Loyalty Blocks Accountability

We moderns tell ourselves that while the ancients were transparently and strongly dominated by elites, we hold our leaders far more accountable, such as via law, media, and democracy. But we allow our elites many easy ways to use money or political connections to gain far more favorable treatment from media and law. And we use democracy much more to fight each other via coalition politics than to hold leaders accountable. That is, we much more submit to the leaders we vote for, than we defy the leaders we don’t.

Consider 18 ways we now block holding our leaders accountable:

1. We make blackmail illegal, so they are less penalized for misbehavior.

2. We don’t arrange to try to secretly and randomly bribe officials.

3. We don’t expect leaders to post bonds they forfeit if not keep promises.

4. We mostly pick leaders on recommendation of other leaders.

5. We rarely collect track records re their performance outcomes, or predictions.

6. We rarely use prediction/decision markets to check leader prediction/decisions.

7. We let firms pick their own auditors, and audits are rarely randomized.

8. Evaluators usually can’t see leader decision internal records.

9. Old leaders are not given regular tests re dementia.

10. We don’t much protect or reward whistleblowers.

11. Leader evaluations are rarely blinded.

12. 360 reviews are rare and toothless.

13. Only firm leaders have much cash performance incentives.

14. We give police, prosecutors, and govt officials have legal immunity.

15. Police internal affairs reports to police chief, not mayor.

16. Firms use poison pills to block takeovers, and we vilify short sellers.

17. Golden parachutes and option price resetting cushion CEO losses.

18. We let CEOs pick who is on their boards.

Many excuses are offered for each of these patterns, but the obvious explanation here is that we are far less like the ancients than we like to think. We are eager to submit to the powerful, and show them our fealty, and are wary of endorsing positions by which we might seem to challenge or defy their power.

This is a big problem with two of my solutions to cultural drift, which require at least some of our groups to adopt much more competent forms of governance, forms that induce leaders to actually achieve identified goals. Our world now far less achieves most of the goals we give our leaders, due to our using pretty bad governance mechanisms. But we each prefer that to risking our seeming less loyal to our elites.