We are leaving the era of big gate keepers and are entering the era of the herders

From an essay, Was Mancur Olson Wrong? by Jonathan Rauch which is quite packed with insights on both political systems and economic development.

A summary of Olson's view of political sclerosis and its destructive impact on political legitimacy and economic efficiency.

What happens if forces are out of balance, even only a little, over time?

Well, even if narrow interests have only a slight advantage, their advantage will tend to compound, much as an unbalanced pair of oarsmen will steer a canoe off course. Moreover, another important imbalance is at work: hard though it may be to organize interest groups, once established, they are even harder to get rid of. So it is no good to say that diffuse groups can and do overcome their challenges in particular cases; societies will still drift toward an accumulation of groups seeking and defending narrow interests — protective regulations, tax loopholes, subsidies, and so on. The element of time makes Olson’s analysis a theory of social development: other things being equal, societies’ arteries will tend to become clogged with groups in the business of obtaining for themselves whatever it is they want — subsidies to cotton growers, regulatory preferences for solar power, environmental protections for snail darters, you name it. And every group will see its own claims as vital to the national interest, and other groups’ as grubby handouts.

This one is even more interesting.

In 1965, when Olson wrote The Logic of Collective Action, the world was managed by institutions that acted as gatekeepers: big corporations, big unions, big media, and big political parties. Organizing a new interest group in that cartelized era really was hard. You could spend a fortune just on long-distance phone calls. Since then, the cost of organizing has dropped by orders of magnitude. Just think about what a single Facebook page can do. The Tea Party, the archetype of a diffuse-interest group, could never have reached escape velocity without free online conference calling, as its founders have told me.

What is unarticulated but implied is what I find intriguing. Rauch explicitly, and I think accurately, describes the world of the 1950s through to the 197os as one of institutional gatekeepers. We had, in the blink of an historical eye, moved from a fundamentally free and free market environment to an entirely command-and-control national economy predicated on the decisions of the wise few. This was done in order to win World War II. With that transition, remarkable things were accomplished in short periods of time (three and a half years). The army went from 350,000 to 13 million. The Pentagon, the world's largest building was constructed in less than fifteen months. The atomic bomb was designed and built. Ships were built in numbers almost too large to fathom.

So in many respects, mobilizing all the resources of a nation or society to address an existential threat, the command-and-control structure was immensely successful and probably the only means to achieve the desired end. But there are always two critical measures of any process; a snapshot in time, a static picture, and a dynamic picture.

Command-and-control, dictatorial systems can accomplish remarkable things in short periods of time (a snapshot) but usually are unable to do so over longer durations. They become sclerotically clogged as Olson described. Many theoreticians became enamored to what could be achieved by reducing freedom and letting the wise men decide and blinded to the long run costs and risks. In many ways, the 1960s and 1970s can be seen as a period of the US working off its new found addiction to totalitarianism. We have not returned to the chaotic exuberance of unbridled freedom but have been moving that way. Speeded up by the increasing clarity of the complete ineffectiveness of totalitarianism (collapse of Francoism, Soviet Communism, Chinese Market Communism, North Korea, etc.) and slowed down by the rear guard actions of the putative wise men or wanna-be wise men, we have been inching in fits and starts back towards freedom.

It has been a battle between the big gatekeepers (big government, big business, big labor, big religion, etc.) played out around the world and against the interests of the individual. And with the examples of BIG gatekeeping failure and now energized by the distributed aspects of technology (internet, facebook, twitter, etc.), the forces of individualism and inalienable individual rights are gradually making progress. We are in the process, it seems to me, of leaving the era of big gate keepers and are entering the era of the herders. Parties that want to shape the direction of things but can't actually control it tactically. We want to get the herd from the ranch to Cheyenne. The herd makes all the tactical decisions that shape things day-to-day but the cowboys, with little control but a lot of influence, manage the process so that, despite set-backs and diversions and a complete lack of desirable efficiency, the herd does in fact arrive in Cheyenne. Gatekeepers versus herders, engineers versus cowboys.