Sean Carroll

But I do think that the overlap between the things he was interested in and physics was more than he suspected.

And I think that physics is something which, if you understand it, can help clarify your view on things like emergence and real patterns and things like that.

So I encouraged him to move in that direction.

Miwash Viachor says, in the spirit of physics of democracy, do you think that we should strive to become fractal or scaleless societies?

That is, is there value in having layers of self-governance, identity, legislation, values, personal connections, et cetera, apply with approximately equal weight at scales from families and local communities through neighborhoods, cities, regions, countries, all the way to continents and the earth?

Or should certain scales be privileged, as, say, nationalists insist that nations should be?

Not necessarily meant as a political project, but I'm very curious to hear your take on the pros and cons.

Well, I want to emphasize that the idea of the physics of democracy is a descriptive one, not a normative one.

That is to say, I'm trying to see whether or not we can learn about how things work by applying a physics-oriented lens to some of these problems in politics and society, rather than saying physics teaches us that we should do things one way or the other.

So I would interpret your question as saying, is it possible to—

have better by the standards we already have, by the norms that we already hold to, would we be more effective if there were more autonomy between the different layers of government than there are now?

Like in the present world, I think it's true that sort of the nation state is the primary locus of governance.

And, you know, I think that I'm not sure is the answer.

I don't think that there's any

principle that says that if an organization is completely scale-free or power law or fractal or whatever, that that's better.

I think that there are reasons why dynamically in different circumstances those kinds of distributions arise naturally, and maybe politics is not one of them.

I mean, you can see in the United States, which again, I always apologize for always using American examples, but those are the ones I know, having grown up here.

There was a very strong tradition of federalism at early moments in the history of the country.

And even at a more fine-grained level, there was a tradition of local control of things like schools and roads and things like that.

So there was a distribution of responsibilities at different levels.