The questions I mostly frequently ask myself are "How does anything good scale?" and "How is anything good and large-scale sustained?"
The most trivial answer to this is "Markets and incentives!" which is not wrong, but also seems like an underwhelming answer. Markets and incentives do solve many coordination problems and have reduced large amounts of suffering. However, they also seem to have limits in terms of their predictive power. I would like to read books which discuss how cooperation can be leveraged when incentivized markets (free from rent-seeking!) are insufficient.
In "Mission Economy", Marianna Mazzucato claims cooperation flourishes outside of markets when the government needs to explicitly define missions. She uses The Apollo Mission as an example, but this answer felt slightly under-specified. By the end of the book, I couldn't distinguish a good "mission" from a bad one. Even worse, I can't even tell if a mission is being carried out badly, other than ham-fistedly comparing it to The Apollo Mission, even though there's a ton of vague prose spent on the topic.
What books should I read to get a better pragmatic understanding? Is there a “handbook for social change” regardless of scale?
Some candidates I'm currently considering:
- The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Mark Levinson
- A historical book about water treatment, electricity distribution or libraries?
- A historical overview of unions. Supposedly unions have driven a number of beneficial labour reforms, but they also can result in stagnation and corruption?
I am interested in books on this topic as well However, the answer to the original question does not seem that mysterious to me. Most evolutionary psychologists describe the mechanisms of cooperation that made it possible for humans to grow increasingly large organizations (tribes, city states, corporations, nation states) aligned behind some commonality. The forces that make people agree to cooperate don't seem to matter that much. Once there is a social contract in place and a hierarchy of leadership, people align themselves behind objectives that seem important. It seems natural that groups of people would build stadiums, churches, political parties, trade mechanisms, armies, factories, roads, etc. I would ask a complementary question: what would you need to disrupt or remove in order to make it very hard for humans to build things at scale?
Started reading this book and made it to chapter 3 before giving up. Mostly ends up being a tour of various pitfalls when pursuing something ambitious. For example:
These points felt obvious/familiar and I was hoping for a more systematic treatment.