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Theodore Ehrenborg's avatar

I take your point that an encyclopedia article about a law is different from a justification of a law.

My concerns are focused more on governance by jury. We currently expect Congress to create nation-wide policy, which is harder than a jury's current task of deciding the fact of a crime or deciding responsibility in a specific court case.

Thus I suspect that governance by juries would do worse than a legislature when faced with, say, a year's worth of policy decisions, even if we improve the juries and the legislature by giving them access to prediction markets' forecasts, as well as nullifying decisions that are likely to be soon overturned.

A specific failure mode I see is that clever arguments by an interest group could convince a jury to enact a policy, while a legislator who often deals with that interest group is less likely to be fooled because of their greater experience. As a somewhat relevant example from the book I'm reading, when cities began adding fluoride to the water supply to reduce dental problems, "cities whose administrators or city councils made the decision without a referendum overwhelmingly adopted fluoridation." But 60% of popular referendums rejected fluoride, since "Crackpots, rogue doctors, and extreme right-wing interest groups all fought fluoridation, and many voters, including a substantial fraction of those with college educations, could not sort out the self-appointed gurus from the competent experts" (Achen & Bartels, p. 54).

Of course, one could argue that the interest group would have more time to convince the legislator to support them. And maybe a jury would do better than a popular referendum, since the jury has to focus on a particular issue. But citizens' assemblies are based on a similar idea, and they have mixed records for actually creating workable policies (see https://politi.co/2OS2MYy). Achen and Bartels also criticize these assemblies, observing that in Canada "a body of ordinary citizens engaged in an elaborately funded year-long process of education, consultation, and deliberation aimed at recommending a new voting rule to be employed in provincial elections. And in each case, their nearly unanimous recommendation was decisively rejected by their fellow citizens in a subsequent referendum" (p. 302).

But I'm mostly arguing from my intuitions. So it would be nice to run an experiment or find strong historical evidence of a similar situation.

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RobinHanson's avatar

In this post, I proposed a specific way to make laws easier to repeal.

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