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⁶ Beinhocker, Eric, The Origin of Wealth (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2004)Google Scholar surveys the literature on complexity and economics. Hayek, F. A., “The Theory of Complex Phenomena” in Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967)Google Scholar is an early example of thinking about complex systems across multiple domains. See also Ostrom and Parks, ibid.

⁷ This terminology follows Taleb, Nassim, Antifragile (New York: Penguin, 2012).Google Scholar

⁸ Edelman, Gerald M. and Gally, Joseph A., “Degeneracy and Complexity in Biological Systems,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 98, no. 24 (2001): 13763–13768 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Whitacre, James M., “Degeneracy: A Link Between Evolvability, Robustness, and Complexity in Biological Systems,” Theoretical Biology and Medical Modeling 7, no. 6 (2010): 1–17.Google Scholar

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¹⁰ The claim here is not that degeneracy causes mutation or change, but rather that only a system characterized by degeneracy can accommodate both change and robustness.

¹¹ Taleb, Antifragile.

¹² Edelman and Gally, “Degeneracy and Complexity in Biological Systems.”

¹³ Ibid., 8.

¹⁴ Taleb, Nassim, The Black Swan (New York: Random House, 2007).Google Scholar

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¹⁷ Ibid., 116.

¹⁸ A wide selection of classic Bloomington School texts can be found in McGinnis, Michael, Polycentricy and Local Public Economies , and McGinnis, Michael, ed., Polycentric Games and Institutions (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Two recent works that examine the distinctive aspects of the Bloomington approach are Aligicia, Paul Dragos and Boettke, Peter, Challenging Institutional Analysis and Development (London: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar and Aligicia, Paul Dragos, Institutional Diversity and Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).Google Scholar

¹⁹ Ostrom, Vincent, Tiebout, Charles, and Warren, Robert, “The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas: A Theoretical Inquiry,” American Political Science Review 55 (1961): 831–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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²² Vincent Ostrom, Compound Republic, 11–12. See also 156–67.

²³ Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom, “Public Goods and Public Choices,” in Vincent Ostrom, The Meaning of American Federalism, 193.

²⁴ Vincent Ostrom, The Meaning of American Federalism, 234–40.

²⁵ Aligicia, Institutional Diversity, chap. 2.

²⁶ For an excellent discussion of these twin sources of failure, see Pennington, Mark, Robust Political Economy (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2011).Google Scholar

²⁷ In Aligicia and Boettke, 155–56.

²⁸ Ibid., 153.

²⁹ See Frey, Bruno S., “Functional, Overlapping, Competing Jurisdictions: Redrawing the Geographic Borders of Administration,” European Journal of Law Reform 5, nos. 3–4 (2005): 543–55Google Scholar for an important proposal along these lines, though not one aimed at international governance.

³⁰ Kukathas, Chandran, The Liberal Archipelago (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 169–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³¹ Sovereignty is a storied and malleable concept in the hands of different authors, so of course only some conceptions of sovereignty will be flatly inconsistent with degenerate governance.

³² Vincent Ostrom, Compound Republic.

³³ Taleb, Antifragile, chap 5.

³⁴ See Pinker, Steven, The Better Angels of Our Nature (London: Penguin, 2011)Google Scholar and North, Douglass et al, Violence and Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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³⁶ Allen Buchanan, The Heart of Human Rights, 217–18.

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³⁸ Weede, ibid., See also Chiu Yu Ko, Mark Koyoma, and Tuan-Hwee Sng, “Unified China and Divided Europe,” SSRN working paper (May 2014), URL = <http://ssrn.com/abstract=2382346>

³⁹ Allen Buchanan, The Heart of Human Rights, chap. 5.

⁴⁰ Vincent Ostrom, The Meaning of American Federalism, 8.

⁴¹ Ibid., 44.

⁴² Sells, Susan, Private Power, Public Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Drahos, Peter, “Global Law Reform and Rent-Seeking: The Case of Intellectual Property,” Australian Journal of Corporate Law 7, no. 1 (1996): 1–17.Google Scholar

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⁴⁴ Eli Dourado and Alex Tabarrok, “Public Choice Perspectives on Intellectual Property,” Public Choice, forthcoming.

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⁴⁸ Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago, 205.

⁴⁹ Vincent Ostrom, The Meaning of American Federalism, 240–43.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 261.

⁵¹ Benson, Bruce, “The Spontaneous Evolution of Commercial Law,” Southern Economic Journal 55, no. 3 (1989): 644–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁵⁴ Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 30–35.

⁵⁶ Ostrom, Vincent, The Meaning of American Federalism (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1999), chap. 9.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Ostrom, Vincent, The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵⁸ See, e.g., Allen Buchanan, The Heart of Human Rights, and Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights.

⁵⁹ Weingast, Barry, “The Economic Role of Political Institutions: Market-Preserving Federalism and Economic Development,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 11, no. 1 (1995): 1–31.Google Scholar

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⁶³ The obvious omission from the list of functions is a capacity for wide-scale redistribution. Many cosmopolitans place substantial weight on concerns about distributive justice, even on a global scale. They would be right to worry that robust exit rights might empower wealthy individuals to flee to less egalitarian jurisdictions, but degeneracy is not wholly at odds with all concerns for distributive justice. By enabling exit, polycentricity insulates individuals from the “fat tail” of truly awful governance outcomes. Degenerate cosmopolitanism is thus compatible with a sufficientarian understanding of the demands of distributive justice.

⁶⁴ See Williamson, Oliver, “The New Institutional Economics: Taking Stock, Looking Ahead,” Journal of Economic Literature 38, no. 3 (2000): 595–613.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶⁵ Taleb, Antifragile, chap. 4.

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⁶⁷ Economic freedom is measured by the economic freedom index, found in Gwartney, James, Lawson, Robert, and Hall, Joshua, Economic Freedom of the World: 2013 Annual Report (Fraser Institute: 2013)Google Scholar. Other data is taken or calculated from the World Bank Development Indicators, found at data.worldbank.gov. All GDP figures are from 2011 and adjusted for purchasing power parity; income share of the bottom 10 percent is the most recent available figure.

⁶⁸ The classic essays from the Bloomington side of this debate are gathered in McGinnis, Polycentricity and Local Public Economies.

⁶⁹ See the essays collected in McGinnis, Polycentricity and Local Public Economies, especially Elinor Ostrom, “Metropolitan Reform: Propositions Derived from Two Traditions.”

⁷⁰ Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren, “The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas,” 831.

⁷¹ Ostrom, Elinor, Governing the Commons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Gibson, Clark C., et al., The Samaritan’s Dilemma (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁷⁵ Olson, Mancur, The Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

⁷⁶ Vincent Ostrom, The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies, chap. 11.

⁷⁷ Clemens, Michael, “Economics and Emigration: Trillion Dollar Bills Laying on the Sidewalk,” Journal of Economic Perspective 25, no. 3 (2011), 83–106.Google Scholar

⁷⁸ See Becker, Gary, The Challenge of Immigration: A Radical Solution (London: Institute for Economic Affairs, 2011).Google Scholar

⁷⁹ Charter cities have been proposed by economist Paul Romer, who wrote a detailed proposal in “Technology, Rules, and Progress: The Case for Charter Cities,” Center for Global Development mimeo (2010). Romer’s original proposal involves more-developed nations providing governance in charter cities, which met with substantial resistance from those weary of new forms of colonialism. Startup cities advocates likewise propose semi–autonomous areas but instead push for local determination of the legal regime and public service provision. There is no detailed academic proposal for Startup Cities at the time of this writing, but there is a Startup Cities Institute at Universidad Francisco Marroquin that maintains a web presence at http://www.startupcities.org.