Oddbean

@65cb3dfd Yes, this is an interesting idea... when I was teaching political economy the local, small-tech ideas of Schumacher were always intriguing to students looking for a full-scale redirection of our political economy... and I always think what's interesting about that approach is could be na organic ground-up response... achieved by communities working together; certainly on small scale hydro there are some interesting examples....

@65cb3dfd A new medievalism? This was a new that was quite common in international politics (for completely different reasons) some decades ago.... I suggest it not to be trite, but to try to capture what the physicality of a new localism might look like?

@43d7c4ea I loathe the term, which I suspect was designed to be pejorative. However, I suspect it is pretty accurate. Small communities based on an accurate version of Dunbar's number, say 500 people, will source food & energy, repair hygiene and primary care locally, with larger communities providing specialist services secondary services such as legal, hospital based services, and post primary education. I'm guessing cities will provide tertiary services within the sovereign city state?

@65cb3dfd Time to reclaim it perhaps... certainly in international politics it was linked to a pretty positive notion of a 'society of states' rather than an anarchic system where states only relied on themselves for security (the traditional 'realist' vision).

@43d7c4ea that's what I envisage. A series of local governments within collaborative Federations within a series of larger confederations. In UK it would return power to Local Government who would hold the spare money and pass it up to regional and federal governments who would fund the confederations in turn. Bottom up government, rather than the top down approach we seem lumbered with.

@65cb3dfd @43d7c4ea however, unlike the 19th century when the trajectory was towards greater urbanisation and the increasing centralisation of power, things are likely to be flowing the other way https://www.resilience.org/resources/future-is-rural-report/