Risk Mitigation in Smallism

Risk Management Model

Any financial advisor or trader will tell you to manage your risk.  Put simply, you don't put all your eggs in one basket.  Totalitarianism is precisely the opposite of risk management because all the eggs are in the basket of the leaders.  If that leader makes a mistake, all the eggs are broken.

Smallism, by contrast, can be explained by the 'Coke Machine' problem.  That is, would you rather have the revenue from 1% of 100 coke machines or 100% of 1 coke machine.

The advantage of the anti-totalitarian risk-managed solution is that it allows progress to be made.  If you have a pandemic and allow 100 communities to come up with their solutions, then what works and what doesn't is easy to see.  However, given a totalitarian model, there is no control group to know which solution would have been the best and can be drawn upon in the future should similar events arise.  

Putting this example in the context of a topical issue, Pharmaceutical companies would invest in 10 different labs to arrive at ten different solutions. Each of these labs would be funded by a number of Pharmaceutical companies and the successful product's revenue would be shared.