Dean's World

One of the fascinating things about the democratic process is how many unintended consequences it involves. For instance, the ability of 2/3 of the electorate in 3 provinces to reject the Iraqi constitution was intended to protect the Kurds; instead, the Sunnis were the main beneficiary. Had that proviso not been in force, there would have been less pressure to involve the Sunnis, and perhaps the pre-referendum breakthrough would not have occurred, and a major Sunni party would not have endorsed the Constitution.

This reminds me of an analogy Douglas Adams used, in regards to both astrology and parliamentary democracy: the particulars of the rules themselves aren’t that important, it’s the process that unfolds within those rules that’s really significant. We put people of a nation into a democratic constitutional process (first Americans, later Japanese, Germans, and Italians, now Iraqis), and like iron filings that line up on a piece of paper in response to magnetic fields they form certain patterns of behavior.

Those patterns of behavior under democracy have led democracies to become immensely prosperous and powerful relative to totalitarian regimes and socialist dictatorships. The degree to which an economy is controlled seems to be a main limiting factor in its growth. I think a large part of that can be attributed to something I’m dubbing fractal democracy: the fact that sometimes a blueprint is far less efficient at governing a process than an iterative process under a set of rules.

Ray Kurzweil noted that the entire human genome is less than a gigabyte; you could store dozens of people’s full genetic codes on your hard drive. But the total amount of information in the design of a human body is far, far higher than that; the brain alone requires hundreds of million times that much data to fully describe. How then is your extraordinarily complex body created from such a small amount of data? The creation and maintenance of the body involves a relatively simple set of instructions, the iterative execution of which creates enormously greater complexity, far exceeding the amount of information in the instructions themselves. Rather than a blueprint, your body is constructed using a fractal process, a complex biological version of Wulfram’s cellular automata.

Something akin to a fractal process is also fundamental to the success of democratic capitalism, which like the human body is governed by a relatively simple set of rules rather than a blueprint intended to describe or dictate everything we do. Totalitarian economic models fail because they inherently limit the complexity of the system they operate to the level of complexity that can be competently managed by humans, which is rather low (socialist dictatorships do the same thing to a lesser extent). Under democratic capitalism, instead of having everything we do defined, we’re given a relatively simple set of constraints (or laws) and left to our own devices, and the result is innovation and prosperity.

Imagine if your genes operated in a “command economy” mode and had to hold every bit of information that describes the blueprint of your body. Genes would have to be orders of magnitude larger, so large as to probably prevent a ten-trillion-cell organism like humans from ever evolving. Similarly, the Soviet Union and other Communist states found they were unable to manage the complexity of a state economy, and most have abandoned the attempt. Democratic capitalism benefits from the ability to harness something similar to a fractal process, creating vastly more complexity and efficiency than can be centrally described and planned.