Crises Reveal Centralisation (Stefan Schubert)

This post from @Stefan_Schubert’s blog is great. Highlights/summary:

I think there are some common heuristics that lead people to think that power is more decentralised than it is [...]:
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Extrapolation from normalcy: the view that an actor seeming to have power here and now (in relatively normal times) is a good proxy for it having power tout court.
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Naive behaviourism about power (naive behaviourism, for short): the view that there is a direct correspondence between an actor’s power and the official and easily observable actions it takes.

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But in my view, the world is more centralised than these heuristics suggest. The easiest way to see that is to look at crises. During World War II, much of the economy was put under centralised control one way or another in many countries. Similarly, during Covid, many governments drastically curtailed individual liberties and companies’ economic activities (rightly or wrongly). And countries that want to acquire nuclear weapons (which can cause crises and wars) have found that they have less room to manoeuvre than the heuristics under discussion suggest. Accordingly, the US and other powerful nations have been able to reduce nuclear proliferation substantially (even though they’ve not been able to stop it entirely).

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Relatedly, I think sleepwalk bias/the younger sibling fallacy plays a role: “the failure to see others as intentional and maximising agents”, who predict others’ behaviour and act accordingly. To understand power, we have to consider the fact that we’re looking at sophisticated actors who engage in complex reasoning. They’re thinking several steps ahead, trying to model each other. But we often fail to take that into account, tacitly assuming that people are implausibly myopic.