Long ago, in the year 2000, Robin Hanson raised the question of whether we should vote on values and bet on beliefs. He proposes a form of government called futarchy, in which people vote on values and bet on beliefs.

Under futarchy, values experts propose measures of global welfare, policy-writing experts write up policies, and policy-evaluation experts bet on the outcome of those policies (in principle, anyone could do any of these things - but politics is valuable enough that I imagine experts will occupy these three roles). People vote on the measure of global welfare used, and the policies that have the best expected outcome by inputting the results of the betting markets into the currently-elected global welfare measure become law.

Sounds great! But as with all good things, one might suspect that the reason we don't already have futarchy is because of some sticky Nash equilibrium.

Imagine trying to go full futarchy, straight away. There are tons of different stakeholders in politics; some of them gain power when you implement futarchy, some of them lose power. The ones who lose power attempt to veto this. Given that tearing everything down and implementing futarchy requires a similar set of moves to tearing everything down and implementing dictatorship, the historical record suggests that they can usually veto this; you are not living under a dictatorship of the first person to ever try becoming a dictator. Depending on how powerful you are when you try, this looks like everyone ignoring the futarchy of you and your less-enthusiastic high school friends, a SWAT team raiding your futarchy compound, or your nation's constitution not having an amendment that lets you do futarchy.

So, forget systemic change for now. Imagine trying to become a personal futarch, as an elected politician. You hire a software engineer to write a prediction market app (like mine), or make a little thing on the Augur blockchain or something, and then from then on you vote on legislation according to the results of the markets rather than your own guesses. Just kidding! No you don't! You're an elected politician - the part of you that would be weird enough to do something as terribly unconventional as futarchy was ground away in your climb to the top, or you preserved it and got selected out of politics and you're not actually an elected politician. And that...

Tetraspace Grouping's Shortform

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Tetraspace Grouping's Shortform

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