Beyond monopoly: the coming globopoly

Raphel Sagarin studies the impact of climate change and human activity on marine life, and is based at Duke University, Durham, North Caroline. He thinks living things can show us how to keep society safer. Asked by New Scientist (subscription) whether there are any successful examples of the kind of security approach he is advocating he replied:

The one I often cite is of DARPA, an arm of the US Department of Defense that develops forward-thinking technologies. It had a grand challenge: to create autonomous robotic vehicles. Rather than contract this out to a single organization, it went out to university groups and offered a million-dollar prize. DARPA had remarkable success, as all these individual groups tried to solve the problem.

This is a slightly less refined version of Social Policy Bonds, but even so it was more successful than the default setting of the current system. As government becomes more and more dominant in our economy, society and environment, it will tend to crowd out diverse approaches with its own one-size-fits-all, top-down, way of doing things. Its approach is essentially that of central planning. My chief worry is that globalised central planning will not be subject to the decades-long attrition that led to the breakdown of the Soviet Union, which was fearsomely monopolistic in its own domain, but eventually had to face competition from the more prosperous, less uniform, western economies. This global monopoly (globopoly?) will dictate not only what should be done, but how things shall be done. It's that approach that has led to Kyoto, and the single focus on reducing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions as the only approved way of tackling climate change - and it's unlikely to do any better for the world environment than central planning was for that of the USSR.