---
title: "The Political Economy of Decentralization Allen Farrington"
description: "Please enjoy the following reading list championing localism and decentralization in systems of human cooperation — to which I believe Bitcoin provides a natural addition."
url: https://www.swanbitcoin.com/canon/the-political-economy-of-decentralization/
---

# The Political Economy of Decentralization Allen Farrington

Please enjoy the following reading list championing localism and decentralization in systems of human cooperation — to which I believe Bitcoin provides a natural addition.

---

Please enjoy the following reading list championing localism and decentralization in systems of human cooperation - to which I believe Bitcoin provides a natural addition.

**Allen Farrington** ([@allenf32](https://twitter.com/allenf32))

It goes without saying that Bitcoin has several entirely novel technical characteristics, some of which represent brilliant academic breakthroughs. However, I have always been wary of associating Bitcoin too strongly with advances in information technology, or indeed with "newness" at all.

This is in part because these very same advances are argubaly insufficient yet necessary drivers of an increasingly politically and economically centralized world. They have contributed to many problems Bitcoin, and Bitcoiners, aspire to fix: the erosion of privacy, financial repression, monolithic power over dissemination of information, etc.

Bitcoin provides a means to (re)decentralize, and I think it fits nicely and naturally in a canon of academic philosophy, politics, and economics analyzing this ideal. But, crucially, this analysis is without reference to Bitcoin itself, or, in most cases, even the internet or software design. It is not techno-utopinaism, but humanism. It is not new.

- [The Use of Knowledge in Society](https://fee.org/articles/the-use-of-knowledge-in-society/) (F.A. Hayek): Astonishingly concise and powerful explanation of the power of the market to embed distributed information in prices. Possibly the seminal analysis of the mechanics of voluntary and decentralized consensus formation.
- [Seeing Like a State](https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Like-State-Condition-Institution/dp/0300070160/) (James C. Scott): Astute analysis of the persistent failure of centralized social schemes which fail to account for local knowledge and custom.
- [The Mystery of Capital](https://www.amazon.com/Mystery-Capital-Hernando-Soto/dp/0552999237/) (Hernando De Soto): My favourite explanation of what "capital" really is, distinguished by minimal armchair theorising and extensive field research. Might seem removed from Bitcoin but the moral is that truthful, accessible records matter.
- [The Unsettling of America](https://www.amazon.com/Unsettling-America-Culture-Agriculture/dp/161902599X/) (Wendell Berry): Poetic lament of what happens, not just to stocks of capital, not just economic but social, cultural, and *agri*cultural stocks when the participants' time preferences rise beyond what can sustain the stocks.
- [Governing the Commons](https://www.amazon.com/Governing-Commons-Evolution-Institutions-Collective/dp/1107569788/) (Elinor Ostrom): Careful analysis of how common pool problems are reliably solved by voluntary organisations rather than a coercive state, with consideration of the factors that constitute effective governance in such organisations.
- [The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary](https://www.amazon.com/Cathedral-Bazaar-Musings-Accidental-Revolutionary/dp/0596001088/) (Eric C. Raymond): Classic anthropological investigation of the economics and sociology of open source software development, and explication of its superiority in many respects to closed source, top-down planning.
- [Dark Age Ahead](https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Age-Ahead-Jane-Jacobs/dp/1400076706/) (Jane Jacobs): From the godmother of political localism, a dire warning of where we may be headed if we don't first appreciate and then do the work to keep local bonds and institutions alive.