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RE: Blind Cave Fish and the Science of Island Biogeography
As I'm reading, I'm wondering whether this can be extrapolated to economic systems. Capitalism is supposed to favor innovation via open and large-scale competition, but here you're telling us restricted and small-scale may often be better and faster. I was always an advocate of trying out every economic (and maybe political and why-the-hell-not let's throw in sexual) idea in isolated regions, and see how they do.
Thoughts?
It's not that smaller is better, it's that smaller is less resistant to change than larger, allowing for extremely rapid change. That change is often failure or extinction, but it's also often also highly successful local adaptations.
It the economic realm, note that communism's most persistant bastion, Cuba, is an island both in the physical and economic senses.
Politically and economically, large scale systems are more resilient, as holds true for most complex systems. They do tend to ignore local knowledge/metis, however, the social equivalent to those highly specialized island adaptations. (For more on metis and large-scale systems, I highly recommend James C. Scott's Seeing Like A State.)
It should also be reiterated that many of those island adaptations, while extremely effective, often come at high metabolic cost or high competitive cost, and the same is true of political systems- which is simultaneously an argument for and against your suggestion.