And centralized financing and management of large segments of the economy tends to encourage top-down decision making.

I think one of the biggest problems with modern society is that due to the scale of institutions, there are way too many layers of abstraction and aggregation between decision-makers and the decisions they make. This breaks the feedback loop, since decision-makers can only operate against generalities and not actual knowledge, and it encourages a great deal of risk aversion that prevents the exploration and variation necessary to create real solutions.