What If We Designed Economies Like West African Villages Instead of Corporate Trees?

There is a village in Cameroon called Logone-Birni where the houses, the family compounds, the neighborhoods, and the town itself share the same nested rectangular geometry. The ethnomathematician Ron Eglash spent years documenting this in African Fractals: a settlement pattern scaling from the doorway to the district, each level a smaller or larger echo of the others. The chief's enclosure mirrors a child's sleeping nook. Power, in these designs, is recursive, not pyramidal.I think about Logone-Birni when I read economic news, which I do as an outsider, the way someone might read the sports pages of a country whose game they don't quite understand. The rules seem arbitrary until you notice they were drafted by the people winning. And lately the people winning seem nervous.The Branch and the TrunkCentralised economies, and by this I mean the inherited Western model of capital pooled at the top, decisions made by ministries and quarterly boards, value defined by transaction, operate on…