It’s nice to elect the right people, but that’s not the way you solve things. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things.
I think the Brecht quote is somewhat misleading. The problem is not that not enough people want/demand goodness, the problem is that it is too easy to profit by cheating without getting caught.
This solution only works if you are in the special position of being able to make institutional design changes that can’t be undone by potential future enemies. Otherwise, whose “right things” will happen depends on who is currently in charge of institutional design (think gerrymandering).
Then try to make it politically profitable to help sustain those changes you make. Make it so painfully obvious that the only reason to remove those changes would be for one’s unethical gain that no politician would ever do so. The problem then though, is that people end up just not caring enough.
What you’re describing is exactly the position of being able to make institutional design changes that can’t be undone by potential future enemies. This position is “special” not only because the task is very difficult, but also because you have to be the first to think of it.
Couldn’t I also set up the system to try to exclude the wrong people from ever getting power?
It seems to me that computers get better at detecting liars, and we have an ease of fact checking on things now we never used to have, and conflicts of interest are generally relatively easily seen, and we’ve got all this research about how influence functions… In short that we’ve made a lot more progress on the judging people front, than we have on the side of designing procedures and regulations that suit us and also serve as one-way functions.
That mentality is probably why US politics is as corrupt as it is at the moment. Electing people who aren’t corrupt to replace corrupt people is very valuable if your goal is to have a well governed country.
If you have the political goals of Milton Friedman it might not be. If you want politicians to be corportate friendly than you make it politically profitable for them to do so by making it easy for companies to bribe them.
I think the spirit of the quote is that instead of counting on anyone to be a both benevolent and effective ruler, or counting on voters to recognize such things, design the political environment so that that will happen naturally, even when an office is occupied by a corrupt or ineffective person.
This idea is primarily why I’m skeptical of the effectiveness of institutions like the federal reserve (despite not being a subject matter expert). It seems pretty clear that in order to be effective the leadership has to be comprised of people that are not only exceptionally brilliant, but exceptionally benevolent as well.
What do you think that “design the political environment so that that will happen naturally” means concretely?
The policies that Milton advocated got a huge boost because companies put lobbyists who distribute campaign money in the “right places” to switch political incentives.
There are political enviroments in which the actors try to do what is right instead of just maximizing their personal interests. Milton says in the quoted video that the US congress isn’t such an enviroment and that’s no problem that anyone should be attempting to fix by electing different politicians.
An example is in Federalist No. 10. Madison is trying to design a political environment resilient to the corrupt effects of factions:
No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause; because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time; yet what are many of the most important acts of legislation, but so many judicial determinations, not indeed concerning the rights of single persons, but concerning the rights of large bodies of citizens? and what are the different classes of Legislators, but advocates and parties to the causes which they determine? Is a law proposed concerning private debts? It is a question to which the creditors are parties on one side and the debtors on the other. Justice ought to hold the balance between them. Yet the parties are, and must be, themselves the judges; and the most numerous party, or, in other words, the most powerful faction, must be expected to prevail. Shall domestic manufactures be encouraged, and in what degree, by restrictions on foreign manufactures? are questions which would be differently decided by the landed and the manufacturing classes; and probably by neither, with a sole regard to justice and the public good. The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party, to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling, with which they overburden the inferior number, is a shilling saved to their own pockets.
It is in vain to say, that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm: Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all, without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another, or the good of the whole.
His concrete solutions are to choose representative democracy over direct democracy, and to have large republic rather than a small republic.
A more recent example would be last year’s ban on members of Congress trading stocks based on the inside information they have as lawmakers. I think Milton Friedman’s point is that one should direct efforts toward supporting policies like that, rather than trying to elect politicians who are too ethical to insider-trade.
His concrete solutions are to choose representative democracy over direct democracy, and to have large republic rather than a small republic.
Why? How does this fix things? Without quite knowing what problem this solution is meant to address, the first consequence of this policy (representative democracy + large republic) that comes to my mind by judging it independently is that it looks optimized for the smallest number of rulers and the greatest amount of people limited in their political power by comparison—in other words, it seems to concentrate power. (If there are other implications, they’re not as obvious to me as this one.) How or why does that help overall impartiality?
An example is in Federalist No. 10. Madison is trying to design a political environment resilient to the corrupt effects of factions:
Designing for resillence is not the same thing as designing a system to get politicans to do certain things. If you think as Miltion Friedman that “the right” thing is free market policies, designing the political system in a way that gives political advantages to those people who push free market policies, you are likely reduce resiliency.
A more recent example would be last year’s ban on members of Congress trading stocks based on the inside information they have as lawmakers. I think Milton Friedman’s point is that one should direct efforts toward supporting policies like that, rather than trying to elect politicians who are too ethical to insider-trade.
Given Friedman’s politics I doubt that he had actions such as restricting members ability to trade stocks in mind. That’s not the kind of political agenda that Friedman pushed.
Then I don’t think you understand what that policy does. Lawmakers get their information regardless of how they vote or what policies they persue. That kind of insider trading allows lawmakers to personally enrich themselves instead of making bargains with people who want to hand them money.
What the policy does do, is that it provides a new tool for the people who have information about the trades that a congressman makes, to blackmail the congressman.
You might get some positive effects through the policy, so I’m not clear that it’s a bad law.
rather than trying to elect politicians who are too ethical to insider-trade.
What’s the problem that you are trying to solve in the first place? Insider-trade? Let Eliot Spitzer run the SEC and double SEC funding.
Insider trading doesn’t exist because there a lack of laws against the practice.
I didn’t downvote you, but I’m not continuing the argument because it seems really political in a partisan way. I suspect that’s what’s motivating the downvotes.
The policies that Milton advocated got a huge boost because companies put lobbyists who distribute campaign money in the “right places” to switch political incentives.
You seem to be confusing support for a free market with rent seeking. Milton Friedman supported free markets, in this and your follow up comment you seem to equate this with rent seeking.
A large part of the Federalist Papers is about designing structures and incentives to make government robust against overwhelming ambition and corruption—to make ambition in one branch check ambition in another branch, similarly between state and federal and between state and state.
That said, I think Friedman (I was never on a first name basis with him) is overly dismissive of electing the right people. But again we need to set up structures and incentives differently, so elections are less of an entertaining spectacle and more like a hiring search or job interview. The structures or institutions that might improve the situation don’t have to come from legislation (though some of them could—I’m not against that on principal); e.g. parties weren’t legislated into being, and if we want something better, we should not look exclusively to legislation.
It seems at least conceivable to have some agreement across party lines that our electoral processes, as I said before, look less like a circus to which we passively attend, and more like a hiring search / job interview type process.
I’ve often thought of ironically proposing that we should legislate that job interviews have to be more like elections: i.e. stop limiting candidates’ ability to express themselves. If somebody wants to bring a brass band to an interview, it’s their free speech right to do so. If they want to spread nasty rumours about the other candidates why not?
Not so ironically, maybe our best hope is to persuade people that our current approach with its sound bites, catch phrases, push polls, gerrymandered “safe seats” and so on is a source of dangerous blindness that affects all of us, with all of our different interpretations of “the good” (of the country, etc.); to persuade people to find all of that current process repulsive, and to insist that all that airtime, column inches, etc., be devoted to information about the candidates, analysis of the current crises and challenges and possibilities, and to debates of all sorts: dozens of debates, discussions, and joint press conferences among the candidates.
One problem: “Information” (as in “information” about the candidate, etc.) is a word that gets bandied about too casually. What might possibly be done to increase the sanity with which people evaluate what is and isn’t truly “information”. I think that is the big problem that people concerned with rationality might be able to make some progress in solving.
I’ve often thought of ironically proposing that we should legislate that job interviews have to be more like elections: i.e. stop limiting candidates’ ability to express themselves. If somebody wants to bring a brass band to an interview, it’s their free speech right to do so. If they want to spread nasty rumours about the other candidates why not?
I think that the only rules we have against spreading nasty rumors about other candidates are our laws against defamation; spreading malicious falsehoods about people in order to deprive them of business opportunities in favor of yourself is exactly the sort of thing that those laws prohibit, because then the people who did those sort of things would be the most likely to get the jobs. Job candidates would have to become willing to undercut their rivals in order to stay competitive, and we’d be at risk of risk devolving to a state where having to filter through webs of malicious falsehood in any hiring situation where the candidates are known to each other was the norm rather than the exception.
As for bringing a brass band to a job interview, candidates are entitled to do such things, with the caveat that they wouldn’t get the jobs. It would be an awfully rare position where bringing a brass band to the interview would be positive evidence of the candidate’s ability to perform the job well. Giving candidates too much leeway for self expression runs the risk of turning interviews into contests of showmanship.
and we’d be at risk of risk devolving to a state where having to filter through webs of malicious falsehood in any hiring situation where the candidates are known to each other was the norm rather than the exception.
which sounds to me like the state we are in w.r.t. election to political offices.
My point is nobody hires people for ordinary jobs the way we collectively hire a president. We are extremely passive, and don’t manage the process. There is a field I am very interested in called Social Epistemology (it’s a divided field with one part being excessively postmodern and relativistic; the other side, which interests me, holds that there really are such things as truth and falsehood, and the biggest name in that area is Alvin Goldman). This field is very interested in institutions, such as the law court in its different forms, that have tried to come up with procedures and standards (like selectivity in the sort of evidence you will listen to) that try to improve the chances of coming to the right conclusion. There is quite a lot of emphasis on law courts, but it occurred to me that hiring committees do something similar; they require things like resumes, and have a systematic way of questioning candidates rather than say to candidates “Come and put on a show and we’ll see what we think of you”.
which sounds to me like the state we are in w.r.t. election to political offices.
I don’t understand why you’re arguing that job interviews should be more like elections in that case. If the process leads to bad outcomes for elections, and is likely to lead to bad outcomes for job interviews as well, why use it?
Concretely, Milton Friedman probably didn’t have a workable plan for bringing about such an environment, though he may have thought he did; I’m not familiar enough with his thinking. One next-best option would be to try to convince other people that that’s what part of a solution to bad government would look like, which under a charitable interpretation of his motives, is what he was doing with that statement he made.
The nice thing about working with incentives is that they’re pretty stable relative to political leanings. I’d expect a given person’s perceptions of politicians’ level of corruption or incompetence or any other negative adjective you can think of to depend almost entirely on party affiliation, but you can actually leverage that to get changes in incentive structures passed: just frame it as necessary to curb the excesses of those guys over there, you know, the ones you hate.
And in any case the quote works just as well for the governed. As anyone who’s ever moderated a large forum can tell you, playing with incentives works almost embarrassingly well and quickly compared to working on sympathy or respect for authority. Of course, it’s also harder to do.
As anyone who’s ever moderated a large forum can tell you, playing with incentives works almost embarrassingly well and quickly compared to working on sympathy or respect for authority. Of course, it’s also harder to do.
That sounds very intriguing. Can you give some example of how you’ve used “playing with incentives” successfully to (I assume—correct me if I’m wrong) maintain a productive forum? That might be very enlightening—seriously, no irony here.
Simplest positive example I can think of offhand: if there’s lots of content-free posting going on and you want it to go away, changing the board parameters so that user titles are no longer based on postcount goes a surprisingly long way.
Simplest negative example I can think of: if you think there’s too much complaining going on (I didn’t, but the board owner at the time did), allocating a subforum for complaints will only make things worse. Even if you call it something like “Constructive Criticism”.
Sorry, I’ve never run a forum. Is there any easy place to learn enough to make “user titles are no longer based on postcount” make sense to me (unless you want to take the time to explain it). I really am very interested.
Sure. One feature in phpBB and several other popular bulletin board packages (but not in reddit or Slashdot or any of their descendants) is the ability to set user titles: little snippets of descriptive text that get displayed after a user’s handle and which are usually intended to give some information about their status in the forum.
The most common arrangement is to have a couple of special titles for administrative positions (say, “mod” and “admin”), then several others for normal users that’re tiered based on the number of posts the user’s written, i.e. postcount: a user might start with the title “newbie” or “lurker”, then progress through five or six cutely themed titles as they post more stuff. It’s common for admins to change the exact titles and the progression pattern to suit the needs of the forum (a roleplaying forum for example might name them after monsters of increasing power), but uncommon to change the basic scheme.
You may notice that this doesn’t differentiate on post quality.
I’d expect a given person’s perceptions of politicians’ level of corruption or incompetence or any other negative adjective you can think of to depend almost entirely on party affiliation
Very few people argued that Cato was corrupt. Even those who disagreed with him mostly didn’t.
As anyone who’s ever moderated a large forum can tell you, playing with incentives works almost embarrassingly well and quickly compared to working on sympathy or respect for authority.
I do have experience with moderating a large forum and I still believe in not trying to corrupt people. You want people that are open for rational discouse and who changes their position when you bring them arguments to change their opinions even in the absence of giving them incentives to switch their position.
I do have experience with moderating a large forum and I still believe in not trying to corrupt people.
I’d say that setting up incentives so that people within a system do culturally useful things out of their own self-interest is about as close to an opposite of corrupting people as we’re likely to find.
Doing X for specially crafted incentive Y for the intrinsic value of X is a form of corruption. It’s not always possible that all decisions are made for the intrinsic value but if you have a political enviroment where there a lot pressure to do Y’s.
Especially if you can’t get any political power without Y, you won’t have many people who persue political goals for their intrinsic value in your political system.
Things work much better when the politicians do what they consider to be right instead of having to do be coercied into taking any position that’s political advantageous.
That’s a… remarkably loose definition of corruption you’ve got going on there.
I’m not sure it’s practical to make a political system completely free of incentives, as long as you’re working with humans governing humans: the closest approximations I can think of would have to involve a leadership caste socially and economically isolated from the people they govern and without any means of improving their own welfare, and that’s so far removed from anything historical I know about that I don’t even want to try working out all its long-term implications. Imperial Japan’s about the closest, and that degenerated at first into proxy governance by provincial warlords and later into a military-aristocratic dictatorship ruling in the imperial family’s name but not in practice controlled by it.
Now, given anything resembling our existing politics, it seems naive to behave as if the default incentives surrounding political power are nonexistent or weak enough that they’re drowned out by altruistic impulses among those inclined to seek power—or even among random members of the populace, if you prefer direct democracy. This being the case, it makes far more sense to me to design systems to reward competent government—however defined—rather than to high-handedly dismiss any such attempts as unethical and rely wholly on the better angels of politicians’ natures.
I’m not quite prepared to say that there can’t exist any candidate systems where this wouldn’t be necessary, but if you’ve got a proposal like that, we should really be talking about that proposal rather than speaking in generalities.
I’m not sure it’s practical to make a political system completely free of incentives.
I’m not sure such a thing has been proposed (after reading most, if not all of this thread); in fact it sounds so absurd that I can’t imagine what such a proposal would look like.
Maybe ChristianKI will correct me if he/she really is proposing a “political system completely free of incentives”.
In The Tamuli, by David Eddings, one country’s political system is described as an attempt to limit corruption. (The usual caveats regarding fictional evidence apply here, of course). In short, when a person is elected onto the ruling council of the Isle of Tega, all that he owns is sold, and the money is deposited into the country’s treasury. He is then simply not permitted to own anything until his term is up, some four years later (presumably food and housing is provided at the expense of the state); when that time comes, the money in the treasury is divided among the ministers in proportion to how much they put in (and the former ministers presumably start re-purchasing stuff). Note that the one thing that the ministers are not allowed to do is to change the tax rates.
This is described as having two consequences. First of all, the Isle of Tega is the only country that always shows a profit. Secondly, the minute that a man is nominated to become a minister, he is put under immediate armed guard to prevent him from running away (and remains under armed guard until his term is over). A government position is viewed with the same trepidation as a prison sentance.
Wouldn’t they still have incentives to aid parties who promise to repay them once their term is up? Similar to how some legislators conveniently acquire lucrative positions requiring little-to-no effort on their part from companies who they have helped out through the years once they’ve retired from politics?
Or to aid their families and friends, or to adopt policies that benefit their industry or hometown or social class—I considered similar systems when I was writing the ancestor (probably unconsciously influenced by Eddings; I haven’t read him in years, though), but decided that they were transparently unworkable.
Yes, it seems both too drastic, and not really able to accomplish the desired result.
Funny, I’ve wondered about a similarly drastic action though to improve the quality of voting, namely for each election select a random 1% (or some such—small enough to not crash the economy) of the population and lock them up with nothing to do but learn about what’s going on in the country and in the world and debate who they should vote for. In the end, unlike in the jury system, it should still be a secret ballot. Of course, if as many people were exempted as in jury duty, then it would be biased. One would have to see how much exemption was unavoidable, and and see whether the bias could be sufficiently minimized.
random 1% (or some such—small enough to not crash the economy)
If it’s small enough not to crash the economy, then is it big enough to reliably alter the election results? And who provides the information for them to read through?
Wouldn’t they still have incentives to aid parties who promise to repay them once their term is up?
Only if they can trust the promise; once their term is up, the parties have little real incentive to stick to their promise, after all.
There will be an incentive to aid people who immediately donate a great big chunk of money to the State, as that money will be shared out among the ministers at the end of their term in any case; but the incentive only works, there, if the great big chunk of money is more than the state would obtain by other means.
Doing X for specially crafted incentive Y for the intrinsic value of X is a form of corruption. It’s not always possible that all decisions are made for the intrinsic value but if you have a political enviroment where there a lot pressure to do Y’s.
Especially if you can’t get any political power without Y, you won’t have many people who persue political goals for their intrinsic value in your political system.
This seems like possibly quite a useful bit of abstraction and offer the potential of arguing the merits of a single principle that appears in many manifestations, in politics, corporations, volunteer organizations, etc. But I’m just having trouble getting it clearly in my head. Two things might help.
1) One or 2 concrete examples where you flesh out “X” and “Y”. I spent 2 years in a math Ph.D. program, which is long enough to know that to move forward with an abstraction, it is best to start with at least a couple of examples.
2) Consider the “agency problem” (or “principle-agent problem”), which to me seems the most promising abstraction for reasoning about corruption. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_problem, and maybe very close to what you’re aiming at.
You want people that are open for rational discouse and who changes their position when you bring them arguments to change their opinions even in the absence of giving them incentives to switch their position.
Be sure to let us know when you find such people. One of the main conceits of this site is that rationalists should win. If it’s possible to get ahead by not being a rationalist (even temporarily), people are going to do that. Ultimately, I think what the original quote from Friedman boils down to is the old adage that you should try to fix the system rather than blame the people in it.
If you have corrupt politicians, blame the voters. The politicians did not vote themselves into the office. (Unless they own the vote-counting machines factory.) I guess the quote suggests that “making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things”, whatever precisely that means, could still be easier than replacing the whole population of voters; or at least the majority of them.
Agreed. It’s too easy to pander to a base that doesn’t expect you to be good, just deliver a few things… things that matter a great deal less than the cumulative effect of having the right people in charge.
-- Milton Friedman
-- Bertold Brecht
(I’m always amused when people of opposite political views express similar thoughts on society.)
Also:
I think the Brecht quote is somewhat misleading. The problem is not that not enough people want/demand goodness, the problem is that it is too easy to profit by cheating without getting caught.
This solution only works if you are in the special position of being able to make institutional design changes that can’t be undone by potential future enemies. Otherwise, whose “right things” will happen depends on who is currently in charge of institutional design (think gerrymandering).
Then try to make it politically profitable to help sustain those changes you make. Make it so painfully obvious that the only reason to remove those changes would be for one’s unethical gain that no politician would ever do so. The problem then though, is that people end up just not caring enough.
What you’re describing is exactly the position of being able to make institutional design changes that can’t be undone by potential future enemies. This position is “special” not only because the task is very difficult, but also because you have to be the first to think of it.
Couldn’t I also set up the system to try to exclude the wrong people from ever getting power?
It seems to me that computers get better at detecting liars, and we have an ease of fact checking on things now we never used to have, and conflicts of interest are generally relatively easily seen, and we’ve got all this research about how influence functions… In short that we’ve made a lot more progress on the judging people front, than we have on the side of designing procedures and regulations that suit us and also serve as one-way functions.
Not if having power over others turns the right people into the wrong people.
No. No-one can set up the system. The most that anyone can do is introduce a new piece into the game, pieces like Google, or Wikipedia, or Wikileaks.
That mentality is probably why US politics is as corrupt as it is at the moment. Electing people who aren’t corrupt to replace corrupt people is very valuable if your goal is to have a well governed country.
If you have the political goals of Milton Friedman it might not be. If you want politicians to be corportate friendly than you make it politically profitable for them to do so by making it easy for companies to bribe them.
I think the spirit of the quote is that instead of counting on anyone to be a both benevolent and effective ruler, or counting on voters to recognize such things, design the political environment so that that will happen naturally, even when an office is occupied by a corrupt or ineffective person.
This idea is primarily why I’m skeptical of the effectiveness of institutions like the federal reserve (despite not being a subject matter expert). It seems pretty clear that in order to be effective the leadership has to be comprised of people that are not only exceptionally brilliant, but exceptionally benevolent as well.
What do you think that “design the political environment so that that will happen naturally” means concretely?
The policies that Milton advocated got a huge boost because companies put lobbyists who distribute campaign money in the “right places” to switch political incentives.
There are political enviroments in which the actors try to do what is right instead of just maximizing their personal interests. Milton says in the quoted video that the US congress isn’t such an enviroment and that’s no problem that anyone should be attempting to fix by electing different politicians.
The only one I’ve heard of is “fiction.” Did you have an example in mind?
An example is in Federalist No. 10. Madison is trying to design a political environment resilient to the corrupt effects of factions:
His concrete solutions are to choose representative democracy over direct democracy, and to have large republic rather than a small republic.
A more recent example would be last year’s ban on members of Congress trading stocks based on the inside information they have as lawmakers. I think Milton Friedman’s point is that one should direct efforts toward supporting policies like that, rather than trying to elect politicians who are too ethical to insider-trade.
Why is this comment at −1 yet 100% positive?
It then goes to 0 and 0% positive when I up-vote it.
Why? How does this fix things? Without quite knowing what problem this solution is meant to address, the first consequence of this policy (representative democracy + large republic) that comes to my mind by judging it independently is that it looks optimized for the smallest number of rulers and the greatest amount of people limited in their political power by comparison—in other words, it seems to concentrate power. (If there are other implications, they’re not as obvious to me as this one.) How or why does that help overall impartiality?
Why is this comment at −1 yet 100% positive?
Designing for resillence is not the same thing as designing a system to get politicans to do certain things. If you think as Miltion Friedman that “the right” thing is free market policies, designing the political system in a way that gives political advantages to those people who push free market policies, you are likely reduce resiliency.
Given Friedman’s politics I doubt that he had actions such as restricting members ability to trade stocks in mind. That’s not the kind of political agenda that Friedman pushed.
Then I don’t think you understand what that policy does. Lawmakers get their information regardless of how they vote or what policies they persue. That kind of insider trading allows lawmakers to personally enrich themselves instead of making bargains with people who want to hand them money.
What the policy does do, is that it provides a new tool for the people who have information about the trades that a congressman makes, to blackmail the congressman.
You might get some positive effects through the policy, so I’m not clear that it’s a bad law.
What’s the problem that you are trying to solve in the first place? Insider-trade? Let Eliot Spitzer run the SEC and double SEC funding. Insider trading doesn’t exist because there a lack of laws against the practice.
I didn’t downvote you, but I’m not continuing the argument because it seems really political in a partisan way. I suspect that’s what’s motivating the downvotes.
You seem to be confusing support for a free market with rent seeking. Milton Friedman supported free markets, in this and your follow up comment you seem to equate this with rent seeking.
A large part of the Federalist Papers is about designing structures and incentives to make government robust against overwhelming ambition and corruption—to make ambition in one branch check ambition in another branch, similarly between state and federal and between state and state.
That said, I think Friedman (I was never on a first name basis with him) is overly dismissive of electing the right people. But again we need to set up structures and incentives differently, so elections are less of an entertaining spectacle and more like a hiring search or job interview. The structures or institutions that might improve the situation don’t have to come from legislation (though some of them could—I’m not against that on principal); e.g. parties weren’t legislated into being, and if we want something better, we should not look exclusively to legislation.
It seems at least conceivable to have some agreement across party lines that our electoral processes, as I said before, look less like a circus to which we passively attend, and more like a hiring search / job interview type process.
I’ve often thought of ironically proposing that we should legislate that job interviews have to be more like elections: i.e. stop limiting candidates’ ability to express themselves. If somebody wants to bring a brass band to an interview, it’s their free speech right to do so. If they want to spread nasty rumours about the other candidates why not?
Not so ironically, maybe our best hope is to persuade people that our current approach with its sound bites, catch phrases, push polls, gerrymandered “safe seats” and so on is a source of dangerous blindness that affects all of us, with all of our different interpretations of “the good” (of the country, etc.); to persuade people to find all of that current process repulsive, and to insist that all that airtime, column inches, etc., be devoted to information about the candidates, analysis of the current crises and challenges and possibilities, and to debates of all sorts: dozens of debates, discussions, and joint press conferences among the candidates.
One problem: “Information” (as in “information” about the candidate, etc.) is a word that gets bandied about too casually. What might possibly be done to increase the sanity with which people evaluate what is and isn’t truly “information”. I think that is the big problem that people concerned with rationality might be able to make some progress in solving.
I think that the only rules we have against spreading nasty rumors about other candidates are our laws against defamation; spreading malicious falsehoods about people in order to deprive them of business opportunities in favor of yourself is exactly the sort of thing that those laws prohibit, because then the people who did those sort of things would be the most likely to get the jobs. Job candidates would have to become willing to undercut their rivals in order to stay competitive, and we’d be at risk of risk devolving to a state where having to filter through webs of malicious falsehood in any hiring situation where the candidates are known to each other was the norm rather than the exception.
As for bringing a brass band to a job interview, candidates are entitled to do such things, with the caveat that they wouldn’t get the jobs. It would be an awfully rare position where bringing a brass band to the interview would be positive evidence of the candidate’s ability to perform the job well. Giving candidates too much leeway for self expression runs the risk of turning interviews into contests of showmanship.
which sounds to me like the state we are in w.r.t. election to political offices.
My point is nobody hires people for ordinary jobs the way we collectively hire a president. We are extremely passive, and don’t manage the process. There is a field I am very interested in called Social Epistemology (it’s a divided field with one part being excessively postmodern and relativistic; the other side, which interests me, holds that there really are such things as truth and falsehood, and the biggest name in that area is Alvin Goldman). This field is very interested in institutions, such as the law court in its different forms, that have tried to come up with procedures and standards (like selectivity in the sort of evidence you will listen to) that try to improve the chances of coming to the right conclusion. There is quite a lot of emphasis on law courts, but it occurred to me that hiring committees do something similar; they require things like resumes, and have a systematic way of questioning candidates rather than say to candidates “Come and put on a show and we’ll see what we think of you”.
I don’t understand why you’re arguing that job interviews should be more like elections in that case. If the process leads to bad outcomes for elections, and is likely to lead to bad outcomes for job interviews as well, why use it?
To quote myself:
It’s irony. I.e., it’s such a bad idea that I’d like to suggest it’s also a bad way to elect presidents.
Ah, see, I thought you meant that ironically, while it’s not a good way to elect presidents, it would be an improvement on how we conduct interviews.
Concretely, Milton Friedman probably didn’t have a workable plan for bringing about such an environment, though he may have thought he did; I’m not familiar enough with his thinking. One next-best option would be to try to convince other people that that’s what part of a solution to bad government would look like, which under a charitable interpretation of his motives, is what he was doing with that statement he made.
The nice thing about working with incentives is that they’re pretty stable relative to political leanings. I’d expect a given person’s perceptions of politicians’ level of corruption or incompetence or any other negative adjective you can think of to depend almost entirely on party affiliation, but you can actually leverage that to get changes in incentive structures passed: just frame it as necessary to curb the excesses of those guys over there, you know, the ones you hate.
And in any case the quote works just as well for the governed. As anyone who’s ever moderated a large forum can tell you, playing with incentives works almost embarrassingly well and quickly compared to working on sympathy or respect for authority. Of course, it’s also harder to do.
That sounds very intriguing. Can you give some example of how you’ve used “playing with incentives” successfully to (I assume—correct me if I’m wrong) maintain a productive forum? That might be very enlightening—seriously, no irony here.
Simplest positive example I can think of offhand: if there’s lots of content-free posting going on and you want it to go away, changing the board parameters so that user titles are no longer based on postcount goes a surprisingly long way.
Simplest negative example I can think of: if you think there’s too much complaining going on (I didn’t, but the board owner at the time did), allocating a subforum for complaints will only make things worse. Even if you call it something like “Constructive Criticism”.
Sorry, I’ve never run a forum. Is there any easy place to learn enough to make “user titles are no longer based on postcount” make sense to me (unless you want to take the time to explain it). I really am very interested.
Sure. One feature in phpBB and several other popular bulletin board packages (but not in reddit or Slashdot or any of their descendants) is the ability to set user titles: little snippets of descriptive text that get displayed after a user’s handle and which are usually intended to give some information about their status in the forum.
The most common arrangement is to have a couple of special titles for administrative positions (say, “mod” and “admin”), then several others for normal users that’re tiered based on the number of posts the user’s written, i.e. postcount: a user might start with the title “newbie” or “lurker”, then progress through five or six cutely themed titles as they post more stuff. It’s common for admins to change the exact titles and the progression pattern to suit the needs of the forum (a roleplaying forum for example might name them after monsters of increasing power), but uncommon to change the basic scheme.
You may notice that this doesn’t differentiate on post quality.
Look up some of the karma discussions on this very site.
Very few people argued that Cato was corrupt. Even those who disagreed with him mostly didn’t.
I do have experience with moderating a large forum and I still believe in not trying to corrupt people. You want people that are open for rational discouse and who changes their position when you bring them arguments to change their opinions even in the absence of giving them incentives to switch their position.
I’d say that setting up incentives so that people within a system do culturally useful things out of their own self-interest is about as close to an opposite of corrupting people as we’re likely to find.
Doing X for specially crafted incentive Y for the intrinsic value of X is a form of corruption. It’s not always possible that all decisions are made for the intrinsic value but if you have a political enviroment where there a lot pressure to do Y’s.
Especially if you can’t get any political power without Y, you won’t have many people who persue political goals for their intrinsic value in your political system.
Things work much better when the politicians do what they consider to be right instead of having to do be coercied into taking any position that’s political advantageous.
That’s a… remarkably loose definition of corruption you’ve got going on there.
I’m not sure it’s practical to make a political system completely free of incentives, as long as you’re working with humans governing humans: the closest approximations I can think of would have to involve a leadership caste socially and economically isolated from the people they govern and without any means of improving their own welfare, and that’s so far removed from anything historical I know about that I don’t even want to try working out all its long-term implications. Imperial Japan’s about the closest, and that degenerated at first into proxy governance by provincial warlords and later into a military-aristocratic dictatorship ruling in the imperial family’s name but not in practice controlled by it.
Now, given anything resembling our existing politics, it seems naive to behave as if the default incentives surrounding political power are nonexistent or weak enough that they’re drowned out by altruistic impulses among those inclined to seek power—or even among random members of the populace, if you prefer direct democracy. This being the case, it makes far more sense to me to design systems to reward competent government—however defined—rather than to high-handedly dismiss any such attempts as unethical and rely wholly on the better angels of politicians’ natures.
I’m not quite prepared to say that there can’t exist any candidate systems where this wouldn’t be necessary, but if you’ve got a proposal like that, we should really be talking about that proposal rather than speaking in generalities.
I’m not sure such a thing has been proposed (after reading most, if not all of this thread); in fact it sounds so absurd that I can’t imagine what such a proposal would look like.
Maybe ChristianKI will correct me if he/she really is proposing a “political system completely free of incentives”.
In The Tamuli, by David Eddings, one country’s political system is described as an attempt to limit corruption. (The usual caveats regarding fictional evidence apply here, of course). In short, when a person is elected onto the ruling council of the Isle of Tega, all that he owns is sold, and the money is deposited into the country’s treasury. He is then simply not permitted to own anything until his term is up, some four years later (presumably food and housing is provided at the expense of the state); when that time comes, the money in the treasury is divided among the ministers in proportion to how much they put in (and the former ministers presumably start re-purchasing stuff). Note that the one thing that the ministers are not allowed to do is to change the tax rates.
This is described as having two consequences. First of all, the Isle of Tega is the only country that always shows a profit. Secondly, the minute that a man is nominated to become a minister, he is put under immediate armed guard to prevent him from running away (and remains under armed guard until his term is over). A government position is viewed with the same trepidation as a prison sentance.
Wouldn’t they still have incentives to aid parties who promise to repay them once their term is up? Similar to how some legislators conveniently acquire lucrative positions requiring little-to-no effort on their part from companies who they have helped out through the years once they’ve retired from politics?
Or to aid their families and friends, or to adopt policies that benefit their industry or hometown or social class—I considered similar systems when I was writing the ancestor (probably unconsciously influenced by Eddings; I haven’t read him in years, though), but decided that they were transparently unworkable.
Yes, it seems both too drastic, and not really able to accomplish the desired result.
Funny, I’ve wondered about a similarly drastic action though to improve the quality of voting, namely for each election select a random 1% (or some such—small enough to not crash the economy) of the population and lock them up with nothing to do but learn about what’s going on in the country and in the world and debate who they should vote for. In the end, unlike in the jury system, it should still be a secret ballot. Of course, if as many people were exempted as in jury duty, then it would be biased. One would have to see how much exemption was unavoidable, and and see whether the bias could be sufficiently minimized.
If it’s small enough not to crash the economy, then is it big enough to reliably alter the election results? And who provides the information for them to read through?
Only if they can trust the promise; once their term is up, the parties have little real incentive to stick to their promise, after all.
There will be an incentive to aid people who immediately donate a great big chunk of money to the State, as that money will be shared out among the ministers at the end of their term in any case; but the incentive only works, there, if the great big chunk of money is more than the state would obtain by other means.
In iterated games, defection has its price.
I see your point and, on further thought, acknowledge it as correct.
This seems like possibly quite a useful bit of abstraction and offer the potential of arguing the merits of a single principle that appears in many manifestations, in politics, corporations, volunteer organizations, etc. But I’m just having trouble getting it clearly in my head. Two things might help.
1) One or 2 concrete examples where you flesh out “X” and “Y”. I spent 2 years in a math Ph.D. program, which is long enough to know that to move forward with an abstraction, it is best to start with at least a couple of examples.
2) Consider the “agency problem” (or “principle-agent problem”), which to me seems the most promising abstraction for reasoning about corruption. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_problem, and maybe very close to what you’re aiming at.
Be sure to let us know when you find such people. One of the main conceits of this site is that rationalists should win. If it’s possible to get ahead by not being a rationalist (even temporarily), people are going to do that. Ultimately, I think what the original quote from Friedman boils down to is the old adage that you should try to fix the system rather than blame the people in it.
If you have corrupt politicians, blame the voters. The politicians did not vote themselves into the office. (Unless they own the vote-counting machines factory.) I guess the quote suggests that “making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things”, whatever precisely that means, could still be easier than replacing the whole population of voters; or at least the majority of them.
There are worse things that a politician can be than corrupt.
There are worse things that a politician can be than corrupt.
Agreed. It’s too easy to pander to a base that doesn’t expect you to be good, just deliver a few things… things that matter a great deal less than the cumulative effect of having the right people in charge.