Harnessing Polarization
Human status competition can be wasteful. For example, often many athletes all work hard to win a contest, yet if they had all worked only half as hard, the best one could still have won. Many human societies, however, have found ways to channel status efforts into more useful directions, by awarding high status for types of effort of which there might otherwise be too little. For example, societies have given status to successful peace-makers, explorers, and innovators.
Relative to history and the world, the US today has unusual high levels of political polarization. A great deal of effort is going into people showing loyalty to their side and dissing the opposing side. Which leads me to wonder: could we harness all this political energy for something more useful?
Traditionally in a two party system, each party competes for the endorsement of marginal undecided voters, and so partisans can be enticed to work to produce better outcomes when their party is in power. But random variation in context makes it harder to see partisan quality from outcomes. And in a hyper partisan world, there aren’t many undecided voters left to impress.
Perhaps we could create more clear and direct contests, where the two political sides could compete to do something good. For example, divide Detroit or Puerto Rico into two dozen regions, give each side the same financial budget, political power, and a random half of the regions to manage. Then let us see which side creates better regions.
Political decision markets might also create more clear and direct contests. It is hard to control for local random factors in making statistical comparisons of polities governed by different sides. But market estimates of polity outcomes conditional on who is elected should correct for most local context, leaving a clearer signal of who is better.
These are just two ideas off the top of my head; who can find more ways that we might harness political polarization energy?
Added 28Sep: Notice that these contests don’t have to actually be fair. They just have to induce high efforts to win them. For that, merely believing that others may see them as fair could be enough.
"...who can find more ways...."
I strongly agree. Here are some variations on the theme..,
1). For issues such as health care, or retirement safety nets, we could ask the left, the right and libertarians, Marxists or whatever to each come up with their recommended institutional solution. We could then allow the states to choose among the three or four or whatever number of plans. The incentive here is that each side gets to have its national program albeit on a (multi?) state basis. This would allow regional preferences to get the type of institutions they want (potentially improving utilitarian value), and also allow benchmarking and competition. Later states can learn from the better experiments, adapting and possibly converting to proven superior programs.
2). We could allow individual opt outs or options for national institutions. The obvious existing example is retirement age today for SS. The same option can be introduced for retirement age vs. tax rate. For example, we could allow individuals to choose between current retirement and higher FICA, or later retirement and current FICA rate. Obviously those near retirement would choose the former. Underfunding would be solved immediately in a way either party could approve.
3). For immigration, we could create open immigrant cities or territories where immigrants were allowed to come and go under the institutions of the sponsoring nation state. It can be in an unpopulated border area, in a volunteer area or a neutral place like a charter city. This resolves the classical liberal arguments for potentially expanded or even unlimited immigration, with the concerns of extreme immigration undermining current institutions and norms. The immigrant areas can operate under various experimental institutions.
There are countless other possibilities here. The point is that it allows the Blue states to get Blue state programs, but to get them they must also give Red States their chance to try their ideas as well. We go beyond endless rhetoric and into actual benchmarking comparisons. We effectively convert a win/lose negative sum dynamic into a potentially win/win, constructive cooperation learning system.
Let government bifurcate; why should there only be one Department of Education?
Even more important why have one US currency and central bank big enough to bring down the world economy. Why not have 5 regional backs each with their own currency.