Very interesting—I’ll give some thought to answers, but for now a quick cached-thought comment:
A proposed solution: bills cannot be contradicted by bills which pass with less votes.
I don’t think this is practical as a full solution to this problem, since a bill doesn’t need to explicitly contradict a previous bill in order to make the previous one irrelevant.
You’ve made foobles legal? We’ll require fooble licenses costing two years’ training and a million dollars. You’ve banned smarbling? We’ll switch all resources from anti-smarbling enforcement to crack down on unlicensed foobles.
Of course you could craft the fooble/smarbling laws to avoid these pitfalls, but there’s more than one way to smarble a fooble.
You’ve made foobles legal? We’ll require fooble licenses costing two years’ training and a million dollars. You’ve banned smarbling? We’ll switch all resources from anti-smarbling enforcement to crack down on unlicensed foobles.
Agreed. But it’s not a totally meaningless rule. The fooble-legalization bill could include language preventing any restrictions on fooble use and possession, such as licensing. As for Smarbling, the budget for anti-smarbling enforcement will have itself passed with some margin, which you’ll have to surpass to repeal the funding.
Funding is itself a huge issue, though. I’m pretty tempted to say that the budget just shouldn’t be passed as a bill in the same way.
Proposal 1: Average Budget
Each legislator draws up a budget, and the total budget is just the average of all of these.
Objection: strategic budgeting
If I know how everyone else is going to budget, I can make the end budget turn out any way I like by putting sufficiently large numbers on my proposal.
Proposal 2: Allocated Budget
Each legislator gets their share of the federal budget, which they can spend however they like.
Objection: too little accountability?
It seems like politicians would spend too much of the money on their own projects, potentially in corrupt ways, since they wouldn’t need to get it approved by others. In theory, this behavior would get them voted out of office; but if everyone was doing it, it might be difficult for voters to find replacements who would behave better.
Objection: how to decide total budget?
This requires some other method.
Proposal 3: Quadratic Funding
Each legislator gets points which they put toward budget items (out of a list of budget items any legislator can add to). Then the total amount spent on a budget item is proportional to the square of the sum of the square roots of the number of points allocated to that item by individual legislators.
I don’t know this much about this option, but it seems potentially pretty good.
Objection to the whole project: a budget item might have pretty nonlinear returns on money, EG be worth nothing if it doesn’t get at least a billion dollars in funding. An approach like averaging or quadratic funding could end up unexpectedly allocating a highly inefficient amount, like just shy of a billion dollars.
Combinatorial Voting
Moving beyond budget, back to the general project:
Budgets are just an extreme example of the general point, that bills are multidimensional objects. Forcing things into a bunch of individual yes/no votes makes things artificially simple, and ends up highly distorting the voter preferences.
Far better if we can vote directly on combinatorial issues. But that’s a tough issue.
Very interesting—I’ll give some thought to answers, but for now a quick cached-thought comment:
I don’t think this is practical as a full solution to this problem, since a bill doesn’t need to explicitly contradict a previous bill in order to make the previous one irrelevant.
You’ve made foobles legal? We’ll require fooble licenses costing two years’ training and a million dollars.
You’ve banned smarbling? We’ll switch all resources from anti-smarbling enforcement to crack down on unlicensed foobles.
Of course you could craft the fooble/smarbling laws to avoid these pitfalls, but there’s more than one way to smarble a fooble.
Agreed. But it’s not a totally meaningless rule. The fooble-legalization bill could include language preventing any restrictions on fooble use and possession, such as licensing. As for Smarbling, the budget for anti-smarbling enforcement will have itself passed with some margin, which you’ll have to surpass to repeal the funding.
Funding is itself a huge issue, though. I’m pretty tempted to say that the budget just shouldn’t be passed as a bill in the same way.
Proposal 1: Average Budget
Each legislator draws up a budget, and the total budget is just the average of all of these.
Objection: strategic budgeting
If I know how everyone else is going to budget, I can make the end budget turn out any way I like by putting sufficiently large numbers on my proposal.
Proposal 2: Allocated Budget
Each legislator gets their share of the federal budget, which they can spend however they like.
Objection: too little accountability?
It seems like politicians would spend too much of the money on their own projects, potentially in corrupt ways, since they wouldn’t need to get it approved by others. In theory, this behavior would get them voted out of office; but if everyone was doing it, it might be difficult for voters to find replacements who would behave better.
Objection: how to decide total budget?
This requires some other method.
Proposal 3: Quadratic Funding
Each legislator gets points which they put toward budget items (out of a list of budget items any legislator can add to). Then the total amount spent on a budget item is proportional to the square of the sum of the square roots of the number of points allocated to that item by individual legislators.
I don’t know this much about this option, but it seems potentially pretty good.
Objection to the whole project: a budget item might have pretty nonlinear returns on money, EG be worth nothing if it doesn’t get at least a billion dollars in funding. An approach like averaging or quadratic funding could end up unexpectedly allocating a highly inefficient amount, like just shy of a billion dollars.
Combinatorial Voting
Moving beyond budget, back to the general project:
Budgets are just an extreme example of the general point, that bills are multidimensional objects. Forcing things into a bunch of individual yes/no votes makes things artificially simple, and ends up highly distorting the voter preferences.
Far better if we can vote directly on combinatorial issues. But that’s a tough issue.