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Building The Bottom Up From The Top Down, A. Michael Froomkin

Articles

"Bottom up" governance. "Self-organization." These are among the most talismanic virtue-words of modern political discourse. Yet the reality is that in politics, "self-organization" is rare, being hard to initiate and even harder to sustain. As Oscar Wilde once complained about socialism, it "requires too many evenings." Governance as we tend to know it depends primarily on hierarchical institutions, or on close coordination within small groups. True partnerships, conversations among engaged equals, do not seem to scale. Indeed, whether one believes the fundamental problem to be something about the economics of group formation, the iron law of oligarchy, or something in …