Would the established interests of 95 years hence not simply lobby for repeal of the law before it takes effect? It's generally difficult for the current legislature to thoroughly bind the hands of a future legislature.
And it seems to me that "people 100 years ago imposing a weird law that even they didn't want to be subject to themselves" would be an easy sell to quietly cancel.
I'm not a legal expert, but I'm sure we've solved the problem of how to create a binding contract.
What's weird about the laws I've suggested?
I'm not a legal expert, but I'm sure we've solved the problem of how to create a binding contract.
Laws are not contracts.
No contract has the power to bind anyone but its signatories. No-one but the signatories has any standing to enforce a contract. A contract has no binding force against the common will of its signatories to alter or dissolve it. In some places, a contract has no binding force beyond some limited interval after the death of its signatories.
Laws are passed by governments to impose obligations on the people. Laws have less power to bind the government itself, and almost no power to bind its successors. What laws one government can write, the next government can as easily erase.
Let me start by saying I think I really should have said 50 years instead of 100. That seems to a big sticking point for people.
I haven't made myself clear. What I'm saying is create a contract to enforce the institution of a law. The government is the signatory, not any particular person. Governments can and do hold by agreements that past governments made, even if they disagree with their predecessors.
Now, sometimes they break those promises, and that's why I'm talking about creating a binding contract. As in, if you break the contract, a penalty occurs.
For example, let's say the government issues $1T of a particular financial asset. Those assets are basically inflation-adjusted perpetuities, except upon the institution of the delayed law, they cease to pay out. (Unless the law is instituted before the 50-year period, in which case they only cease to pay out after 50 years so that the perpetuity buyers aren't swindled.) If the law is not instituted, then they continue to be perpetuities.
Upon selling those "enforcement perpetuities", the government splits the ownership of land and buildings. So if you own a house, now you own the house itself, as well as a financial asset for the land underneath it. The land asset pays off a cashflow equal to the land value (if you're taxed $1000 on Jan 1st, the government pays you $1000 on Jan 1st). Now, the money raised from the enforcement perpetuities can be used to buy those land assets from all current landowners.
Maybe you'd call this an incentive mechanism, rather than a contract. Whatever, I'm not a legal expert. Whether that's the best solution or not, I don't know. Even if there's something wrong with the contract I just laid out, I would be shocked if there were not a way to do this. I'm sure there are plenty of creative solutions.
Obviously, that particular solution doesn't apply to all delayed laws. Different laws will require different solutions. For the voting system problem, make a constitutional amendment requiring a unanimous vote to overturn it.
So what happens when in 50 years the government just stops paying, without passing the law? Buyers of these instruments don't care about that law, so they will not object much, and there will be no reputation loss.
I work at an investment fund. If we held these assets, I assure you we would be trying to get paid if the government reneged. It would be a default, and government defaults are a very big deal with serious consequences for the country. So your suggestion is not really an option. Either the future government can enact the policy and get their debt wiped for free, or they can continue to pay the debt.
It's a very strong enforcement mechanism, since the benefit to enacting the policy is so high.
I think repealing laws is a valid point. I assume you'd not only have to have the enactment of the law postponed, you'd also have add on extra terms that prevent a repealing. Maybe that's what you mean by "binding contract". Consider the example of Hunduras' ZEDEs.
I've just written a post on how exactly to enforce these contracts: Enforcing Far-Future Contracts for Governments.
Let me know what you think!
Constitutional law as a separate category with higher standards to make a change is the textbook way of making a law that isn't so easily un-made (that and international treaties). But of course making a change to the constitution requires a stronger consensus to begin with - and probably in most cases you could use that strong consensus to pass a law with immediate effect.
I don't expect "this amendment shall require a unanimous vote to be repealed" would be a valid thing to include though - a regular amendment going through the normal process could still simply say "no it doesn't" and supersede the previous amendment.
People may also have a sense that constitutional law has a specific proper role, and that making provisions that aren't to do with the fundamental architecture of how the government works is outside of that remit and thus unwise. So using it to change the voting system would be on-brand, but making arbitrary other changes would be susceptible to an accusation of "that's not what the constitution is for", in the battle for public opinion.
Setting up financial products in such a way that the future government would be fiscally incentivised to follow through seems more promising, but might be more difficult to persuade current voters to go along with. Those inclined to oppose might find it easy to spread fear/doubt of anything too novel and unfamiliar; call it a trillion dollar future debt bomb or whatever. And you can try to explain that the "bomb" only goes off if the future government reneges on the current government's commitment, but "if you're explaining you're losing" and "you get about five words".
I see your point about constitutionality, but I think something such as the electoral system falls within its remit, which was my recommendation. But yeah, I would have no problem with extending the uses of the constitution, although I know that others would.
I agree that the financial product is more promising, because of its generality. The interesting thing is that even if they issue the asset with the intention of breaking the promise, they lose basically nothing in net present terms (because those cashflows 50 years into the future are discounted by 1+d to the 50th power). Thus it wouldn't be a mistake to do it (even while planning to renege). Since it's equivalent to issuing regular perpetuities in terms of how much money a given debt would raise, it's outright incorrect to call it a “bomb”. They don't have to pay $1T all at once at the 50-year mark, it's just that the present value of the debt will be worth that amount (assuming the same discount rate is the same as it was upon issuance).
Don't get me wrong, I get that “if you're explaining you're losing”. But LessWrong, of all places, should be an area to discuss such ideas, and not have it dismissed out of hand simply because “People are too stupid/lazy/disinterested to get it”. I don't think we should restrict our posts to 5 words or fewer. I don't think we should avoid novel ideas. And I don't think we should avoid politics.
The fact that everyone said Trump had no chance in the 2016 election shows that people basically don't know what they're talking about when it comes to political plausibility. No offence meant. I just don't see any value in such guesses, when they're so often wrong, and they stifle ideas.
On the point of explaining/losing and only having 5 words, I don't mean anything in the region of "you shouldn't have posted this for discussion" or that your posts about it here should be limited to 5 words. Only that I expect there would be major communications challenges if someone were to attempt implementing any of these ideas as actual political strategies, and that this would need to be anticipated and accounted for.
I'm also realising I fatally misread your post about perpetuities; quite right, calling it a "bomb" would be inaccurate.
Okay cool. And you didn't misread it the first time, I had to heavily edit it to make it clearer.
How well can you predict what will be good in 100 years? For perspective, given the contemporary zeitgeist of 1923, rather than knowing all we know now, what would have been considered a great policy to enact then that would take effect in 2023?
Depends on domain we're talking about. The post I linked in the last paragraph will probably answer your question in more detail than you'd ever want, but I'll answer it briefly here.
I'd very happily back the two examples that I gave. And that's because we can define reasonable optimality criteria for each of those areas (voting systems and tax policy) and show that our policy proposals satisfy those criteria under some reasonable assumptions.
The key point here is that, for the land value tax, the optimality criteria and the assumptions required are extremely weak, i.e. every person informed on the matter would agree with them.
For the voting system change, there's actually a proof that you can't satisfy all the conditions that you probably want for that system (Arrow's impossibility theorem). So in that example, there could be reasonable debate about which property set we want, but I'd be happy If America changed to any number of proposed voting systems. For an introduction on the topic, see CGP Grey's video.
This delay strategy is definitely a last resort. If you can implement a good policy today, then do that. But if you face insurmountable road blocks, and you know the policy is optimal (by some reasonable definition), then it may very well be the best option available to you.
As for the 1923 question, I'd say we didn't have a theoretical foundation for what makes a policy optimal. Given that, there is no policy I would have tried to have advocated for in this way (even though the land value tax was invented before 1879). The article that I linked you to contains my attempt to lay those theoretical foundations (or the start of it anyway, I haven't finished it yet).
I think that governments already do this to some extent, the UK (and I think many other countries) have enshrined a date in law (2050) that says "net zero carbon emissions from this date".
The point is almost the same as what you describe. The government wants the votes of environmentally concerned citizens, but it also wants the votes of people who drive or work in a polluting industry.
In the most charitable case the net-zero 2050 commitment is a public statement from the government to polluting industries or car manufacturers that their clock is ticking. So they should maybe stop hiring, or develop alternative products. This push does some of the government's work for it before it actually works out which policies it needs for net zero. Then, maybe, those policies face less stiff resistance when they do start coming in because time lead giving many of the people who would loose out "time to move".
With any large change in tax policy, or a policy that causes a big impact financially on a lot of people it does make sense to give a fairly large lead time to warn people. Assuming you wanted to abolish state pensions, doing so tomorrow morning would be madness. But, announcing that they will be abolished and that no one currently under 35 is ever getting a state pension would be a more reasonable approach, gives people more space to plan.
Hmm, I didn't have the zero-carbon commitment in mind when I wrote this, but you're right, this post's idea is basically just a wider application of that. Although I do think my subsequent post is probably more novel (see here: Enforcing Far-Future Contracts for Governments).
As far as the tax changes go, I completely agree, forewarning is great, and totally underutilised. There's also a faster alternative, which is to nullify any immediate wealth transfers that result from the change. So for instance, if you're lowering the corporate tax, stock prices will increase, which disproportionately benefits people who are more invested in stocks than, say, real estate. The downside of this is that it requires a very large number of accurate counterfactual valuations (in order to determine the difference). So it's much easier just to give forewarning.
Additionally and separately, the law "X takes effect at time t" will be opposed by the interests that oppose X, regardless of the value of t.
I think your point is that this strategy only works if the voting block’s short-term interests conflict and their long-term interests don’t conflict. I fully agree with that.
If you disagree that these policies are actually beneficial in the long run, I’m sure you can think of policies that you like that have long-run benefits and short-run costs.
And other people will disagree with those. No policy can be known to have long-run benefits until it has actually had a long run.
There is no way to make laws for 100 years hence, because we do not know what the world will be like then. Some even expect a singularity before 2120. Could anyone in 1920 make laws for the 2020s? Any attempt from back then would be regarded as laughable today. Who can say, at last we know the truth of how people should behave, and all we have to do is force them to do it? Only fanatics who would destroy the world and call it peace.
I think it's rather unfair to classify me as a confidently underinformed fanatic. I've worked in federal government, the country's largest bank, and am now an investment analyst at a large fund. High confidence usually indicates overconfidence, sure, but that correlation breaks down when someone really has thought deeply about a topic. Mathematicians, for instance, are nearly 100% confident of long-known peer-reviewed claims.
I've written quite extensively on optimal policy methodology. Have a read here, The Benevolent Ruler’s Handbook (Part 1): The Policy Problem. As I said in one of my other comments, “As for the 1923 question, I'd say we didn't have a theoretical foundation for what makes a policy optimal. Given that, there is no policy I would have tried to have advocated for in this way (even though the land value tax was invented before 1879). The article that I linked you to contains my attempt to lay those theoretical foundations (or the start of it anyway, I haven't finished it yet).”
Once you have these foundations, you can say things like “I know this policy is optimal, and will continue to be so”.
I think it's rather unfair to classify me as a confidently underinformed fanatic.
I'm sure you're informed. :)
We just have to ensure the policies we propose are actually good ... and have large barrier to reversal
How are you going to know that 100 (or even 50) years in advance of them ever being implemented? This looks to me like solving AGI alignment by saying "we just have to ensure the AGI actually does what we want and stop anyone turning it off."
I'm taking the outside view here and observing that knowing how society should work and making everyone do that has always worked out badly before. What would be different this time?
Why is it that mathematicians are confident about their results? It's evident that they are highly confident. And it's evident that they're justified in being confident. Their results literally hold for the rest of time. They're not going to flip in 100 years. So why is this the case?
Basically, there are a few stages of belief. Sometimes a belief is stated on its own without anything else. Sometimes a justification is given for that belief. And sometimes it's explained why that justification is a reliable indicator of truth. Now, you may think you have infinite regress here, but that's wrong in practice: You eventually reach a point where your justification is so trivially obvious that it almost feels silly to even list those justifications as assumptions in your argument.
Voting systems have been figured out to the level of standard mathematical detail (i.e. belief + justification). And my methodology post that I linked to you is explaining why justifications of the form they use are unambiguously correct in the world of policy. (Again that series is not finished yet, but the only roadblock is making it entertaining to read, I've already figured out the mathematical details.)
So to me, arguing against a voting system change is like saying “Maybe there are a finite number of primes” or “Maybe this table I'm resting my arms on right now doesn't actually exist”. I.e. these really are things that we can, for all intents and purposes, be certain of. And if you're not certain of these basic things, we can't really ever discuss anything productively.
It's not a matter of the Dunning–Kruger effect; it's that experts understand these problems well enough. You can find professors who specialise in voting theory and ask them. Ask them “Is there any chance that replacing the current presidential voting system with any of the most promising current alternatives will be a mistake in 100,000 years?” The amount of time is totally irrelevant when you understand a problem well enough. One plus one will always equal two.
Conversely, AI safety's whole problem is that we don't have anything like that. We have no confidence that we can control these systems. We have proposals, we have justifications for those proposals, but we have no reason to believe that those justifications reliably lead to truth.
To be clear, I'm not saying every policy problem is solved. But some policy problems are solved. (Or in the case of voting theory, sufficiently solved as to far outperform the current system, and we know that there is no unknown system will blow our current proposals out of the water due to Arrow's impossibility theorem.) And establishing some of those policies is difficult because of short-term incentives. This delay tactic is a way to implement that specific subset of policies, and only that subset.
Denying this would require you to think that no such policies exists. Which would commit you to say, “Hey, maybe the Saudi Arabian policy of cutting off a child-thief's hand shouldn't be revoked in 50 years. Who can say whether that'll be a good policy at that point?”
We can be confident of mathematics because mathematics is precise and explicit, and exists independently of space, time, and people. Its truths are eternal and we can become arbitrarily certain of them.
This is not true of anything else.
The pure mathematics of voting systems, being mathematics, exists likewise, but its application to the physical world, like all applied mathematics, is contingent on the real world conforming to its ontology and its axioms.
“Is there any chance that replacing the current presidential voting system with any of the most promising current alternatives will be a mistake in 100,000 years?”
Even given a flourishing future for humanity, it seems vanishingly unlikely that the Presidency or the US will even exist in 100,000 years, or that anyone by then will care much what they were. I would not even bet on there being anything resembling a presidency or a political state after that passage of time, or on any positive conjecture about how our descendants would be living.
The pure mathematics of voting systems, being mathematics, exists likewise, but its application to the physical world, like all applied mathematics, is contingent on the real world conforming to its ontology and its axioms.
I never would have disputed this. But you’re being binary: basically “either we know it or we don’t”. It's not that you're wrong, it's that your categories aren't useful in practice. You're implicitly bucketing things you're 99.9% sure about with things that you're 20% sure about.
In contrast, my view is that you should assign some credence to your set of assumptions being true. And given that, we can say that your credence in a valid logical argument’s conclusion must be at least as high as your credence in its assumptions. (It’s higher because, of course, there can be other sound logical arguments that support your conclusion.)
If you're restricting your knowledge to known mathematical truths, you're not going to make any government policies at all.
it seems vanishingly unlikely that the Presidency or the US will even exist in 100,000 years
Conceded, but that’s not a substantive issue to my argument. The electoral system of an office that doesn’t exist anymore hardly matters, does it? I only posed the 100,000-year question to illustrate my point. That underlying point still stands: We should be confident that changing the electoral system is good, no matter what the future holds. Or rather, that we should be as confident as we can be about any policy change.
On a scale of 100,000 years, it pretty much is binary. Mathematics will not change; basic physical law also (although some of it may come to be seen as limiting cases of some more general ideas); little else can be counted on on that timescale. This feels somewhat analogous.
In the short term, of course things can be a lot more variable.
your credence in a valid logical argument’s conclusion must be at least as high as your credence in its assumptions. (It’s higher because, of course, there can be other sound logical arguments that support your conclusion.)
The longer the chain of reasoning built on uncertain assumptions, the further it may drift from reality.
Why are you ignoring my actual point?
That underlying point still stands: We should be confident that changing the electoral system is good, no matter what the future holds. Or rather, that we should be as confident as we can be about any policy change.
"As confident as we can be about any policy change" amounts to not very confident, especially so for making policy for 50 years hence.
In government, it’s not just a matter of having the best policy; it’s about getting enough votes. This creates a problem when the self-interests of individual voters don’t match the best interests of the country.
I think that's a model that's not sophisticated when you want to think about getting laws passed.
For instance, voting researchers widely consider the presidential voting system in America to be inferior to many alternatives. But if you want to change it, you require consent from Democrats and Republicans—i.e. the very people who benefit from the status quo.
That claim seems false. Ballot initiatives to change voting systems are possible in many systems and state law dictates how electors for the president are chosen and it's possible for some states to use a different voting system.
The main problem with changing the voting system is that most people don't care about the voting system.
No, you're universalising my claim to something that I don't agree with. My claim is not that the short-term interests of those in power always prevent the institution of policies that are in the long-term interests of the country, or that this is always the main barrier.
My actual claim that it is sometimes it is the case. E.g. gerrymandering. E.g. Republicans arguing against the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. And so on. And just because ballot initiatives can be started, doesn't mean they're going to pass into law. They can still have the misaligned incentive problem due to the current voting-age population's interests misaligning with the interests of the unborn. Or due to gerrymandered areas where a minority has control. My proposal solves a subset of these issues.
I'm hoping this comes across as constructive. You've made this same fallacy in another conversion we had. I essentially said “Countries that call themselves communist tend to do communist things”, which is demonstrably true, and you overgeneralised it to “Anything that calls itself an X acts like an X”, which is of course false. And then you knocked down that straw-manned version of my claim.
They can still have the misaligned incentive problem due to the current voting-age population's interests misaligning with the interests of the unborn.
The unborn have no political power to get laws passed whether the law comes into force today or in a hundred years.
There's zero incentive for a congressman to put work into progressing a bill that does something in a hundred in which nobody has an interest.
And just because ballot initiatives can be started, doesn't mean they're going to pass into law.
You claimed that there's something specific that preventing them from being passed into law, namely the opposition of Republicans and Democrats. Those groups control the legislature but not ballot initiatives.
Actually addressing your specific example is not strawmanning.
Concretely, someone making a ballot initiative to change the voting system has an option to write in a provision that it will only kick into effect in X years in the future. In practice, I would expect that this would not help the ballot process to get passed but more likely reduce it's chances of success because it demotivates the participants.
There are cases where there's a consensus among lawmakers that it would be good to do something and there's current opposition that can be circumvented by writing the law into the future, but the strong clarity among lawmakers that something would be good does not exist in the examples that you mentioned.
In Berlin where I live, a reform that reduced the amount of districts in Berlin and thus the number of majors of districts is one example. It was written into the future to get less opposition from people currently being in the district governance. This was possible because there was a strong political will to do government reform to cut costs within the governing coalition.
There exists no such will in the kind of cases you mentioned.
There are cases where there's a consensus among lawmakers that it would be good to do something and there's current opposition that can be circumvented by writing the law into the future
This is exactly my point. It's actually the entire point of the article. Everything else was simply trying to describe this problem and give examples so that it's easier to understand. Whether anyone agrees with the examples does not matter. The article literally emphasises this point: “The examples I’ve given are simply for clarity.”
Actually addressing your specific example is not strawmanning.
Should I have been more general than saying “Republicans and Democrats” interests are the bottleneck? Sure, it's the people in control of the actual vote that matters. But those details are entirely incidental. It's kind of like pointing out a spelling error, and making a huge deal of it.
Now, I do want to hear this. What about your overgeneralisation that “Anything that calls itself an X acts like an X”? Do you not concede that you were straw manning me in that instance?
This is exactly my point. It's actually the entire point of the article.
No. You are not saying anything about the required initial buy-in by lawmakers in your article and you explicitly suggest that it's a strategy that people who aren't lawmakers can use.
What about your overgeneralisation that “Anything that calls itself an X acts like an X”?
I did not generalize things in the post you linked as well. The other post was about a very explicit claim you made about whether certain governments care about the granularity of policies.
Me: “For the CCP to declare themselves as ‘Communist’ means they are likely to disregard much granularity that good policy must have”
You: “The fact that North Korea someone publically declares themselves to be democratic in the name of their country. That tells you little about how it’s actually governed.”
Again, to highlight the problem, I said “Countries that call themselves communist tend to do this communist thing”, which is demonstrably true. Then you overgeneralised it to “Anything that calls itself an X acts like an X” and then gave an example of your overgeneralisation (North Korea claiming to be democratic) to say the form of my argument was wrong.
The actual form of my argument is that “Certain self-assigned labels convey information”. Sometimes that information is counter to the label, sometimes it matches. But given a specific context, you know which way it goes. For North Korea, “Countries that have ‘Democratic’ in their country’s name tend to be undemocratic” is a true statement. Certain self-assigned labels do convey information. This is not disputable.
Your argument was a total straw man. Honestly, you have a genuine problem admitting error. You care about winning more than truth. Please don’t comment on my posts anymore.
The main problem I see here lies in implementing an institutional mechanism that ties future governments to bills passed decades before.
What I mean is that future governments are likely to be able to further delay/ignore past 'bills for the future' because a legislature is only bound to act without breaching the respective constitution (usually interpreted by a constitutional court), its bylaws (decided internally by MPs) and the law (written by MPs).
This implies that any law that does not enjoy constitutional ranking can be just as easily repealed by any future legislature using the same procedure that was used to pass the bill to the future.
I would also say that over decades I would expect most countries to experience changes that would likely stem the enacting of a past law (for instance, major constitutional reforms/more or less violent institution changes that expunge legal orders and create new once).
Note that I keep the wording vague because this issue applies to most existing countries.
In government, it’s not just a matter of having the best policy; it’s about getting enough votes. This creates a problem when the self-interests of individual voters don’t match the best interests of the country.
For instance, voting researchers widely consider the presidential voting system in America to be inferior to many alternatives. But if you want to change it, you require consent from Democrats and Republicans—i.e. the very people who benefit from the status quo.
Or consider the land-value tax. This tax is considered among economists to be uniquely efficient (i.e. it causes zero reduction in the good being taxed). When implemented correctly, it can address edge cases, such as new property developments, and can even prevent reductions in new land production, like the creation of artificial islands. However, this policy is against the interests of current land owners. So any politician who advocates this policy would not only fail but also likely end their political career.
What do these policies have in common? Well, both policies yield long-run benefits, and as we’ll see, they impose short-run costs. (If you disagree that these policies are actually beneficial in the long run, I’m sure you can think of policies that you like that have long-run benefits and short-run costs. The examples I’ve given are simply for clarity.)
What if rather than asking American politicians to vote against their own interests, we ask them to pass a policy today that will only be enacted after a 100-year period? Significant advances in medicine notwithstanding, by that time, most of today’s politicians will be dead. In other words, they no longer have to vote against their own interests.
The same strategy can be applied to land value taxes. If today, we passed a policy for a 100-year delayed land-value tax, the effect on house prices is approximately zero (see the widely-accepted net present value model of asset prices).
I believe this strategy offers a significant opportunity. Policy in the EA community is often seen as too hard because of how crowded it is. Yet almost no policy makers are thinking about the future in 100 years. It might be possible to pass a lot of “unpassable” policies. We just have to ensure the policies we propose are actually good (see my unfinished series on the topic), and have large barrier to reversal, so that the politicians of the future can’t renege on the government’s commitment when the day of implementation arrives.
I have a follow-up post here: Enforcing Far-Future Contracts for Governments.