Again, I don't see why it can't scale. Whether you've got 50 blocks of city employing a specific social structure or 500 blocks at a ground level its the same.
Granted mega cities add a level of complexity, but on a very broad level I don't see why people here thing you can't scale a system employed by a 8m country to say 80m. Its just more of the same.
Well just compare a large company with tens of thousands of people, to a small one, the smaller ones are much more nimble and able to implement new best practices.
Imagine you had 1 team of 10 people working on ABC, or 100 groups of 10 people, working on ABC, yet having to cooperate between groups. It's really hard, it creates all kinds of friction, you need all kinds of overhead human capital to organise everything, everything moves slower, there's more resistance to change, and various of the smaller groups create their own working cultures and approaches, and squaring all of that into one cohesive vision is really tricky.
Then consider that companies are relatively dictatorial compared to the runnings of most OECD countries, where a CEO has more power to simply lay down a vision and expect everyone to get behind it, much more than a president or prime minister doing so.
I think that's mostly it. For a more academic approach look up diseconomies of scale, although I'm sure you're already familiar... It also applies to government. I do agree with you though, to a large extent I think we can scale, but there are limits and disadvantages at some point.
Beyond that I think to a large extent the differences can be numerically explained. It's not true that small countries do best across the board. Germany does better than Italy, Kenya does better than Malawi, China does better than Vietnam who does better than Cambodia etc... all larger countries that do better.
But imagine you have a list of 10 'large' countries, and 100 'small countries'. Obviously the large are less common, after all only two countries have more than 1 billion people, no other ones more than 500m, only 3 other countries have more than 200m, while more than 100 countries have less than 10 million people.
So imagine 10 large and 100 small countries, and they're randomly distributed. The chance of a small country in the top 10 is very large, as it is to be in the bottom 10, while for large countries the chance is really small to simply end up anywhere. Yet if you break up the US into 100 little regions of a few million people, like about 80 countries on the planet, similar to say Norway, Singapore, Finland (all 5m ish people), or Iceland (300k), you'd surely have many of those little regions hitting top 10 rankings for standard of living. Places like greater San Fransisco would probably do quite well.
Very valid points, but I think your example is a little tangential in that I'm talking about societal structures, not an organisation where there is a need to coordinate. Societies are self-organising to some extent, especially in their local cluster. e.g.
Suppose you have a room full of 5 people building a bridge with legos. They're a small group and thus benefit from say the agility small teams provide. They finish their lego bridge in record time & live happily ever after.
If you need to provide lego bridges for 10 people though then you've got a choice: you can stick 10 people into the room and make them build a bridge twice as big, or you can have two rooms each building their own bridge in close proximity & benefiting from the speed of small teams.
Thats a simplification sure, but I feel societal structure (e.g. the mindset that makes canada's healthcare work) are to some extent imprinted in the people & thus apply regardless of the size of the border on some random map. If you stick another hospital on a map in Canada it'll work just as well.
As a side note, not convinced about the big company thing either. It can certainly be like that, but well managed its not inevitable. I work for one of the biggest companies out there & absolutely everything is split into ad-hoc ~7 man teams that have essentially absolute power over that project.
Bit fuzzy post/argument I know - apologies for that.
Wall-mart beats the mom and pop stores Starbucks kills the local coffe shops. Local grocery shops just can' compete with Tescos.
In academic terms, this is known as the "economies of scale" And there is a reason why the mom and pop stores are always the underdog when Wall-Mart moves in. The economies of scale are bigger than the diseconomies of scale by degrees of magnitude. I mean, it would be nice to imagine that the nimble local stores are going to win out over the big chains, but theory says thats not going to happen, and in practice we observe that this does not happen.
The economies of scale are simply so much larger than the diseconomies that they steamroll them withotu noticing that they were ever there.
What is more is, we can observe how these things scale in countries from Iceland at 300 000 people, to Finland at 5 million to Germany at 80 million. There doesn't seem to be much evidence of diseconomies of scale over this span.
I dont really think we can assume they'd somehow spring into existence beyond the population of Germany.
We regularly see startups do a belly flop when they scale from 5 employees to 50, yet somehow what works for a country 1/5 the population and 1/10 the size of California could apply to all 50 states?
