gives a good starting foundation. In my city it is divided into ~10 municipalities. As an example, some of those 10 municipalities are rabidly anti-development, while a couple are rabidly pro-development, with most somewhere in the middle. This lets people decide what is best for their community, and then like minded people to move to that community.
The 150 limit number could be say a neighborhood within a municipality. And of course for many or most things, the best person to decide is the indivudual themselves.
Where I see a great challenge with this, is that in some industries there is things that are not possible for a small corporation to do. The scale advantages of making like 1 million Toyota Corollas vs. making a few hundred of a limited production car. Notably though, I notice corporations are changing from these huge 100,000 person corporations, to a series of corporations which contract out to other corporations.
For example a huge corporation will win the bid to create an electrical plant. This corporation will handle the financing and the high level project management. By the time it gets down to say the local concrete corporation pouring the foundation, they have less than that 150 number. In those projects today, the big corporation even contracts out to firms like law firms & environmental engineering firms to handle the regulatory interface.