If the political systems were seen to be better in these smaller situations, they might very slowly move into the larger states (probably multi-century timescales).
Control of smaller organisations than governments, e.g. charities.
Organization and management of businesses and nonprofits is, if not exactly a well-understood problem, then at least the subject of a large body of expertise, and more importantly, of constant real-life tests in the marketplace. If there existed a way to reach useful insight there by theorizing from first principles, I would guess that someone would have already found it (and used it to great practical success).
Seasteading
Setting aside the questions about the practical viability of ...
Patrissimo argue that we should try to design good mechanisms for governance rather than try and use the current broken mechanisms.
I agree, however we don't have a theoretical framework that we can use to evaluate different systems that are proposed. Ideally we would be able to crunch some numbers and show that a Futarchy responds to the desires/needs of the populace better than "voting for politicians who then make decisions" or anything else we come up with.
So we need to be able to do things like quantifying how well the system responds to the people. Pretending that humans are agents which have a utility function would seem like an obvious simplification to make in the model. We also need to formalise "being in charge".
I tend to formalise who has authority in a system as a number of pairings of people and posts. Posts might be the seat in the senate or the presidency, although we will want to expand this notion of post to look at all bureacracy and how they are filled.
One way a proposed mechanism would work would be through controlling the pairings. Futarchy suggests that we might look at other ways to make the mechanism work. This would be quite hard to model, we would have to model the incentives of the people making the prosperity indexes and the incentives of the market participants.
So we want a system that selects the people/post pairing that maximises the groups utility function, while assuming that the people in control of the post will maximise their utility and everyone else will try to (ab)use the mechanism to maximise their own utility.
Does this seem like the right track?