Among the many proposed forms of governance, some are “direct democracy” wherein all citizens vote on key choices, and some are variations on “demarchy”, i.e., assigning key roles to, or filling legislatures with, random citizens. The following proposal is similar in some ways, but seems different enough to be worth treating separately. I’m not sure if “jurarchy” is a good idea, but it seems to me simple and elegant enough to be worth considering.
Choosing between A, B, C, D, E is often less important than deciding what those letters are exactly. Every fine detail and wording behind them can change the end result and the best choice. Negotiation, fact finding, consensus building, preparing choices are the hidden core of democracy.
Before any choice is made, people involved should meet and discuss and chart the options, invent experts and interest groups. That's the hard part in representative, direct and any form of democracy.
Political scientists are trying to figure out how to make this process better as a whole. The overall quality of the process decides how good the end result is. There are proposals for participatory or deliberative democracy or improving legislative process in representative democracy.
Democracy requires legitimacy. You need to make people commit to choices made in the process. Making decision process less personal and mechanical can be a mistake.
Suggestion: Robin, you should try find a way to embed the prediction market into the early phases in the legislative process. The role of experts and information acquiring already exists in the system but it's not as principled as it should be. In my opinion prediction markets and information aggregation should work as guide during the legislative process, not a method for making choices.
Suggestion 2 Law might have clause that ties it into prediction market. If it looks like the intent of law is not achieved by the law at some point based on the market, the law must be voted again or it expires.
1) in that case your 4th paragraph should either say that it's not considering non-bounty gains G, or it should include them by changing (A+C)/B to (A+C)/(B+G), as you effectively did 2 paragraphs later.
On 1), yes a delay allows time for reversal, at a cost of the responsiveness of this system. On 2), a higher M/N prevents marginal majorities for making big changes. I don't see the problem with combining delays and high M/N, other than slower responsiveness.
1) A phenomenon (other than the futarchy one) might help with the issue of parties re-trying the same proposal until they happen to get a favorable jury: Assume bills are only implemented after a certain delay, then it seems quite natural for companies to emerge whose business model is simply to dig up and suggest to revert such unpopular decisions that just passed by chance (i.e. are actually unpopular).
2) A somewhat orthogonal issue seems to be a lack of continuity in government. Imagine a divisive and polarising (so that people are simply willing to take losses to get it passed) proposal with ~50% very much in favour and ~50% very much against it. How would you ensure that some decision is made (for some given minimal duration)?
Obviously one could take care of 2) by introducing some rule that proposals can only be reverted after a certain duration, but this would make 1) more of an issue again. Is there some way to "solve" 1) and 2) simultaneously?
(One assumption for the 2) even being a problem is that sometimes some decision supported by, say, >1/3 of the population is better than a paralysed government.)
1) No, $B is a direct bounty given by government. I've added the word "bounty" to make that clearer. 2) The parameters A, B can be changed to change the rate of policy changes.
That's an issue with all law-based forms of governance. Any change in law requires a standard way to figure out what other laws are changed as a direct result.
1) my be being being dense but is the award of $B in your initial scenario description meant to represent the expected NPV of the financial benefit to the proposer which will result from the policy change (and if not, shouldn't that also be included in the analysis)?
2) what limits the level of volatility of policies in such a system? It seems clear that too much volatility is harmful.
It sounds as though there's a limitation to the system as described: government policies cannot depend on other government policies in ways that mean an update to one policy requires updates to other policies. I think the impact of that limitation might be worth exploring.
Could I ask: what problem is this intended to solve? With futarchy and your private insurance criminal justice proposals, I feel it’s easier to get the purpose.
I really hope a book on your extensive thoughts on alternative forms of governance is forthcoming! Perhaps it would be helpful to the burgeoning charter cities movement.
Choosing between A, B, C, D, E is often less important than deciding what those letters are exactly. Every fine detail and wording behind them can change the end result and the best choice. Negotiation, fact finding, consensus building, preparing choices are the hidden core of democracy.
Before any choice is made, people involved should meet and discuss and chart the options, invent experts and interest groups. That's the hard part in representative, direct and any form of democracy.
Political scientists are trying to figure out how to make this process better as a whole. The overall quality of the process decides how good the end result is. There are proposals for participatory or deliberative democracy or improving legislative process in representative democracy.
Democracy requires legitimacy. You need to make people commit to choices made in the process. Making decision process less personal and mechanical can be a mistake.
Suggestion: Robin, you should try find a way to embed the prediction market into the early phases in the legislative process. The role of experts and information acquiring already exists in the system but it's not as principled as it should be. In my opinion prediction markets and information aggregation should work as guide during the legislative process, not a method for making choices.
Suggestion 2 Law might have clause that ties it into prediction market. If it looks like the intent of law is not achieved by the law at some point based on the market, the law must be voted again or it expires.
1) in that case your 4th paragraph should either say that it's not considering non-bounty gains G, or it should include them by changing (A+C)/B to (A+C)/(B+G), as you effectively did 2 paragraphs later.
On 1), yes a delay allows time for reversal, at a cost of the responsiveness of this system. On 2), a higher M/N prevents marginal majorities for making big changes. I don't see the problem with combining delays and high M/N, other than slower responsiveness.
1) A phenomenon (other than the futarchy one) might help with the issue of parties re-trying the same proposal until they happen to get a favorable jury: Assume bills are only implemented after a certain delay, then it seems quite natural for companies to emerge whose business model is simply to dig up and suggest to revert such unpopular decisions that just passed by chance (i.e. are actually unpopular).
2) A somewhat orthogonal issue seems to be a lack of continuity in government. Imagine a divisive and polarising (so that people are simply willing to take losses to get it passed) proposal with ~50% very much in favour and ~50% very much against it. How would you ensure that some decision is made (for some given minimal duration)?
Obviously one could take care of 2) by introducing some rule that proposals can only be reverted after a certain duration, but this would make 1) more of an issue again. Is there some way to "solve" 1) and 2) simultaneously?
(One assumption for the 2) even being a problem is that sometimes some decision supported by, say, >1/3 of the population is better than a paralysed government.)
1) No, $B is a direct bounty given by government. I've added the word "bounty" to make that clearer. 2) The parameters A, B can be changed to change the rate of policy changes.
That's an issue with all law-based forms of governance. Any change in law requires a standard way to figure out what other laws are changed as a direct result.
There's no hidden purpose beyond what I said, to offer another option in the standard list of forms of governance.
1) my be being being dense but is the award of $B in your initial scenario description meant to represent the expected NPV of the financial benefit to the proposer which will result from the policy change (and if not, shouldn't that also be included in the analysis)?
2) what limits the level of volatility of policies in such a system? It seems clear that too much volatility is harmful.
It sounds as though there's a limitation to the system as described: government policies cannot depend on other government policies in ways that mean an update to one policy requires updates to other policies. I think the impact of that limitation might be worth exploring.
Could I ask: what problem is this intended to solve? With futarchy and your private insurance criminal justice proposals, I feel it’s easier to get the purpose.
I really hope a book on your extensive thoughts on alternative forms of governance is forthcoming! Perhaps it would be helpful to the burgeoning charter cities movement.