this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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If everything is completely decentralized then it essentially means that each person is providing for themselves... including basic services like water and waste processing. Centralizing these things makes sense, they're more efficient when operated at scale, and there are significant benefits to task specialization. And frankly, you don't want decentralized medical care - you want big, modern, well-funded hospitals with the latest technology, which means centralized locations and management.
Decentralizing services doesn't make sense. Individual residence solar panels are substantially less productive than large-scale solar plants. Services like energy, water, medicine and waste handling should be concentrated and publicly funded - but then that means you need to collect public funds and then decide how to use them, and that means government. The larger the public project is that you want to build, the larger the government around it has to be.
Youβre assuming parts of decentralized entities canβt cooperate.
Well, no, certainly there could be cooperation. But operating a complex entity like a hospital or a sewage processing plant requires proper organization and a permanent dedicated staff. I don't see how you could do that in a decentralized way.
Parts of the communities interested in running a hospital can just band together and run a hospital. Decentralization doesn't mean no organization, but the freedom to move between and form organizations. (Anarchist contexts would also say "just no hierarchical organization".)
Sewage and stinky jobs are interesting problems. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-full.html#text-amuse-label-seci413 offers a variety a solutions, including giving benefits to those who volunteer, community agreement on a rotation, etc.
They can. But often they don't, until it's too late.
"Often", as in this has happened many times before?
You are making good points, but I'd say there is a point in "size" which no longer a centralised entity makes sense, and it must be divided in order to provide better, independent service.
Everything has a critical size. It would be terrible if there was a "hospital" city for an entire country instead of a hospital per X amount of citizens.
Or it would be terrible to power the entire world from a single power plant, for many absurd reasons.
Yea ofc there is allways a too big. But energy makes a lot more sense over a big area. Not in form of a big power plant, but in a big energy network. If it's sunny in one region and they make a lot more power than they can use and at the same time a different region has a power shortage, because it's a cloudy day it only makes sense to share the energy. The larger the skale of your network the more efficient is your energy production. Less recources get wasted.
Absolutely, a single hospital for an entire country would not work. But also, small clinics on every street corner would not work because none of them would be able to support more complex/expensive functions like surgical wards, FMRI or biochem labs. The hospital needs to be scaled so that it can support those things, but then it only makes sense for it to serve a larger community because it's going to need a large staff and a substantial budget - so it needs to be at least locally centralized.
As you said, there's a critical size.