Innovation vs. Centralization (Competition within Empires, City-States and Corporations)

I am starting to think that competing city-states work better than empires. If you placed all the scientific and intellectual advances of Greece against the advances of Rome, Greece would win. It’s not even close. That is amazing because the Roman Empire (which I think about every day) lasted for about seven hundred years longer and was many times larger in both population and area ruled than the glory days of ancient Greece.

What followed in Italy to possibly rival the Classical period of the Greek city-states intellectually was the Renaissance. That only lasted three hundred years. Likewise, the era was defined by competing city-states rather than a massive bureaucratized empire.

I think the reason was that city-states were small enough to innovate. It has been said that China and Rome were far too top-down, too large to dramatically advance science or art quickly. Every architect focused on copying the way things were to get ahead and become the imperial architect or philosopher or what have you. In a city-state, you needed to figure out how to make the best building or painting for your own particular city-state. You didn’t have three imperial advisors above you telling you exactly what to do, so you could be creative even if you still had to be practical.

However, there was enough linguistic and cultural overlap that an artist advancing a painting technique in Parma (that Italian town where Parmesan cheese comes from) could be sought and brought to teach in Florence very quickly. In Ancient Greece, Thespia could argue about Socrates and Thuycides even though they were Athenian. They spoke the same language and had the same religion, so they could communicate with each other very quickly. Translating Socrates and Aristotle from Greek to Arabic and then from Arabic to Latin can disseminate very important ideas, but it takes a while to translate, and translating complicated texts is quite difficult.

If you think about it, the history of Western civilization’s advancement is a lot like corporations today. Small groups of highly ambitious men innovate a new business model or a better product. They expand, and they keep making good products. But after a few decades of earned success and expanding wealth, many of these originally creative and forward-thinking corporations become large and bloated. They can still make money, but they don’t innovate like they used to. They don't need to, and aren't interested in fostering innovation in others.

In the most despicable cases, corporations use their great power to stifle the innovation of others. Microsoft used to do this by going after anyone who made something that even kinda looked like their product and lobbying the government endlessly. The Japanese video game corporation Nintendo is like this as well. A game called Pal World came out and had a more interesting formula than the Pokémon series, so Nintendo did everything to crush it. All to preserve their place of privilege. Nintendo is now using its legal team and resources like the Hammer Bros, tossing a seemingly infinite amount at lawsuits against the skilled and nimble Mario (nerd credit to whoever got that reference).

Likewise, the corrupt eras of the Roman or Chinese Empire became all about obtaining power and preserving that power through all manner of trickery rather than governing. When the people at the top are too busy blackmailing or manipulating other people for positions to pay attention to policy, it is quite similar to crony capitalism.

I would argue that part of America’s success is our Federalist system of government that lets different states compete. When New York wanes, Florida can wax. It’s also pretty easy for Americans to leave for different locations with better job opportunities. The result is that competition can occur with greater ferocity. Like the golden ages of Italy or Greece, corruption has always been a player in American society, but raw competition mitigates domination from the winners.

The EU could have worked if it had adopted a decentralized system that helped coordinate inter-European trade, facilitating the movement of highly skilled Europeans to establish internationally competitive corporations or entrepreneurial start-ups. Instead, Brussels decided to regulate everything to death as corrupt imperial bureaucracies tend to do.

What do you guys think is required for innovation? Why are there some eras of human history with explosions of innovation and centuries of stagnation?