Breaking up power means making society more antifragile and governance more tailored.

What's So Great About Polycentricity?
By Max Borders


** Breaking up power means making society more antifragile and governance more tailored.
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In “When Governments Compete, You Win ([link removed]) ,” we discussed the importance of polycentral law as an extension of the fact of pluralism. In this piece, we’ll discuss the blessings of polycentricity and local empowerment.

—Max Borders

The concept of competing approaches to governance doesn't sit well with everyone. So it behooves us to share at least one practical fact about polycentrism at the outset: it’s antifragile.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb outlines an entire theory in his book Antifragile. The basic idea is that systems should be designed without single points of failure. Inevitably, claims Taleb, black swans will threaten monolithic systems. Distributing or decentralizing systems—including governance systems—makes them less vulnerable or more “antifragile.”

“If there is something in nature you don't understand,” Taleb cautions,

Odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.

In a similar fashion, polycentricity is biomimicry.

To mimic nature, we can start by privileging the law that emerges from natural interactions and collisions of people moving about in the world. The common law, for example, has evolved over time. Statutes, by contrast, are rationalist contrivances of central elites. Still, if central elites are to design law to some
degree (like Eugen Huber did), they will do well to practice “network design.”

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