I've recently been reading Norman Cantor's really excellent history of the Middle Ages and thinking that we are seriously missing a science that studies forms of human collective organization, which have varied enormously over time.
In business studies there is an extremely minor area called "theory of the firm" that almost no one pays attention to, and it is narrowly focused on modern corporate structure.
In economics there has been some work on cooperatives and partnerships vs corporations, which is why we know that cooperatives suffer extreme diminishing returns as they cross the Dunbar threshold (a fact that is simply flat-out ignored by the alt-community folks you so accurately carricature [1].) There has also been some work done in economics on agency issues in corporations (looting by managers, in particular, especially focused on the savings and loan crisis in the US in the late '80's or early '90's).
Sociologists and criminologists have done a little work on different kinds of collective organization, but no one has attempted any kind of grand cover of all the different ideas and structures humans have employed to solve the problem of getting stuff done in groups of more than a few close friends and family, which includes but is not limited to:
1) military organizations
2) churches and monastaries
3) town corporations
4) craft guilds
5) trade unions
6) civil bureaucracies
7) chartered companies
8) partnerships
9) cooperatives
10) corporations (in the modern, post-1850's sense)
11) criminal gangs
12) collegial organizations (universities)
Reading about the Middle Ages, I am struck by how various social innovations were really about attempting to figure out how to solve the problem of collective organization, and how new institutions that solved certain problems better edged out older ones that failed to adapt (in the later Middle Ages universities and town corporations took over many functions that had been previously handled by monasteries, for example.)
We only have the most scattered and incomplete understanding of any of this, and yet finding effective solutions to the problem of collective organization is the most pressing problem for any human civilization. The disasters of the total state in the 20th century were essentially possible because no one could prove they wouldn't work, and while we are somewhat better off in that regard today there is still an enormous amount of work to be done, to the extent that I think the problem really needs its own field of study, rather than being scattered across economics, business, politics, sociology and history.
[1] It manages to be both accurate and carricature because the real thing is as genuinely grotesque as what you describe. It is a carricature of itself.
> finding effective solutions to the problem of collective organization is the most pressing problem for any human civilization
Threat models need to include active subversion, lest we tar some ideas as structural failures of cooperation rather than structural failures of defense and risk management.
I certainly agree that the model must include that, and I think complete failure to consider this is one of the major reasons the simple answers fail even at small scales. If your model isn't robust even against "Bob is deciding to show off to the women by putting down Phil, and Phil is getting angry", and especially if your model actively shuts down everything that might actually resolve this problem, then you certainly haven't solved governance in any reasonable manner. And that's just one political game we humans play intuitively, without conscious intervention... if that's enough to tear your system apart, you can hardly have been said to have had a system in the first place. Both gaming and active subversion must be accounted for.
Yes, we will need more than spreadsheets to model resonance in the feedback loops (visible and invisible) which influence outcomes within and among complex systems, from single humans all the way to inadvertent collectives. Today, currency and law are used to implement feedback loops, but we have since invented many other forms of expression and composition.
In business studies there is an extremely minor area called "theory of the firm" that almost no one pays attention to, and it is narrowly focused on modern corporate structure.
In economics there has been some work on cooperatives and partnerships vs corporations, which is why we know that cooperatives suffer extreme diminishing returns as they cross the Dunbar threshold (a fact that is simply flat-out ignored by the alt-community folks you so accurately carricature [1].) There has also been some work done in economics on agency issues in corporations (looting by managers, in particular, especially focused on the savings and loan crisis in the US in the late '80's or early '90's).
Sociologists and criminologists have done a little work on different kinds of collective organization, but no one has attempted any kind of grand cover of all the different ideas and structures humans have employed to solve the problem of getting stuff done in groups of more than a few close friends and family, which includes but is not limited to:
1) military organizations 2) churches and monastaries 3) town corporations 4) craft guilds 5) trade unions 6) civil bureaucracies 7) chartered companies 8) partnerships 9) cooperatives 10) corporations (in the modern, post-1850's sense) 11) criminal gangs 12) collegial organizations (universities)
Reading about the Middle Ages, I am struck by how various social innovations were really about attempting to figure out how to solve the problem of collective organization, and how new institutions that solved certain problems better edged out older ones that failed to adapt (in the later Middle Ages universities and town corporations took over many functions that had been previously handled by monasteries, for example.)
We only have the most scattered and incomplete understanding of any of this, and yet finding effective solutions to the problem of collective organization is the most pressing problem for any human civilization. The disasters of the total state in the 20th century were essentially possible because no one could prove they wouldn't work, and while we are somewhat better off in that regard today there is still an enormous amount of work to be done, to the extent that I think the problem really needs its own field of study, rather than being scattered across economics, business, politics, sociology and history.
[1] It manages to be both accurate and carricature because the real thing is as genuinely grotesque as what you describe. It is a carricature of itself.