Use alignment of interests. The Captain must sink with the ship.
Those in power and their immediate families must be forced by law to use only the services available to the lower classes while they are in office:
Live in public housing.
Use no private healthcare . Social healthcare is ok.
Send their children only to state schools ( I think singapore enforces this).
Mandatory conscription for their families if they send troops abroad.
Use only public transport.
This will be a system of government where the fate of the elite is aligned with the lower half of the population. You cannot be allowed to take up a civil or political post if you do not agree. you can always resign and go back to your previous lifestyle at any point. I think that this way the standard of living will be raised for all. A lot of the elite are not evil, they simply lack any undertanding for the fate of those at the bottom. Being forced to live like common people may help them develop some empathy.
To summarise—the design of incentives is just as important as design of the laws and structure of government.
Possible objection is that this incentivizes people with power to hide from places you officially define as “people with power”. Instead of becoming politicians, they will have their puppets elected as politicians… and the puppets will have to use mass transit and send their kids to state schools… and presumably get a reward that makes it worth all this suffering.
Counter-objection: this still adds another complication for the secret rulers, which may decrease their relative power compered to the non-secret rulers. That is probably good.
Another objection is that if the system works relatively okay, this motivates the rulers to keep it okay. But what if the system is broken in such way that fixing it would take a decade or more? For example, by the time you fix public education, it will be too late for your kids. Then the system would simply disincentivize people who care about their own kids (which doesn’t necessarily imply they care about other kids).
I really like this, and agree that incentives are very important.
A related idea for example is to limit the pay of CEOs to X times that of the average/lowest salary of employees.
A trivial (as in too simple to actually work) toy example in the same vein is to continuously make the least powerful person the most powerful person.
That person than either helps themselves (consequently loosing office), or helps everybody at the bottom. Either way, inequality decreases (Yes, I know this won’t work).
Use alignment of interests. The Captain must sink with the ship.
Those in power and their immediate families must be forced by law to use only the services available to the lower classes while they are in office:
Live in public housing.
Use no private healthcare . Social healthcare is ok.
Send their children only to state schools ( I think singapore enforces this).
Mandatory conscription for their families if they send troops abroad.
Use only public transport.
This will be a system of government where the fate of the elite is aligned with the lower half of the population. You cannot be allowed to take up a civil or political post if you do not agree. you can always resign and go back to your previous lifestyle at any point. I think that this way the standard of living will be raised for all. A lot of the elite are not evil, they simply lack any undertanding for the fate of those at the bottom. Being forced to live like common people may help them develop some empathy.
To summarise—the design of incentives is just as important as design of the laws and structure of government.
Possible objection is that this incentivizes people with power to hide from places you officially define as “people with power”. Instead of becoming politicians, they will have their puppets elected as politicians… and the puppets will have to use mass transit and send their kids to state schools… and presumably get a reward that makes it worth all this suffering.
Counter-objection: this still adds another complication for the secret rulers, which may decrease their relative power compered to the non-secret rulers. That is probably good.
Another objection is that if the system works relatively okay, this motivates the rulers to keep it okay. But what if the system is broken in such way that fixing it would take a decade or more? For example, by the time you fix public education, it will be too late for your kids. Then the system would simply disincentivize people who care about their own kids (which doesn’t necessarily imply they care about other kids).
I really like this, and agree that incentives are very important.
A related idea for example is to limit the pay of CEOs to X times that of the average/lowest salary of employees.
A trivial (as in too simple to actually work) toy example in the same vein is to continuously make the least powerful person the most powerful person.
That person than either helps themselves (consequently loosing office), or helps everybody at the bottom. Either way, inequality decreases (Yes, I know this won’t work).