Socialism Via Futarchy

On Bryan’s recommendation, I just read Niemietz’s Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies, which credibly argues that two dozen socialism experiments over the last century have consistently failed, with roughly this pattern:

The not-real-socialism defence is only ever invoked retrospectively, namely, when a socialist experiment has already been widely discredited. As long as a socialist experiment is in its prime, almost nobody disputes its socialist credentials. On the contrary: practically all socialist regimes have gone through honeymoon periods, during which they were enthusiastically praised and held up as role models by plenty of prominent Western intellectuals. (More)

Noteworthy results from the latest experiment:

The number of worker-run cooperatives increased from fewer than 1,000 when Chávez was first elected to well over 30,000 in less than a decade. By the end of Chávez’s second term, cooperatives accounted for about 8% of Venezuela’s GDP and 14% of its workforce … It soon became clear … that many cooperatives were behaving like capitalist enterprises, seeking to maximize their net revenue … For example, rather than supplying their products to local markets … export them to other countries where they can sell them at higher prices … Also, many cooperatives have refrained from accepting new members. … As Chávez himself said: … if we are 20 in a cooperative, we are going to work for the benefit of us 20, and that is merely capitalism. Cooperatives need to be impelled towards socialism.’ (More)

Even after so many very expensive experiments, they still apparently have only have the vaguest idea of what detailed arrangements might actually achieve what they want. It seems they have mainly waited until an allied group gained control somewhere, and then tried a few random variations that resonate with local supporters.

There still seems to be great passion in the world for further socialism experiments, but it seems hard to hold much hope if they continue with this pattern. While I’m not personally very inspired by the socialist vision, I do like for people to get what they want, and that includes people who want socialism. So I’m taking the time to think about how to help them get it.

Which induces me to consider variations on futarchy to help to achieve socialism. If you recall, futarchy is a form of governance wherein market speculators choose policies to maximize an ex-post-measured welfare measure. The thicker are these markets (perhaps via subsidies), the stronger are the incentives for speculators to learn what is actually effective in achieving that welfare. This seems a good match, if what socialism most needs now is less a good system and more a good learning environment in which to search for good systems.

The big question for futarchy-based socialism is: what are the ex-post-measurable outcomes that indicate a successful socialism? That is, how would you know one when you saw it? Obviously you’d want to include some basic consumption measures, like G.D.P., but if that’s all you maximize there’s no obvious reason why the result will be especially socialist. You might include risk-aversion over consumption, which punishes inequality to some degree, but again it isn’t obvious that risk-aversion greatly favors socialism. Even more directly and strong punishing inequality and emphasizing the poor doesn’t obviously favor any more socialism than we see in high-redistribution low-regulation capitalist Nordic “social democracies”.

Consider:

Socialism is … characterised by social ownership of the means of production and workers’ self-management of enterprise … Social ownership can be public, collective or cooperative ownership, or citizen ownership of equity. (More)

What all socialism has in common … is … bottom-up governance of society based on local assemblies which elect delegates that share their peoples’ living conditions, can be overridden, answer to and are replaceable by them, who can federate into councils and repeat the process for larger areas and amounts of people. (More; see also)

It seems that to many a central concept of socialism is each person having a high a degree control (also called “ownership”) over their world, including both their immediate world and the larger economic/political world. This is not just control to enable one to achieve high consumption, but also control over one’s workplace, and probably even more control than is required for these purposes. In this view, successful socialism is a world of busybodies with strong abilities to get into each others’ business.

To promote socialism then, we might try a futarchy whose welfare measure includes not just measures of consumption, but also of control.

For example, one measure of control would ask random people to try to induce particular random changes in their world. The stronger the correlation between actual changes afterward and the changes that we randomly assigned them, the more we’d say that people in this world had a lot of control over it. But we’d need to find some widely-accepted weights that say which possible changes count for how much, and we’d need ways to get people to actually try to change their world in the ways we assign them. These seems hard to achieve. Also, this would probably find near zero control for larger social structures, no matter how things are arranged. And we’d need to find ways to prevent this world from suddenly becoming more plastic to support test changes, while less supporting non-test changes.

Also, I worry that simple-minded measures of individual control might induce many decisions to be made via big xor trees. Such trees would seem to let anyone who controls inputs to any leaf of the tree determine the root as well. Though of course in practice not being able to predict the other inputs means you can’t actually usefully control the output. But can we formally define average individual control in a way that doesn’t promote such xor trees?

Probably the simplest solution is to just survey people about their sense of control over their world. You might want to emphasize people who’ve recently visited other worlds, so they can reasonably compare their world to others. And you’d want to limit the abilities of local authorities to force people to give desired survey answers, such as via the threat of retaliation. If a strong central government were part of a socialist society, that may also make it difficult to measure consumption. Such governments have been known to try to distort consumption stats to make themselves look good.

One solution to these problems would be to rely on capitalist foreigners, and on travel to visit them, for both market speculators and welfare measurement.

That is, let random citizens (perhaps whole families) of the socialist society be extracted periodically and made to visit a capitalist foreign land. During that foreign visit, they can be privately interviewed about both their sense of control and their consumption levels, and they can be offered the chance to stay in that foreign land. (Via offers with varying degrees of attractiveness.) Stats on what they said and on who chose to stay could then be used to estimate the welfare of that society, without allowing that socialist government to retaliate via knowing who said what. Foreign speculators could also pay to talk privately to these visitors, to help inform their market speculation choices.

In this scenario, this socialist society would, to help it more quickly learn what works best, commit to delegating to these capitalist foreigners the measurement of its welfare and substantial participation in their speculative governance markets. Of course people at home within this socialist society could also be allowed to speculate in these markets, and to contribute to stats read by foreigners. But this approach avoids extreme corruption problems by making sure that foreigners can speculate, and measure welfare, in ways that are outside of the control of a perhaps powerful socialist government.

Of course if this approach eventually settled on a stable solution for making a good socialist society, they might want to drop this external futarchy run by foreigners to become entirely self-governing. That would make sense if and when full self-governance became more important than faster learning about how to make socialism work.

And that’s as far as I’ve thought for now. Of course if sufficient interest were expressed in this concept, I could put in some more thought.