I agree entirely. There must be good reasons why it hasn’t happened if it’s such a good idea and the ones you cite are probably important. Obviously I just need to read more 😛

The coordination problem reigns supreme – it is possible for some people to absorb quite a bit of knowledge, synthesize it and come up with good answers, but only to a point.  Everyone drowns in details eventually, and starts losing details.  Splitting that job up between multiple people ensures that details are lost, which is even worse.

And then to be a CEO or a politician requires this incredible skill at synthesis and incredible narcissism and a obsession with money, status and power and pathologically skillful ability to lie with a straight face and superlative people skills.     

I’ve known lots of people with two of those traits, maybe a couple with three.   But society is not set up to let some ambitious, self-absorbed intellectual dork take the reigns.   Society would rather have a moron with good hair and a good speaking voice.   

If you wanted to put the smart people in charge, and break complex jobs up into reasonable ones, humanity would have to be genetically/pharmaceutically re-engineered to not care about status, power or charisma.  Hey, that’s the plot of “This Perfect Day” by Ira Levin.

I’m not prepared to rule out the possibility that there are a special few who have the ability to do those jobs competently. Maybe Dillow would have put it differently, but I don’t like the idea of a zero probability.

I don’t really see how regulation would help, but Dillow seemed to be suggesting that the organisational design requires roles that can’t be done. If it was as easy as changing the job specifications or design of the organisation then I don’t see why it wouldn’t have been done already. Surely the rewards for figuring out how to reduce error rates in pivotal jobs would be huge.

Large institutions really are different beasts, and the public choice issues that exist in government exist for them as well.  Whether any regulation is necessary or this is just the way of the world, and a point we need to keep in mind as potential shareholders, is the hard question for me.