Culture-Guiding Futarchy

Most possible solutions to cultural drift offer humanity little conscious collective control over its future. One exception is my favorite solution: a large polity adopts a futarchy whose outcome measure puts a big (30%?) weight on a long term sacred goal that conflicts with civilization collapse. Like the date when a million people live in space, or when we achieve immortality. The rest of outcome weight would go on more ordinary citizen-pleasing outcomes like peace, income, respect, and leisure.

While we might abandon a mundane goal that asked for large sacrifices in its name, we might instead proudly suffer when asked to sacrifice for a sacred goal. Early test markets could suggest what % weight put on which goal would give the best shot at actually preventing collapse. Such a futarchy should seek to prevent collapse at the lowest cost to its other more mundane goals. And to the extent it was unsure about how to proceed, it would support illuminating smaller scale experiments.

But even though futarchy should be far more competent than current forms of government, it might still not be up to this very difficult task. After all, even the world’s best experts today have little idea how government policy could most cost-effectively change culture to prevent civ collapse. Thus a promising way to pursue this possible solution to cultural drift is not just to collect some practice showing that futarchy actually works for governance in general, but to start ASAP to have related systems practice managing cultural evolution in particular.

When trying to explain the cultural drift of our world’s monoculture, I’ve often discussed corporate cultures as a more understandable analogue. Firms last less than 20 years on the S&P500, and they fall mostly from their cultures going bad. Only 10% of the value of such firms is in tangible capital; most of the rest is in culture. Firms worry about their cultures, and often start big five-year-long cultural change initiatives. But even though CEOs have great power and incentives to cure their cultures, such initiatives fail 2/3 of the time. It is only the frequent introduction of new firms with good cultures that keeps the average quality of firm cultures high.

Corporate cultures seem not only good analogues of macro cultures for the purpose of explaining cultural drift; they also seem good analogues for the purpose of practicing governance to guide culture. So I propose that for particular public firms, we create combinatorial prediction markets, with Bayes Nets connecting variables representing the firm’s future stock price, firm cultural measures, and related firm policies and leadership choices.

Employees, customers, supplies, investors, and other firm-associates could then all edit and improve on the parts of the network where they feel most expert. Yes, this is a more complex structure than I’d advise for most futarchy applications, but I expect that this especially hard problem calls for it. And the relevant Bayes Net market tech has already been proven.

In a simple futarchy, speculators just bet on the direct connections between particular proposed policies and the firm stock price. This forces each speculator to imagine and think through all of the ways that specific policies might influence this key outcome. A task that seems especially hard in the case of culture.

In a combinatorial prediction market, in contrast, speculators could focus on predicting particular variables, or the relation between variables close to each in the network. This should allow a far higher degree of specialization in where traders focus their analysis. And if many different firms were to participate, traders might even connect the networks of different firms via variables representing general tendencies relating different kinds of variables at many firms.

A best shot at figuring out how to guide and improve corporate cultures would seem to come from having many diverse participants able to introduce many related variables, create many connections between them, and edit estimates re those variable and connections. All of which might gain great market subsidy via how they inform decisions by connecting concrete decisions to the key stock price outcome metric.

And if we could learn in this way how to use a combinatorial futarchy guide corporate culture evolution, we might then have a shot at using similar governance structures to guide the macro culture of a civilization. And then prevent our civ’s looming collapse.