Brain storm: What is the theory behind a good political mechanism?
Patrissimo argue that we should try to design good mechanisms for governance rather than try and use the current broken mechanisms.
I agree, however we don’t have a theoretical framework that we can use to evaluate different systems that are proposed. Ideally we would be able to crunch some numbers and show that a Futarchy responds to the desires/needs of the populace better than “voting for politicians who then make decisions” or anything else we come up with.
So we need to be able to do things like quantifying how well the system responds to the people. Pretending that humans are agents which have a utility function would seem like an obvious simplification to make in the model. We also need to formalise “being in charge”.
I tend to formalise who has authority in a system as a number of pairings of people and posts. Posts might be the seat in the senate or the presidency, although we will want to expand this notion of post to look at all bureacracy and how they are filled.
One way a proposed mechanism would work would be through controlling the pairings. Futarchy suggests that we might look at other ways to make the mechanism work. This would be quite hard to model, we would have to model the incentives of the people making the prosperity indexes and the incentives of the market participants.
So we want a system that selects the people/post pairing that maximises the groups utility function, while assuming that the people in control of the post will maximise their utility and everyone else will try to (ab)use the mechanism to maximise their own utility.
Does this seem like the right track?
No, it doesn’t seem to me like the right track.
To me, it sounds like a proposal to base medicine on a model of the human body that would start from the basic laws of chemistry. In other words, the phenomena you’d like to model and the systems you’d like to design are so complex and subject to such ill-understood forces and mechanisms that your model, given the realistic limitations you’re working under, cannot even begin to capture reality.
That said, just like in medicine you can often figure out things by looking at some simpler aspects of what happens in the human body, you can model certain aspects of the existing political systems with some accuracy. Public choice theory is one such reasonably successful attempt. However, such models must start from a deep understanding of an existing system based on observation and experience that will tell you what peculiar simplifying assumptions can be made about it, which gives you a workable starting point. Beginning from the first principles will get you nowhere at all.
I second the endorsement of public choice theory. A good place to begin from when designing a new government.
Thanks, good to get a second opinion.
Do you think there would be any way at all of developing new political systems that would be better than picking new systems randomly?
Are you familiar with the background to patrissimo’s comment? Competitive government is what he’s getting at in the comment you linked.
Is there somewhere where ideas like this are discussed intelligently?
A few thoughts
If the experiments in governance are atheoretical, then I’d expect most of them to be worse. Just as most random mutations in a complex organism are likely to be worse.
Experimentation has a cost, what is the expected benefit from experimenting with different forms of government. How is that expected benefit justified?
Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of seasteading and competitive governments, I just find it disheartening when people don’t want to try applying their brains to the problem of at least narrowing down the space of how governments should be designed.
I’m not aware of a single central hub for such discussion I’m afraid. There’s academic work in the area of development economics which looks at countries around the world and tries to identify what traits of governmental institutions seem to correspond with economic growth and prosperity. This is where Paul Romer and his charter cities idea is coming from.
If you want some really out there but intelligent discussion of related ideas you might want to check out Unqualified Reservations. Maybe start with the gentle introduction series. Mencius Moldbug could be described as many things but concise is not one of them so you’re looking at a fair bit of reading there.
Arnold Kling blogs on this topic a bit as well, he has a particular interest in the idea of ‘unbundling’ government services.
Think of competitive government as a meta-theory of political mechanisms in the same way a well functioning market economy represents a meta-theory of producing efficient organizations rather than a theory of how to run an efficient organization. The question is how to structure things in a way that there is an incentive for good governance. If you get the incentive structure right then good governance will tend to outcompete bad governance. The individual experiments would not be atheoretical but the structure under which they operate is intended to be agnostic about what the best approach will prove to be.
Many of the people you’ll see talking about competitive government are libertarian leaning and so would have their own personal ideas about how to run a government but rather than privileging their own pet theories they want to put them to the test against other ideas about how to run things. A Thousand Nations emphasizes that traditional ideological opponents could in theory both get behind the idea of competitive government as it would give them the opportunity to go and test out their own utopian ideals without having to convince anyone else.
I don’t see how this is any different in principle from the question of the value of experimentation and innovation in general. Many technologies ultimately prove to be market failures but I think the evidence is pretty compelling that economies that follow a free market model and ‘waste’ resources on ideas that don’t pan out have a better track record of producing net benefits through innovation than economies that attempt to centrally plan innovation.
I don’t believe advocates of competitive government are generally doing this. They just don’t believe that their own ideas should be given special privileges over everyone else’s.
Hmm… Actually in most places, the host will be slightly biased towards their own ideas and will not really be engaging in discussing new ideas. In Matt’s endorsement of unqualified reservations, he’s suggesting a blog where the host almost never replies back to comments, but it is well written reactionary stuff.
I guess that until competitive government becomes really feasible in a mass scale, this thought is very theoritical. Quite rationally, people want to cross the bridge when they come to it.
About the actual design, it’s like Eliezer explained when people asked him about how he did his AI box thingy, there is no substitute for thinking hard. You really have to think about incentives of every person in every role in the whole structure.
Mencius short circuits this by assuming a corporate structure and says that since it works well enough in the real world, it would work in a sovereign structure also. This is a good argument from the outside view. Simple hierarchy is definitely a solution to Goodhart’s law as I had mentioned in my post, but as Robin Hanson had pointed out in his comment, it feels like a cop-out.
I found the discussion between Moldbug and Robin Hanson interesting because whilst Robin Hanson has lots of interesting ideas he does not write terribly well. He communicates his idea clearly but there is no style to his writing. Contrast Moldbug (or Eliezer) and see the impact of interesting ideas expressed with eloquence and you being to appreciate the power of language.
I wonder if I give excessive weight to Unqualified Reservations because it has such greater facility with the English language than is typical of the blogosphere. Interesting and controversial ideas expressed with rhetorical flair seem to directly trigger the reward centres of my brain.
One of the things I particularly like about the idea of competitive government is it gives you something practical to do now as an individual. Look around the world and consciously pick a country to live in based on the value offered by its government. Surprisingly few people do this but the few that do have been enough to give us the likes of Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, Luxembourg, etc.
I think being an immigrant gives you a different perspective on things. I’ve spent most of my productive adult life in a country where I pay taxes and have no right to vote. This somehow makes the myth of democracy less potent for me.
I’d assumed there was something going on in the seasteading sphere. But I wasn’t sure what exactly.
An interesting idea, thanks for the link.
What exactly do you mean by “developing new political systems”? What kind of situations do you have in mind where such a thing would be possible?
Seasteading
Control of smaller organisations than governments, e.g. charities. Some charities have people vote for trustees, so you get similar problems there. So alternate systems might create charities more responsive to their stakeholders.
If the political systems were seen to be better in these smaller situations, they might very slowly move into the larger states (probably multi-century timescales).
Organization and management of businesses and nonprofits is, if not exactly a well-understood problem, then at least the subject of a large body of expertise, and more importantly, of constant real-life tests in the marketplace. If there existed a way to reach useful insight there by theorizing from first principles, I would guess that someone would have already found it (and used it to great practical success).
Setting aside the questions about the practical viability of seasteading, it can be viewed as a special case of colonizing an uninhabited territory. While this may seem as an opportunity to design institutions from scratch, in reality it’s naive to ignore the culture that the colonists will bring with them, and the constraints this imposes on the way the colony’s institutions can work. As de Maistre wrote, “Sovereigns command effectively and in a lasting way only within the circle of things acknowledged by opinion, and they are not the ones who trace the circle of opinion.” How would your abstract model capture that?
Even a casual glance at the history of the last two centuries shows that transplanting political institutions from one culture to another doesn’t work in practice. Attempts to do so occasionally work by sheer luck, but more often fail miserably, and it’s not at all rare to see them blow up spectacularly.
Organisation is different to control. I’m interested in changes to things like how the trustees are selected, rather than specific business practices. There is no incentive for the trustees to experiment with how the trustees are selected. So markets have little to work with.
And a casual glance another couple of centuries back shows political change springing up in a number of places due to the zeitgeist. Fairly violently, but we were probably better off for it (fewer religious purges and that kind of thing).
There are other ways of engaging in micronational secessionism. The best method prehaps is to unilaterally declare independence under the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, but do so in such a matter as to not attract the attention of the federal government (for example, keep on paying taxes, follow the laws). Then begin operating as if you are an independent government. Examples would include the Republic of Molossia and the Empire of Atlantium. You will lose status though.
The main problem is thinking you could generalize from one small situation into the macrolevel. There may be intervening variables that could explain why a government can succeed with small population and that same government collaspe when it runs a large population.
Is “quantifying how well the system responds to the people” really the core goal? Isn’t it to produce political decisions that are in favor of the common good?
If you pay enough money for advertising you can sway the public opinion of a given issue. I don’t think that this means that politicians should automatically act differently.
Political decisions makers should be concerned about existential risk even when the majority of the population isn’t.
That gets us into CEV territory, doesn’t it? Public opinion is very fallible, but seems the only thing we can harness this side of the FOOM to change how things are run. I can’t see you convincing people to adopt a system of governance run by humans that they don’t have any say in.
That politicians only care about what the majority of the populace thinks is an artefact of the way that voting works, it doesn’t matter if they win with 70% or 90% of the vote. Not all possible systems have that problem.
It’s very different to argue that listening to public opinion is a good mean to achieve the end of good decisions than to argue that listening to public opinion is the end in itself.
In continental political thought the two concept were named by Rousseau volonté générale and volonté tous. It’s an Anglo-American fallacy that the two are the same. The guilt goes to people like Adam Smith.
Part of the idea of representative democracy is that it’s easier to decide who the experts on an issue happen to be to let them make the decisions than to decide the issues through direct democracy.
In the real world the political systems in the West don’t have that problem. Certain minorities have political power while others don’t. Democracy is about more than the act of ticking a box every four years. The process is a lot more complex.
I’m not arguing for direct democracy…
True, I was over simplifying. And monarchies are not just the absolute rule of a single person. That was a odious feature of them though. Like wise for the ability of the rulers to completely ignore counter votes if they are not a large percentage.
We switched from monarchies to democracies and have been better for it. Can we switch to something else? If so how would you evaluate it theoretically?
At least in continental Europe we didn’t switch to democracy in the sense that we created a system that’s supposed to sum up all individual interests and turn them into public policy.
Neither in theory nor in practice.
The UK never really switched away from being a monarchy but is some form of hybrid. I haven’t read the founding fathers of the US, so I’m not totally sure about what they wanted. They however created institutions like the supreme court that are at odds with the desire to have the sum of individual interests guide public policy.
Does the public policy follow the public interest (volonté générale)? Timeless decision theory helps with the details.
Before Louis XIV there were monarchies that weren’t about the absolute rule of a single person. Local princes held quite a lot of power. Today you have a bunch of small minority groups who reside in Washington who have quite a lot of political power without being formally elected.
Is the goal of coming up with a mechanism of government really for implementation purposes?
Because I’m worried that the main reason why people come up with strange and new government mechanics that are unlikely to ever be adopted is to claim the following:
“Look! Our people have developed the Viatngvogbvim, and this Viatngvogbvim will solve most of our problems (while creating new ones, but let ignore that for now). Viatngvogbvim will aid our society to prosperity. Too bad it will never be implemented or enacted, but that’s okay, because now that we have found the solution, we don’t need to think of anything else to do with this problem. We don’t need to engage in political compromise anymore, or try to work within the current despicable government system. We can now MOVE ON with our lives, glad that we are content with this secret, hidden knowledge of Viatngvogbvim.”
whpearson and blogospheroid seemed to misunderstood what I said, so I’ll clarify my comments, since I wasn’t being clear.
I don’t think that people come up with new governments for the sole purpose of testing or implementing them. I think that people sometimes come up with new governments as a way to come up a simple answer* to the problems facing society, so they don’t have to think any more about those problems, or waste resources trying to fix these problems conventionally.
*To them, at least. The point of coming up with a new government is to persuade themselves, not others.
I’m all in favour of ignoring people who don’t try and implement their idea at least on a small scale. You don’t need to set up a country to do so though, you could use it for corporate governance instead of electing the board of directors.
Or governing a charity.
If your idea doesn’t work on these scales, you need a very good reason for thinking it would work on the larger scale of a country.
The technology to make life easy to live on the sea is improving. Better material science means more stable and strong ships, allowing easier access to the sea and a more comfortable life when there. Seasteading will become a reality if the present day governments continue with their present trend of bloating up. When you setup a seastead, you just can’t say “my way or the highway”. you need to have a good structure which can be evangelised to the people you hope to attract.
Theoritical alternatives to present day models of governance is definitely a direction where some thought should be put.
I can’t agree with Patrissimo. The point of government IS to come up with solutions to potential problems (other governments, crime, paying for “public goods”, expanding the freedom of the individuals pledging loyalty to the government, protection from the “state of nature”, etc.), through a variety of tools, including coercion.
If we can’t talk about what a future government is actually going to do, then what’s the point of changing to it?
When people in your model “maximise their utility”, i.e. make desicions, how will that influence the utility of other people in the model? In this mechanism will be hidden the assumptions that favour one political system over another. And since this mechanism will hardly be anything like real life your results probably won’t be useful.
So, what method of making interpersonal comparisons of utility do you have in mind?
I’m not planning to compare utility in the real world. I’d only want the mechanism to maximise the sum in the theoretical model (and we can normalise everyones functions to be between 0 and 1 in the model, so one person doesn’t dominate).
If the model didn’t show the total being maximised, but only the total of a subset of the population (those in charge) then it wouldn’t be a good mechanism and we should look for better.
Humans don’t have utility functions, so this model of politics is an approximation at best. So it wouldn’t be a completely accurate simulation and experimentation would also be needed to see if any proposed mechanism was compatible with the other facets of human psychology that make us different from utility maximisers.