Bounded society

A friend pointed me to an interesting concept a while back called bounded rationality. In short, it's a way of asking how optimally something with a limited capacity can make decisions. While a supercomputer could run complex calculations or simulations to determine the best course of action, our brains have a much smaller computational ability. Instead, we rely on various tricks and shortcuts that, although not strictly optimal, may be the best we'll get under the circumstances.

I've heard fairly often that democracy is a similar kind of best-we'll-get system. "the worst form of government, except for all the others", as usually attributed to Churchill. Although more autocratic systems can be more effective and powerful in the short term, they always seem to go bad after a generation or two. Or to put it another way, the best case of an autocracy can be better, but the worst case is much worse.

I've also heard it said about capitalism as social system. We could certainly do some pretty amazing things if everything wasn't so focused on strict exchanges of value. At least, in the best case. Much like with political systems, though, the worst case of capitalism seems positively inviting by comparison to the alternatives. To me, what capitalism does best is turn a whole lot of individual selfish actions into a fairly workable system. It doesn't require a lot of trust.

From these examples and others, it seems evident to me that the way we design societal structures is a kind of bounded rationality writ large. Perhaps in an ideal world we could have a perfectly rational society that ensures the best possible outcome for each member, but our own limitations make that impossible. Instead, we have to try to make the best society we can on the back of those limitations.

That said, it's also worth considering that our limitations aren't permanent. As our technology and our culture develops, some of those assumptions will be invalidated and those old infeasible systems may stop seeming so infeasible after all.

At the rate our technology is moving, maybe it's already happening.