What Is Liberal Futarchy?

What measurable outcomes should a futarchy government try to maximize? One answer is “let democracy decide”; a democratic futarchy has its citizens directly vote to choose outcome metrics, or elect representatives who so choose. As democracy is our status quo today, I’ve usually described futarchy in these terms.

But another answer is “they should be liberal”. Liberalism ideally allows different individuals and groups to peaceably pursue different ends under a common government. So what ex-post measurable futarchy outcome metrics could promote a liberal order?

It turns out that “liberal” has meant many different things over the centuries. Some say “liberal” means “make the worse off person better off”. But are we allowed to kill people, or prevent them from existing, to achieve this? And the fact that there are so many different ways to measure “worse off” seems to make this approach pretty fragile.

Others say “liberal” means “rights are preserved”. This suggests minimizing a weighted rate of rights violations, with different kinds of violations getting different weights. But the obvious way to max this is to have zero people doing nothing. And that just can’t be what we want.

To still others, “liberal” has meant “neutral w.r.t. key features”, features like individual identity, family, region, religion, or ethnicity. Of course we can’t be neutral w.r.t. all features, but we could add a constraint that futarchy outcomes can’t refer directly to certain key features. However, what about other features that strongly correlate with key features? Even if we managed to ban outcome metrics referring to any features that too strongly correlate with key features, that is still just a constraint on outcome metrics; it doesn’t tell us what metrics to use.

Another concept of “liberal” is “easy exit”. And exit is easier when you can take more value with you as you leave, part of which comes from selling what you have before you leave. So a liberal outcome metric might come from adding up the market price of all this stuff that people in a governance unit could sell to leave it. Yes, they could also take their skills and social reputation with them. So we could institute slavery to let those have a market price, try to estimate these prices in other ways, or just hope that in practice the total price of stuff one can sell correlates well enough with the total value of all one can take when one leaves.

Taxes people pay as they leave would lower this total that people could take when they leave, while transferable citizenship would raise it. And should an ease of exit metric also include transport prices of moving, and entry prices to start anew elsewhere? There’s also the question of if we want easier exit per person, or added up across all local people; the latter would probably push futarchy to acquire or at least maintain more people.

The total market price of everything that can be sold also seems to be a decent measure of how well people and groups actually achieve their various ends within this place. Which seems another way to cash out the “liberal” ideal. After all, the more obstacles there are to achieving their ends, with easy exist the more that people would go elsewhere, and not stay to bid up the price of local assets. This offers another reason to set a “liberal” futarchy outcome metric to be a sum total of all assets owned by people within the governance unit, following the constraint this metric doesn’t pay attention to key features of who owns or uses those assets, and maybe minus some measure of rights violations.

Maybe count each rights violation in terms of an estimate of how much people would pay on net to avoid it. Though one might argue that this effect should already be included in the price of all local assets measure. Should a liberal regime care more about rights violations than its people do individually?

Now this approach might induce futarchy to try to make more assets tradeable, in order to get measurable prices for them. We could either accept this consequence, or limit the metric to a few particular types of assets, like say land property and/or transferable citizenships, and hope there aren’t many policies that could much change the relative value of these types of assets compared to other types of assets.

I worry a bit about letting the futarchy outcome metric get too complicated, as that could allow more room for corruption and gaming of the metric. For this reason such a liberal metric seems more attractive to me than what simple democracy seems likely to produce. Though adding a complex rights penalty on to whatever complex metric democracy might produce could be even worse.

However, my main reservation here is about adaptiveness. Market prices discount future returns at market rates of return, which quickly make future generations unimportant. So a region run by this sort of liberal futarchy would likely not much resist a civ decline, if its cultures tended in that direction.

Which is why I’d instead prefer a futarchy that puts a big weight on achieving as soon as possible a sacred goal in conflict with civ decline over the next few centuries. Like say medical immortality or a million people living in space. I’m okay with putting the rest of the weight on a liberal outcome as outlined above.