Locus of control

My friend Nora told me a story about meeting with Gavin Newsom and he was talking to her about making decisions about allocating funds to this or that priority. He looks at her and says something like: "This is pretty much what my job is." In recent years I have often thought that the really big questions were about how a given good, be it public or private, is funded. Government or private sector, equity/bonds/bank lending/taxes/insurance...?

But more recently I've been thinking and reading a lot more about what I will characterize as "locus of control" questions. Rather than "how is it funded?", the big question is "where are decisions made?" It is likely real political scientists/economists have an actual term of art for this which I would know if I had studied either discipline properly. Oh well.

For example, zoning has historically been a function that has been administered at the local level, at least in the USA. Many have pointed out for sometime that NIMBYism is a huge cause of the housing affordability crisis. The Atlantic has been banging the drum for some time arguing that local control of zoning is a structural cause of this problem and that therefore states should take away control of zoning from municipalities. Just in the last week it came out with a constitutional argument to this effect, which I have not yet read. The Economist has recently argued that India has too few states (27?) to efficiently administer policy for 1.4 billion people. Uttar Pradesh -- the biggest state of India's poorer north -- alone has a population of ~241 million. 

The obverse of this is the question of how big headcount should be to most effectively carry out a function. Gore Tex famously organizes its business units around the Dunbar number of 150, the maximum number of people that your average human can maintain meaningful connection with at any given time (actually it turns out much of Dunbar's research sprung from the experience of Gore Tex, but that's another story). Anyway, we all know that a department that gets too big becomes unwieldy, accrues problems and often needs to be subdivided. 

I could go on about this all day. I'm sure there's reams of thinking on this I'm just not in touch with.