Decentralized knowledge, centralized power

My answer to the statement: “Arnold Kling argues in his interview on EconTalk that knowledge is becoming more decentralized while power is becoming more centralized. Therefore more decisions will be made by people who don’t know what they’re doing.”

There are three aspects of power: money, violence and knowledge. Knowledge is the most versatile of all three. People have more access to knowledge, therefore they have more power.

“The system” could be getting more centralized, but the system is doing this without any connection to reality of the world, to the power structure of the world. The system, then, in fact has no power.

It has no ability to fix problems, cause a positive change in the world, which is a result of having power.

Obama’s band-aid fix to health-care demonstrates this. The system needs to relinquish control, bringing institutional structure to the current power structure.