wise crowds ruled by foolish governments?

Thomas Homer-Dixon is a deep and interesting thinker, I really enjoyed his book The Ingenuity Gap (see my review).

He has a new one out, The Upside of Down, which is currently sitting at the top of my Books to Read pile.
(Incidentally, according to his book tour info, he will be in Ottawa on December 5, 2006.)

As a side note, according to the pictures on the book site, only Canada gets the upside-down book cover.  I guess Americans can't read upside-down?

The Globe had an interesting interview with him in the Saturday paper, unfortunately it is not free online.

He has some provocative things to say about our decision-making structures, he is really wondering whether the Internet can enable citizens to work together in a better way than our government currently does.

   MV: I don't find this conversation about values taking place in my democratic Parliament or other legislatures. Why not?

   TH-D: I don't know. And it gets us to a conversation about the failure of our institutions. A substantial two-thirds of my book is about how serious our situation is, because I want to make that case very clear. When people say we're heading for breakdown, it comes across as kind of whacko Doomsday. So I spend a fair amount of time in the book just making a solid, well-researched case that we've got serious trouble. And I don't see that sense of urgency reflected in our political institutions.

   MV: Why?

   TH-D: In a larger way, I would say this is an example of what I call negative emergence. We're actually stupider as a whole than we are as individuals.

   MV: Why?

   TH-D: Well, this is an interesting thing that needs to be examined. There have been two books, Smart Mobs [by Howard Rheingold] and The Wisdom of Crowds [by James Surowiecki], that have made the point that often large numbers of people together can be very, very smart. But I think our political institutions in Western society and just about anywhere in the world, our formal political institutions, are actually producing decisions that are radically sub-optimal.

...

   MV: Do you see enough signs in the broader civil society that gives you confidence?

   TH-D: I want to expand on my point about negative emergence. The idea here is that there are some social arrangements where the whole of the group is smarter than any one individual. Our current political systems seem to have created a decision-making whole that actually in many ways is stupider than any one individual.

   I find commonly in my conversations with people, even people with whom I have a strong ideological disagreement, that actually there's a lot of wisdom there, there's a lot to respect. And yet you get us all together collectively, and you look at something like what we're doing with our carbon-dioxide output, and we're acting about as smart as protozoa. We're pooping up our environment and poisoning ourselves.

Globe and Mail - 'It's really late and it's really desperate' - Saturday. November 4, 2006  - pp. F4-F5

This is interesting in that it is basically arguing that representative democracy, which was designed  to save us from the folly of mob rule by providing wise decision-makers, is actually not able to keep up with what the wise crowd of world opinion wants.

I'm not sure that this is a general failure of all Western governments, aren't Canada, the US and Australia the main offenders in terms of climate folly?  All of Europe seems to be, err, all hot to act, at both the citizen and government levels.

I guess it's not surprising that the governments are lagging citizens in terms of their thinking.  In Canada at least we seem to have an excellent government structure... for 1850.  I'm not kidding.  We have a ministry of more fishing, a ministry of more farming, a ministry of more mining and more forestry, and a ministry of more factories.  We do not have a ministry of science, or a ministry of sustainability, or a ministry of cities (despite Canada being one of the most urban nations in the world), or basically a ministry of anything newly important since about 1920.  (Wikipedia - Cabinet of Canada.)  Behold 21st Century Canadian Government, boldly prepared to serve a rural population of hewers of wood.

Gratuitous Amazon pluggery

UPDATE 2006-11-14: I have written a brief review.