Seek What Outcomes Via Futarchy?
There’s an off chance that futarchy might solve cultural drift, if we could show that it works, then get some big place to adopt it, and also get them to set an outcome metric in conflict with civ collapse. But would people set such a goal?
Another question about futarchy is whether people would try to encode their favored policies in the outcome metric, instead of trusting the system to pick the best policies give an outcome metric tied to what they more directly care about.
To investigate these questions, I just did a set of 25 X/twitter polls on what people would pick as futarchy priorities. While these polls had unusual low response rates, I still think they give us a glimmer of what people would set as futarchy priorities today, if they were deciding that today.
Re cultural drift, the first question is what explicit weight they’d put on the future, via a discount rate. The median discount rate chosen was 2.1%, which is faster than population is growing, and pretty much the same as average US GDP growth over the last two decades. Alas, I think we’d need a much lower rate for the discount rate itself to induce much effort to avoid civ collapse.
Here are poll relative weights (wrt 100 max) of 32 possible futarchy outcomes:
The second result re drift is how much weight they’d give to the long term fertility or population, or to the goal in conflict with civ collapse that I included, the one that got the most support in my prior polls: the date when 1M people live in space. This ended up being #18 out of 32 items, just above the #19,20 for population and fertility. These are not remotely high enough priorities to prevent civ collapse. I conclude, alas, that we’d need a big value shift for futarchy to have even a chance at fixing cultural drift.
Re encoding policy in the outcome function, #4,5,7,11,16,20,23 are all items that plausibly represent strategies to achieve outcomes already represented elsewhere in this list. Though it is possible that people value these directly, and not via how they influence other items.
Other surprises, at least to me, are how little weight respondents put on #26-32. I had included them in the list of options because I thought it possible that people might care substantially about them.
Finally, libertarians should be reassured that protecting freedoms is the top poll priority. Futarchy might do better at this than forms of government that promise to do so, but don’t have good mechanisms to achieve that.
I wonder: on our current trajectory how long will it take for population decline to move up on this list? I.e., for the average person to perceive it as a serious risk?
It isn't implausible to me that the answer could be "never", if the change over one lifetime remains modest. How does a gradual change ever compete with the near-to-hand risks that dominate the top of your list: Death, rights violations, crime, etc.
Also you have the overhang of people like me who fondly remember when there was less crowding and everything was easier: Buying a house, getting into a good college, getting a campsite at a national park. Maybe it will take some of us dying off to start taking the problem seriously.
I'd discount that poll as a byproduct of virtue signalling WRT your last paragraph. I'm sure people would say #1 is the top priority today for our current government but in practice nothing could be farther from the truth and I don't see that changing in the future either. People despise freedom for others generally and that's universal across all times and locations. You don't have have the highest prison rate in the world with the most draconian punishments loving freedom. People can say all they want, in reality they push to lock up their neighbor for anything they can fabricate.