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In the US, government hasn't really gotten into this in a big way. Too many governmental units with their own local authority. China, though, or the UK, where the central government has total authority...

I used to think that China's central government would say "jump" and everyone else would ask "how high?" But after several years of reading about central government initiatives being hobbled by provincial/local officials[1], I'm not so sure. It could be that the central government is just better about preventing knowledge of their relatively weak control circulate abroad (limited press freedom, plus language barriers that prevent most Westerners from reading what ordinary Chinese people might be writing about.)

[1] Like the central government trying to reduce air pollution while local officials try to keep as many coal workers as busy as possible.

I spent a year in southern China ten years ago, and it seemed like lots of people had a brother or sister. I asked about the one child policy, and their answer was "Beijing is very far away"

(although I'm sure it's more complicated than that)

> Big companies don't have to have regional subsidiaries any more. [...] In the US, government hasn't really gotten into this in a big way.

It is a mistake to assume that the solution which works in industry is equally applicable in government. Businesses and governments are very different institutions. They have different missions, different stakeholders, different legal obligations, and different responsibilities.

Surely, things would be more efficient if we just had one large uniform, monolithic state institution, but a (small R) republican state cannot exist without extensive delegation. It is only though the process of delegating power to states, counties and municipalities, that we can even attempt to execute the will of the people.

This all comes with tons of redundant infrastructure - thousands of city councils, mayors, police departments, courts, and school systems. 50 governors, 50 state cabinets, 50 independent boards of elections, 50 different state legislatures - but each community has its own needs and its own ambitions, and nobody knows those needs better than the community itself.

The main issue I have seen with the smaller divisions is that they manage to do thing worse while not providing any true accountability because they are too small to be watched effectively and lack the oversight infrastructure of larger organizations - which is really saying something given how infamously ineffectual the watchers are at watching themselves.

That's the US. Many countries have much more centralized governments. French and Japanese public schools are run by the national government and are highly standardized. Germany and Switzerland, on the other hand, have powerful regional governments.

When we get someone who's similarly authoritarian but understands modern scaling technology, we'll have a real problem. Peter Thiel, maybe.

We've already had a high elected official praised for his understanding of technology, who advocated for legislation mandating how people should spend their money and took other actions on executive authority to bypass legislative processes.

Peter Thiel seems pretty sincere in his libertarian bent. What has he advocated for which is authoritarian?

He may be, and while he's a great investor, he's pretty easily duped when they're selling something he wants to be true.

> I think a lot of the voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously but not literally. And so when they hear things like the Muslim comment or the wall comment or things like that, the question is not ‘Are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China?’ or, you know, ‘How exactly are you going to enforce these tests?’ What they hear is ‘We’re going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy. -- Peter Thiel, October 2016

I think a lot of the voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously but not literally. And so when they hear things like the Muslim comment or the wall comment or things like that, the question is not ‘Are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China?’ or, you know, ‘How exactly are you going to enforce these tests?’ What they hear is ‘We’re going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy. -- Peter Thiel, October 2016

I see no evidence of his being duped. That's a pretty good analysis of how many perceived the Trump immigration message.