A World Government?

Economists speak of economies of scale, by which they refer to the idea that the larger a company, the lower the production costs, and therefore the higher the profits. The consequence of accepting this idea is the belief that companies must get bigger and bigger to make better use of resources, so their number would become smaller. It is not often taken into account that this leads to problems such as declining product quality, an almost inevitable consequence of the loss of competition. There is also an optimal design point, which if exceeded leads to cost decreases being reversed, and becoming increases.

After publishing his famous book Small is Beautiful, Ernest Schumacher received a letter that read as follows:

The crucial point is that as a monolithic organization increases in size, the problem of communicating between its components goes up exponentially. It is generally reckoned that the maximum size of a productive scientific research team is twelve; over that size everyone spends all his time finding out what everyone else is doing. (Cited by Joseph Pearce in his book Small is still beautiful).

Pearce says that the same idea of economies of scale has spread to politics of scale, which would inevitably lead to a world government:

[D]emocracy becomes subject to the theory of progressive centralization. Individuals delegate their democratic functions to a local council; the local council delegates its functions to a county council; the county council delegates to the regional council or state government; the regional council or state government delegates to the national government; the national government delegates to a continental union; and finally, so the theory implies, the continental union will delegate to a world government…

If, however, this theoretical world government should ever become a reality, it will almost certainly call itself a democracy. People will have a vote even if they don’t have a voice. The problem, therefore, is not whether democracy is the way forward—because almost everyone believes that it is—the problem is undemocratic “democracy.” The challenge for the future is how to make democracy democratic.

Throughout history there have been various attempts to form such a world government. We can mention Napoleon Bonaparte, who tried to unify Europe by replacing the top rulers with members of his own family and generals of his army; Adolf Hitler, who wanted to found an Empire that would last 1000 years; Stalin, Mao Zedong and other communists, who believed that communism would eventually prevail throughout the world, leading to a communist world government, and didn’t care about the death of millions, as long as their ideology succeeded. Some think that this world government is about to be created, based on the current Western dominance in the United Nations. But is it advisable to create a world government?

I am personally skeptical, and have proved this in several of my futuristic science fiction novels, where the World Government almost always plays the role of the villain.

•         In Under an Orange Sky (1993, 2016), the world government wants to launch the terra-formation of Mars, despite the fact that this would cause the death of all Martians, intelligent beings inhabiting the subsoil of the planet.

•         In the continuation of the previous book, Descent into the Hell of Venus (1999, 2016), some of the dangers of the World Government are explained in the following words: Although the world is theoretically united, there are still conflicts everywhere, civil wars, we could call them, but everybody knows that these are the worst, cruelest and most inhuman of all wars. There is also the possibility that said World Government is occupied by a dictator who’d use it for his own benefit.

•         Finally, in Operation Quatuor (2014), the World Government is one of the main antagonists of the novel. As one of the characters explains: The government has managed to stop the population increase. Now they want to reduce it, so they have established forced abortion for those who already have a child, and compulsory euthanasia for those over ninety years of age.

Starting from the principle that everything created by man can be misused, a world government would probably become an extremely dangerous tool, which would overshadow even the predictions of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty Four, where the world government has not even been built, as the world was divided into three superpowers (Oceania, East-Asia and Eurasia) in permanent war against each other, all of which have turned into a suffocating dictatorship.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread on Politics and Economy: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

Malignant growth

Ernest Schumacher

Joseph Pearce is the author of the book Small is still beautiful, whose title clearly indicates the influence of Ernest Schumacher's best-known work, Small is beautiful. In this book, Schumacher proposes the idea that large companies and organizations are not the most efficient way to achieve human happiness, which in fact should be the goal of every economic activity, rather than increase the profits.

Pearce addresses the question of the Gross National Product (GNP), usually used to measure growth. GNP is often taken as a measure of success: the higher its growth, the better the economy is supposed to be. In Pearce's opinion, this way of measuring economic success is not appropriate for the needs of society, because it presents the following problems:

Education, our greatest resource

In his famous book Small is Beautiful (1973), Ernest Schumacher dedicates an interesting chapter to education, which he calls our greatest resource. Let's look at a few quotes from that chapter, whose title is similar to the title of this post:

If western civilisation is in a state of permanent crisis, it is not far-fetched to suggest that there may be something wrong with its education. No civilisation, I am sure, has ever devoted more energy and resources to organised education, and if we believe in nothing else, we certainly believe that education is, or should be, the key to everything. In fact, the belief in education is so strong that we treat it as the residual legatee of all our problems. If the nuclear age brings new dangers; if the advance of genetic engineering opens the doors to new abuses; if commercialism brings new temptations -- the answer must be more and better education.

Technology with a human face

Ernest Schumacher

In his famous 1973 book Small is Beautiful, Ernest Schumacher advocates a technology with a human face, because (according to him) the way modern technology has been developed dehumanizes us. Let's look at a few quotes from the chapter in his book with the same title as this post:

...the modern world has been shaped by technology. It tumbles from crisis to crisis; on all sides there are prophecies of disaster and, indeed, visible signs of breakdown.

...technology, although the product of man, tends to develop by its own laws and principles, and these are very different from those of human nature or of living nature in general. Nature always, so to speak, knows where and when to stop... Technology recognises no self-limiting principle... [T]he super-technology of the modern world, acts like a foreign body, and there are now numerous signs of rejection.

Plans, forecasts and estimations

Forecast about energy consumption

The media, and sometimes even serious publications, often mistake the use of the three terms in the title of this post. In his book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973) E.F.Schumacher explains their differences:

We talk happily about estimating, planning, forecasting, budgeting, about surveys, programmes, targets, and so forth, and we tend to use these terms as if they were freely interchangeable and as if everybody would automatically know what was meant. The result is a great deal of confusion, because it is in fact necessary to make a number of fundamental distinctions. The terms we use may refer to the past or to the future; they may refer to acts or to events: and they may signify certainty or uncertainty.

According to Schumacher, combining the three different binary components (act-event; past-future; certain-uncertain) we have 8 possibilities:

Crazy to predict the future

E.F.Schumacher

Consider this quotation of the book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973), by E.F.Schumacher:

There have never been so many futurologists, planners, forecasters, and model-builders as there are today, and the most intriguing product of technological progress, the computer, seems to offer untold new possibilities. People talk freely about 'machines to foretell the future'. Are not such machines just what we have been waiting for? All men at all times have been wanting to know the future.

These words are still true today, over forty years after they were written. What’s more, they apply especially to science and technology, two fields of human activity which at first glance should be free of fantasy and keep their feet glued to the ground.

Is science higher than the arts?

Albert Einstein

The explosive expansion of Western science since the sixteenth century has led, with a delay of two centuries, to an equally explosive development of technology. In this situation, modern man tends to be swayed by appearances and thinks that science and technology are the most important of all human activities, as expressed in the quote attributed to Einstein:

One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike — and yet it is the most precious thing we have.

We could confront this paragraph against this quotation by E.F.Schumacher in his book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973):