Cian Witherspoon <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

> And this argument is why I made the counter-argument of “government code is the structure of the civil service”.

That's a pretty good perspective, though how does it fit with Government types like "Participating Democracy" or "Captive Government" or "Religious Dictatorship" which don't tell us much about our encounter with immigration officials when we cross the starport extrality or how taxes will be collected on services we procure in the capital city?

> This also makes sense of the pop/gov/law correlation: as the number of people provided services by a government increases, the most efficient structure for providing those services change. Eventually, the amount of people that require services and the number of people required to keep the structure running reaches a breaking point where it is no longer the most efficient structure, and somebody begins making a new one that either replaces or interfaces with the old. That point is the transition from Gov9 to GovA - the impersonal bureaucracy cannot function, but also cannot die without destroying everything. So now people turn to crime lords, fixers, and loose-cannon file clerks. Those people know how to get the services the people need.

That's a decent description of what the Government types seem to be doing, especially at that Gov 9 / Gov A "breakpoint" but, again, it seems like a poor simulation of the "real-world." It's not like (Pop 8) Americans or Europeans, say, have had to start paying bribes to get a driver's iicence or to avoid a tax audit. . . .

And, indeed, this model doesn't seem to fit many elements of the Third Imperium campaign, The Vilani bureaux and their successor mega-corps seem not to have fallen victim to this size-inefficiency-corruption dynamic despite operations on an interstellar scale. Indeed, the same would hold for any mega-corporation or element of the Imperial bureaucracy. It's not like the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Science are being run by autocrats who have "malcontents" taken to the local "re-education camp" when they fail to perform. . . .

Cheers,

David
--
"As for the other five, one had been an all-out hell-planet, and the rest had been the sort that get colonized by irreconcilable minority-groups who want to get away from everybody else.  The Colonial Office wouldn't even consider any of them." - Mark Howell (H. Beam Piper), "Naudsonce"