A Virtuous Governance Cycle
“The greatest punishment, if one isn’t willing to rule, is to be ruled by someone worse than oneself. And I think that it’s fear of this that makes decent people rule when they do. … In a city of good men, if it came into being, the citizens would fight in order not to rule, just as they do now in order to rule.” Plato, The Republic 347a-d
Governance systems can be distinguished by the goals they pursue, and by their competence at achieving those goals. And a key meta-competence question about any such system is: when a more competent system that achieve similar goals becomes available, how reliably does the original system replace itself with the better system? A similar question applies to any one person who rules: will they voluntarily step down to be replaced by someone who will more competently fill their role?
The US was one of the first modern democracies, and it still uses roughly its original form of democracy, even though parliamentary democracy has long been shown to be a more competent form. Thus US democracy is not very meta-competent.
We have good reasons to think competence and meta-competence are correlated. For example, when a for-profit firm does not put up big obstacles to hostile takeovers, those takeovers happen more often, improving both competence and meta-competence.
Also, futarchy seems promising as a more competent form of governance, and if so it would also be much more meta-competent. After all, the process by which it would evaluate a change in governance form would be mostly the same as the process it uses to evaluate other changes. As long as the new governance system would preserve the key futarchy outcome measurements, assets, and payoff mechanisms, futarchy could reliably estimate the consequences of changing to it.
Meta-competent governance systems offer the promise of a virtuous governance cycle. Systems would replace themselves with systems that are better not only at governing, but also at replacing themselves with improvements. While at first the gains from replacing must be very big, clear, and obvious, and even then take a long time to implement, later smaller and subtler gains will be found and implemented more quickly. Causing an acceleration of governance gains.
Competent governance of nations would tend to induce more competent governance of states, cities, firms, and non-profits. The competence of any one of these areas would tend to push for more competence in the other areas. Once such a virtuous cycle has played out to a substantial degree, we’d have a much more competent world, which should be more effective finding and avoiding risks, and at identifying and solving civ scale problems like cultural drift.
The claim that lower barriers to hostile takeovers results in increased competence at companies seems dubious at best. I readily admit that my attention to business news is only cursory, but the most commonly reported outcome of hostile takeovers I've seen seems to be the new holders essentially looting the company for a temporary bump in stock prices and dividends to their shareholders and then reselling the hollowed out fragments on before their impending collapse becomes obvious.
Similarly, the US, for all its numerous problems, seems to have rather pulled away from Europe lately on a number of positive metrics, such as citizen's average wealth, whereas countries like Germany seem to be serving as a case study in a paralyzed political system incapable of adaptating to cultural and economic challenges.
Frankly, the systems you seem to think demonstrate greater competence aren't striking me as obviously superior to the systems you denigrate.
“ The US was one of the first modern democracies, and it still uses roughly its original form of democracy, even though proportional representation has long been shown to be a more competent form of democracy. ”
Somehow I’m not convinced. If we are talking about “proportional” representation as we most often see in the EU countries, I’ve not heard much good about such from the rank and file voters over there. Seems broadly that new parties still can’t break into effective say in governance even with parliamentary representation since the “rules” have been created to maintain the current power status quo. Not much better than the US “uniparty” system we now have.