I have extremely mixed feelings about this and similar proposals. On the one hand, the diagnosis seems to be correct to a significant extent, and it’s something that very few others are willing to talk about, and it also explains many otherwise hard to explain facts about the lack of recognition of institutional failures after covid (though contrary to what Cummings says there has been some such soul-searching which I’ve discussed in a few previous comments).
So there’s a huge amount of important, non-trivial truth to this proposal.
On the other hand, from the outside, how would you distinguish what he’s proposing from an actual authoritarian power-grab?
The media portrays a ‘conservative’ government actually controlling the government as proto-fascist … the rule of law’ is now often used as a slogan to justify judges deciding political issues
You’re telling your target audience that what you are attempting will be very hard to distinguish from an authoritarian, proto-fascist, rule-of-law denying attempt to take power for yourself. I fully believe that this isn’t what Cummings wants, but even assuming he’s 100% sincere, this still presents a problem.
The problem is that in order to first win the election, you need to gather people who will not be put off by this appearance, but who also share your deep desire to not actually be a proto-fascist, authoritarian rule-of-law denier. Or you need to trick the actual proto-fascist authoritarians into helping you and then get rid of them once you’ve won.
Just because you’ve named the beast, doesn’t make it go away. The bad institutional incentives will still be there when you try to build your new replacement startup institutions, but in this case the bad incentives will take the form of your new government disproportionately attracting people who are not put off by your don’t-care-about-the-rule-of-law image. Unless you’re careful, this will include lots of bad people who just want power.
I don’t think that this is an insurmountable problem! Cummings himself actually did help speed up vaccine procurement and probably saved a lot of lives, FDR and Lincoln and NASA in the 1960s and his other favourite examples did exist without turning into authoritarian nightmares (mostly, this is a little debatable in the case of FDR).
My point is that the downside of this proposal if it goes wrong isn’t the status quo of more stagnation on difficult problems, it’s authoritarianism that might wreck your ability to correct things in the future as well.
What’s the alternative solution, aside from the ‘reform’ that Cummings trashes? I don’t know—Cummings briefly mentions at the end that even he doesn’t want to go all in on ‘complete replacements’ for current institutions like Balaji Srinivasan. I asked the political philosopher Jason Brennan in a recent AMA what he thought, and he said he’s even more confident in Epistocracy now:
It’s clear the agencies did a bad job, as expected, because they had perverse incentives. For instance, the FDA knows that if it approves something that works badly, it will be blamed. If it doesn’t approve something or it is slow to do so, most people won’t notice the invisible graveyard.
That said, it’s not clear to me whether making this a more open or democratic decision would have made it any better. Citizens are bad at long-term thinking, cost-benefit analysis, seeing the unseen, and so on. You’ve probably seen the surveys showing citizens were systematically misinformed about facts related to COVID and the vaccines.
Ideally we’d structure the bureaucracies’ incentives so that they get punished for the invisible graveyard, but it’s unclear how to do that. I’m really not sure what to do other than trying to streamline the process of approval or requiring that any drug approved in, say, Germany, the UK, Japan, and a few other countries is automatically approved here.
...
I don’t want to get caught up in words. We can use new words:
Schmoop: Small bands of experts in bureaucracies get lots of power to unilaterally decide policy which controls citizens, businesses, etc.
Vleep: During elections, use some sort of knowledge-weighted voting system.
I am in favor of Vleep but oppose Schmoop. Lots of democrats favor Schmoop despite opposing Vleep. The recent failures of various regulatory agencies are failures of Schmoop but not Vleep. Against Democracy defends Vleep but not Schmoop.
Ideally we’d structure the bureaucracies’ incentives so that they get punished for the invisible graveyard, but it’s unclear how to do that. I’m really not sure what to do other than trying to streamline the process of approval or requiring that any drug approved in, say, Germany, the UK, Japan, and a few other countries is automatically approved here.
Lots of bureaucracies did better than the US bureacracy, so theres a blueprint for fixing bureacracies that doesn’t involve disbanding them, or implementing epistocracy.
Ideally we’d structure the bureaucracies’ incentives so that they get punished for the invisible graveyard, but it’s unclear how to do that
Other countries do it by holding enquiries and firing people.
Cummings discusses these problems in a very abstract way, as though they are universal, but things actually function differently in different places. It’s noticeable that some places with strongman leaders, like Brasil, did really badly (worse than the US and UK) under COVID… while some technocratic places with bland leaders did really well.
I agree—and in fact small doses of what Cummings suggests does just look like holding enquiries and firing people, and maybe firing the leadership of a particular organisation (just not like 50% of all govt departments in one go). In fact in my original question to Brennan, I asked
For reasons it might strengthen the argument [in favour of technocracy], it seems like the institutions that did better than average were the ones that were more able to act autonomously, see e.g. this from Alex Tabarok,
and I listed some examples of particular bureaucracies that did well in countries that in general failed (one of which was the vaccine taskforce set up, in part, by Cummings). So clearly it is possible to just get the particular thing right without solving all the systemic issues.
My point was that, if you’ve decided you need wholesale reform of how government makes decisions, doing a complete end-run around most existing institutions to build your ‘startup’ replacements has a much worse downside than e.g. experimenting with epistocracy, because it concentrates power in a really small number of people, while epistocracy doesn’t.
But I don’t think either is what we should be reaching for to solve a particular imminent problem.
I’m not very familiar with Brennan’s work, but I can’t imagine how epistocracy could be feasible in the US...its just an invitation to civil war 2.0.
Edit
JB:For instance, I favor a system of enlightened preference voting where we let everyone vote but we then calculate what the public would have supported had it been fully informed
So...”we” the technocrats recalculate to get whatever result “we” like. And everyone tolerates having their actual vote erased and replaced with what they should have voted for.....yeah.
I have extremely mixed feelings about this and similar proposals. On the one hand, the diagnosis seems to be correct to a significant extent, and it’s something that very few others are willing to talk about, and it also explains many otherwise hard to explain facts about the lack of recognition of institutional failures after covid (though contrary to what Cummings says there has been some such soul-searching which I’ve discussed in a few previous comments).
So there’s a huge amount of important, non-trivial truth to this proposal.
On the other hand, from the outside, how would you distinguish what he’s proposing from an actual authoritarian power-grab?
You’re telling your target audience that what you are attempting will be very hard to distinguish from an authoritarian, proto-fascist, rule-of-law denying attempt to take power for yourself. I fully believe that this isn’t what Cummings wants, but even assuming he’s 100% sincere, this still presents a problem.
The problem is that in order to first win the election, you need to gather people who will not be put off by this appearance, but who also share your deep desire to not actually be a proto-fascist, authoritarian rule-of-law denier. Or you need to trick the actual proto-fascist authoritarians into helping you and then get rid of them once you’ve won.
Just because you’ve named the beast, doesn’t make it go away. The bad institutional incentives will still be there when you try to build your new replacement startup institutions, but in this case the bad incentives will take the form of your new government disproportionately attracting people who are not put off by your don’t-care-about-the-rule-of-law image. Unless you’re careful, this will include lots of bad people who just want power.
I don’t think that this is an insurmountable problem! Cummings himself actually did help speed up vaccine procurement and probably saved a lot of lives, FDR and Lincoln and NASA in the 1960s and his other favourite examples did exist without turning into authoritarian nightmares (mostly, this is a little debatable in the case of FDR).
My point is that the downside of this proposal if it goes wrong isn’t the status quo of more stagnation on difficult problems, it’s authoritarianism that might wreck your ability to correct things in the future as well.
What’s the alternative solution, aside from the ‘reform’ that Cummings trashes? I don’t know—Cummings briefly mentions at the end that even he doesn’t want to go all in on ‘complete replacements’ for current institutions like Balaji Srinivasan. I asked the political philosopher Jason Brennan in a recent AMA what he thought, and he said he’s even more confident in Epistocracy now:
So maybe we should do that.
Lots of bureaucracies did better than the US bureacracy, so theres a blueprint for fixing bureacracies that doesn’t involve disbanding them, or implementing epistocracy.
Other countries do it by holding enquiries and firing people.
Cummings discusses these problems in a very abstract way, as though they are universal, but things actually function differently in different places. It’s noticeable that some places with strongman leaders, like Brasil, did really badly (worse than the US and UK) under COVID… while some technocratic places with bland leaders did really well.
I agree—and in fact small doses of what Cummings suggests does just look like holding enquiries and firing people, and maybe firing the leadership of a particular organisation (just not like 50% of all govt departments in one go). In fact in my original question to Brennan, I asked
and I listed some examples of particular bureaucracies that did well in countries that in general failed (one of which was the vaccine taskforce set up, in part, by Cummings). So clearly it is possible to just get the particular thing right without solving all the systemic issues.
My point was that, if you’ve decided you need wholesale reform of how government makes decisions, doing a complete end-run around most existing institutions to build your ‘startup’ replacements has a much worse downside than e.g. experimenting with epistocracy, because it concentrates power in a really small number of people, while epistocracy doesn’t.
But I don’t think either is what we should be reaching for to solve a particular imminent problem.
I’m not very familiar with Brennan’s work, but I can’t imagine how epistocracy could be feasible in the US...its just an invitation to civil war 2.0.
Edit
So...”we” the technocrats recalculate to get whatever result “we” like. And everyone tolerates having their actual vote erased and replaced with what they should have voted for.....yeah.