LARPing the Veil of Ignorance: Someone told me yesterday that there is a group of people role playing a medieval village each summer. They meet for a week, some of them play aristocrats, some of them are artisans, some are peasants. It must suck to be a peasant, I said. The answer was that the roles are chosen by lot. If you are unlucky you become a peasant you are just going to work on a field, but you don’t know that in advance. Which, of course, is the classic Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” thought experiment. And a repeated one at that!
If those people were dedicated to improving the societal system within the game, the thought experiment would become a real experiment. What would that be good for? At the very least it would highlight the shortcomings of the veil of ignorance system—would people game it? And if so, how? But it also may work like a laboratory of governance systems. Whatever emerges in the laboratory can then be tried in a company, an NGO, or, say, a ministry department.
Did they mention any welfare/transfer mechanisms to ensure balance? Like if you drew ‘peasant’ 4 summers in a row (which is not that improbable, having that happen to someone), no one would blame you for just leaving then and there and maybe also quitting the whole thing, but that seems like a bad outcome.
Unfortunately no, they didn’t. But exactly observing this kind of effects would make studying it from the point of view of political science interesting. (See Hirschmanian “exit”).
Honestly if the proportions of those roles were true to real life I would simply never take the lottery, that’s an almost certainty of being a peasant. I guess they still must have made things a bit more friendly.
LARPing the Veil of Ignorance: Someone told me yesterday that there is a group of people role playing a medieval village each summer. They meet for a week, some of them play aristocrats, some of them are artisans, some are peasants. It must suck to be a peasant, I said. The answer was that the roles are chosen by lot. If you are unlucky you become a peasant you are just going to work on a field, but you don’t know that in advance. Which, of course, is the classic Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” thought experiment. And a repeated one at that!
If those people were dedicated to improving the societal system within the game, the thought experiment would become a real experiment. What would that be good for? At the very least it would highlight the shortcomings of the veil of ignorance system—would people game it? And if so, how? But it also may work like a laboratory of governance systems. Whatever emerges in the laboratory can then be tried in a company, an NGO, or, say, a ministry department.
Did they mention any welfare/transfer mechanisms to ensure balance? Like if you drew ‘peasant’ 4 summers in a row (which is not that improbable, having that happen to someone), no one would blame you for just leaving then and there and maybe also quitting the whole thing, but that seems like a bad outcome.
Unfortunately no, they didn’t. But exactly observing this kind of effects would make studying it from the point of view of political science interesting. (See Hirschmanian “exit”).
Honestly if the proportions of those roles were true to real life I would simply never take the lottery, that’s an almost certainty of being a peasant. I guess they still must have made things a bit more friendly.