[barnacs]

Proof of work essentially allows for a periodic leader election, where the leader has sufficient time to propagate its state update along with a verifiable proof of authority in a permissionless decentralized system.

Decentralized cooperation in society likely wouldn't be permissionless, in most cases you would probably want to assign some voting power per human/citizen/share certificate/whatever. I'm also not sure if decentralized, verifiable randomness is easier to achieve outside of computer networks (for example, source some verifiable randomness from the universe based on a pre-defined algorithm).