From a long and very interesting article about Julian Benda's
The Treason of the Intellectuals (highly recommended):
A lot of the regulation - everything from bolt threads to type fonts - is carried out by tens of thousands of standardization agreements worked out by the industries involved. The solutions that arise aren't always optimal, but they usually end up being workable. After two decades of fumbling, we have settled on a de facto standard for computer operating systems. It has imperfections - some serious - but it generally works. Imagine being saddled with a computer architecture defined by some central planning committee in 1983 ...
Putting the decision-making process in the hands of an informed leadership sounds attractive but it more often than not ends up being less efficient that the trial-and-error consensus process of Western democracies. And when you think about it, the standardization agreements I've discussed are decision-making by an informed leadership. In fact, they are decision-making by the informed leadership.
Thanks for the link to The Treason of the Intellectuals, I wish I could share it with my Dad but he's firmly in the head-sand category, which is such an incredible disappointment especially for a man of the cloth...
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