I agree that one of democracy’s core features is that it reduces conflict, and any future system of government should be designed with that in mind. Nevertheless, this post strikes me as foolish for several reasons:
Democracy rewards the majority of the people. But is the side with more raw numbers (even if just 51%) really the group best positioned to win a coup? I propose a new form of government, Money-Democracy, where you get votes equivalent to LN(your_net_worth). Now the rich and powerful are properly weighted as being more influential. Wouldn’t this be a better way of always crowning the faction most likely to win a fight? Does this mean that Money-Democracy would be a more stable form of government, and we should expect it to sweep the world any day now?
Futarchy means “vote on values, bet on beliefs”. Since you’re still voting on values, couldn’t you still do all your coalitional fights over who gets to determine the values that the prediction markets are optimizing for?
You say, “There’s no one, by default anyways, with the personal or psychological motivation inside the ‘futarchic’ system to oppose the majority coalition when it decides to act against the will of Metaculus.” But by that logic, nobody in the USA would oppose the majority coalition if it acted against the Supreme Court? Couldn’t a prediction-market branch of government be respected by the various factions, in the same way that the Supreme Court or Congressional Budget Office are reasonably respected by both parties in the USA? Your theory of democracy seems to predict total majoritarian dictatorship, but that isn’t what happens. A futarchy could similarly be supported by a system of checks and balances and societal norms.
Imagine that one country implements futarchy despite the fact that (I will admit) this is a difficult trick to pull off. But imagine that futarchy works great and that country soon develops unparalleled state capacity, economic growth, etc. Soon, other countries would be forced to follow suit—they’d have to either adopt futarchy themselves or be consigned to irrelevance. In my view, this is basically the process by which democracy took over from other forms of government—by growing faster and being more stable and providing citizens a better life. Citizens of nondemocratic nations see what they’re missing out on, and they agitate for change.
Empirically, not all democracies continually ratchet up to higher levels of civil rights. Some countries go in a very majoritarian direction as an off-ramp from democracy, like Hungary, Turkey, or India. Even among fully democratic countries, civil rights are at a high level but I’m not sure they’re all currently increasing. So I’m not sure what to make of that idea.
Imagine living in a country run by futarchy. The president (elected by the majority coalition) is supposed to handle foreign diplomacy, be the leader of the military, respond to crises, set the cultural tone for the nation, and help define the values function that the prediction markets implements. But one day the president tries to go against a futarchy ruling, saying “actually this law is null and void, the conditional prediction market that favored it is rigged, anyone can see that this would be a bad law!” Wouldn’t people freak out and the stock market drop (because the stock market knows that ignoring the prediction markets and making authoritarian power grabs is bad for business)? Wouldn’t people then get mad that the economy was doing poorly, and then vote out the president? Thus, “respect the prediction markets” would quickly become a well-reinforced norm in the society, since no president would want to tank the markets and get voted out. This is just the same as why Biden today doesn’t try to ignore congress or the supreme court.
First: these are a lot of good points, some I did not think of as an intellectual test of my ideas beforehand. Any responses that I come up with now are a little suspect because I had not anticipated several of them.
Democracy rewards the majority of the people. But is the side with more raw numbers (even if just 51%) really the group best positioned to win a coup? I propose a new form of government, Money-Democracy, where you get votes equivalent to LN(your_net_worth). Now the rich and powerful are properly weighted as being more influential. Wouldn’t this be a better way of always crowning the faction most likely to win a fight? Does this mean that Money-Democracy would be a more stable form of government, and we should expect it to sweep the world any day now?
The majority coalition organizes conditions to defend itself from illegal coups, but that doesn’t mean it’s the most capable group to form one itself. The point is that by passing civil liberties the majority coalition ensures the system is stable. Numbers serves as a good enough proxy under a highly libertarian democracy for power that it tends to be able to reliably maintain order as the current incumbent, though not always!
I agree that it’s an imperfect abstraction to say that the more your system puts powerful people in charge the more things are stable, because obviously, some more overt ways of putting the powerful person in charge galvanizes opposition by offending people’s moral or ideological sympathies. However, it’s IMO the most important deciding component, and the other components tend to be technically surmountable by the ruling faction, once power is achieved (via propaganda, lying, etc.). They simply don’t tend to be as much of a binding constraint on behavior in practice.
Futarchy means “vote on values, bet on beliefs”. Since you’re still voting on values, couldn’t you still do all your coalitional fights over who gets to determine the values that the prediction markets are optimizing for?
I have no response to this. It actually just occurred to me that Futarchy can be packaged as a more effective way to enforce majority coalition values, even if it doesn’t immediately enforce their beliefs about the necessary actions. In that sense it, and jury voting, can be seen as a little analogous to ranked voting. It’s not necessarily true that you have to give literal power to the majority coalition to placate it. This throws the entire posts’ thesis into question.
You say, “There’s no one, by default anyways, with the personal or psychological motivation inside the ‘futarchic’ system to oppose the majority coalition when it decides to act against the will of Metaculus.” But by that logic, nobody in the USA would oppose the majority coalition if it acted against the Supreme Court? Couldn’t a prediction-market branch of government be respected by the various factions, in the same way that the Supreme Court or Congressional Budget Office are reasonably respected by both parties in the USA? Your theory of democracy seems to predict total majoritarian dictatorship, but that isn’t what happens. A futarchy could similarly be supported by a system of checks and balances and societal norms.
This ignores the implementation details of acting against the Supreme Court overtly, from the perspective of a coalition. You of course still need some institution to resolve legal disputes about the laws passed by congress. What will that institution be? A designated party man, like Joe Biden? Now you’re giving him almost unlimited power. What if he turns against the majority coalition?
Perhaps supreme court cases could be decided by majority vote, but you have to remember the point you brought, namely that the majority coalition also might genuinely believe that the current system advances their values better than a simpler system. Democrats and Republicans (rightly IMO) have decided that the best way to influence the supreme court is by putting party-hardliners on the bench when they can. The fact is that coalitions inside democracy do try to influence the composition and power of the supreme court through normal means of law, pretty transparently. It’s just that they don’t do that by attempting to overthrow the court by force, because that’s risky and opens up a can of worms of failure scenarios.
Imagine that one country implements futarchy despite the fact that (I will admit) this is a difficult trick to pull off. But imagine that futarchy works great and that country soon develops unparalleled state capacity, economic growth, etc. Soon, other countries would be forced to follow suit—they’d have to either adopt futarchy themselves or be consigned to irrelevance. In my view, this is basically the process by which democracy took over from other forms of government—by growing faster and being more stable and providing citizens a better life. Citizens of nondemocratic nations see what they’re missing out on, and they agitate for change.
I have a similar but not exactly similar view about democracy, and agree this is a plausible scenario. If the majority coalition decided its interests would be better served by Futarchy through the power of a salient example, then certainly this could happen.
Also important is that if the countries that founded Futarchy adopted a universalist ideology about their political system, not unlike some other countries we know (wink wink), then the wild success of their economy could enable them to project power and attempt to “support” other Futarchist revolutions around the globe. Of course, well-functioning domestic institutions, strong economic growth, etc., isn’t 1:1 with international power, but the correlation is there.
Empirically, not all democracies continually ratchet up to higher levels of civil rights. Some countries go in a very majoritarian direction as an off-ramp from democracy, like Hungary, Turkey, or India. Even among fully democratic countries, civil rights are at a high level but I’m not sure they’re all currently increasing. So I’m not sure what to make of that idea.
I think you mean authoritarian instead of majoritarian. And here I mostly disagree. If you look at the history of a solidly democratic regime like America, it starts with a system of more wacky and less democratic control (political bosses of cities like New York, the electoral college, etc.) and then ends up gradually moving further and further towards majoritarian control. My perspective on flawed democracies is that they’re either one, just pulled both ways; instances where the majority coalition in those countries is not quite powerful or inclined enough to oppose the power grabs by authoritarian cabals, but for circumstantial reasons the authoritarian cabals can’t grab any more power than they currently have. Or, two, and more commonly IMO, the countries simply in an interim position and are actually unstable, in a Nash sense. Those specific examples you mentioned are nations that have been on a pretty clear trend-line toward authoritarianism, and I would place them in bucket #2. Nothing about this model suggests things can’t change, especially as time moves forward and circumstances do; just that things try to move to an equilibrium. For full democracies that equilibrium is pretty solidly giving more power to the public, from the perspective of the public, to effectively advance their agenda.
Imagine living in a country run by futarchy. The president (elected by the majority coalition) is supposed to handle foreign diplomacy, be the leader of the military, respond to crises, set the cultural tone for the nation, and help define the values function that the prediction markets implements. But one day the president tries to go against a futarchy ruling, saying “actually this law is null and void, the conditional prediction market that favored it is rigged, anyone can see that this would be a bad law!” Wouldn’t people freak out and the stock market drop (because the stock market knows that ignoring the prediction markets and making authoritarian power grabs is bad for business)? Wouldn’t people then get mad that the economy was doing poorly, and then vote out the president? Thus, “respect the prediction markets” would quickly become a well-reinforced norm in the society, since no president would want to tank the markets and get voted out. This is just the same as why Biden today doesn’t try to ignore congress or the supreme court.
I agree that one of democracy’s core features is that it reduces conflict, and any future system of government should be designed with that in mind. Nevertheless, this post strikes me as foolish for several reasons:
Democracy rewards the majority of the people. But is the side with more raw numbers (even if just 51%) really the group best positioned to win a coup? I propose a new form of government, Money-Democracy, where you get votes equivalent to LN(your_net_worth). Now the rich and powerful are properly weighted as being more influential. Wouldn’t this be a better way of always crowning the faction most likely to win a fight? Does this mean that Money-Democracy would be a more stable form of government, and we should expect it to sweep the world any day now?
Futarchy means “vote on values, bet on beliefs”. Since you’re still voting on values, couldn’t you still do all your coalitional fights over who gets to determine the values that the prediction markets are optimizing for?
You say, “There’s no one, by default anyways, with the personal or psychological motivation inside the ‘futarchic’ system to oppose the majority coalition when it decides to act against the will of Metaculus.” But by that logic, nobody in the USA would oppose the majority coalition if it acted against the Supreme Court? Couldn’t a prediction-market branch of government be respected by the various factions, in the same way that the Supreme Court or Congressional Budget Office are reasonably respected by both parties in the USA? Your theory of democracy seems to predict total majoritarian dictatorship, but that isn’t what happens. A futarchy could similarly be supported by a system of checks and balances and societal norms.
Imagine that one country implements futarchy despite the fact that (I will admit) this is a difficult trick to pull off. But imagine that futarchy works great and that country soon develops unparalleled state capacity, economic growth, etc. Soon, other countries would be forced to follow suit—they’d have to either adopt futarchy themselves or be consigned to irrelevance. In my view, this is basically the process by which democracy took over from other forms of government—by growing faster and being more stable and providing citizens a better life. Citizens of nondemocratic nations see what they’re missing out on, and they agitate for change.
Empirically, not all democracies continually ratchet up to higher levels of civil rights. Some countries go in a very majoritarian direction as an off-ramp from democracy, like Hungary, Turkey, or India. Even among fully democratic countries, civil rights are at a high level but I’m not sure they’re all currently increasing. So I’m not sure what to make of that idea.
Imagine living in a country run by futarchy. The president (elected by the majority coalition) is supposed to handle foreign diplomacy, be the leader of the military, respond to crises, set the cultural tone for the nation, and help define the values function that the prediction markets implements. But one day the president tries to go against a futarchy ruling, saying “actually this law is null and void, the conditional prediction market that favored it is rigged, anyone can see that this would be a bad law!” Wouldn’t people freak out and the stock market drop (because the stock market knows that ignoring the prediction markets and making authoritarian power grabs is bad for business)? Wouldn’t people then get mad that the economy was doing poorly, and then vote out the president? Thus, “respect the prediction markets” would quickly become a well-reinforced norm in the society, since no president would want to tank the markets and get voted out. This is just the same as why Biden today doesn’t try to ignore congress or the supreme court.
First: these are a lot of good points, some I did not think of as an intellectual test of my ideas beforehand. Any responses that I come up with now are a little suspect because I had not anticipated several of them.
The majority coalition organizes conditions to defend itself from illegal coups, but that doesn’t mean it’s the most capable group to form one itself. The point is that by passing civil liberties the majority coalition ensures the system is stable. Numbers serves as a good enough proxy under a highly libertarian democracy for power that it tends to be able to reliably maintain order as the current incumbent, though not always!
I agree that it’s an imperfect abstraction to say that the more your system puts powerful people in charge the more things are stable, because obviously, some more overt ways of putting the powerful person in charge galvanizes opposition by offending people’s moral or ideological sympathies. However, it’s IMO the most important deciding component, and the other components tend to be technically surmountable by the ruling faction, once power is achieved (via propaganda, lying, etc.). They simply don’t tend to be as much of a binding constraint on behavior in practice.
I have no response to this. It actually just occurred to me that Futarchy can be packaged as a more effective way to enforce majority coalition values, even if it doesn’t immediately enforce their beliefs about the necessary actions. In that sense it, and jury voting, can be seen as a little analogous to ranked voting. It’s not necessarily true that you have to give literal power to the majority coalition to placate it. This throws the entire posts’ thesis into question.
This ignores the implementation details of acting against the Supreme Court overtly, from the perspective of a coalition. You of course still need some institution to resolve legal disputes about the laws passed by congress. What will that institution be? A designated party man, like Joe Biden? Now you’re giving him almost unlimited power. What if he turns against the majority coalition?
Perhaps supreme court cases could be decided by majority vote, but you have to remember the point you brought, namely that the majority coalition also might genuinely believe that the current system advances their values better than a simpler system. Democrats and Republicans (rightly IMO) have decided that the best way to influence the supreme court is by putting party-hardliners on the bench when they can. The fact is that coalitions inside democracy do try to influence the composition and power of the supreme court through normal means of law, pretty transparently. It’s just that they don’t do that by attempting to overthrow the court by force, because that’s risky and opens up a can of worms of failure scenarios.
I have a similar but not exactly similar view about democracy, and agree this is a plausible scenario. If the majority coalition decided its interests would be better served by Futarchy through the power of a salient example, then certainly this could happen.
Also important is that if the countries that founded Futarchy adopted a universalist ideology about their political system, not unlike some other countries we know (wink wink), then the wild success of their economy could enable them to project power and attempt to “support” other Futarchist revolutions around the globe. Of course, well-functioning domestic institutions, strong economic growth, etc., isn’t 1:1 with international power, but the correlation is there.
I think you mean authoritarian instead of majoritarian. And here I mostly disagree. If you look at the history of a solidly democratic regime like America, it starts with a system of more wacky and less democratic control (political bosses of cities like New York, the electoral college, etc.) and then ends up gradually moving further and further towards majoritarian control. My perspective on flawed democracies is that they’re either one, just pulled both ways; instances where the majority coalition in those countries is not quite powerful or inclined enough to oppose the power grabs by authoritarian cabals, but for circumstantial reasons the authoritarian cabals can’t grab any more power than they currently have. Or, two, and more commonly IMO, the countries simply in an interim position and are actually unstable, in a Nash sense. Those specific examples you mentioned are nations that have been on a pretty clear trend-line toward authoritarianism, and I would place them in bucket #2. Nothing about this model suggests things can’t change, especially as time moves forward and circumstances do; just that things try to move to an equilibrium. For full democracies that equilibrium is pretty solidly giving more power to the public, from the perspective of the public, to effectively advance their agenda.
Maybe?