Ideally we’d structure the bureaucracies’ incentives so that they get punished for the invisible graveyard, but it’s unclear how to do that. I’m really not sure what to do other than trying to streamline the process of approval or requiring that any drug approved in, say, Germany, the UK, Japan, and a few other countries is automatically approved here.
Lots of bureaucracies did better than the US bureacracy, so theres a blueprint for fixing bureacracies that doesn’t involve disbanding them, or implementing epistocracy.
Ideally we’d structure the bureaucracies’ incentives so that they get punished for the invisible graveyard, but it’s unclear how to do that
Other countries do it by holding enquiries and firing people.
Cummings discusses these problems in a very abstract way, as though they are universal, but things actually function differently in different places. It’s noticeable that some places with strongman leaders, like Brasil, did really badly (worse than the US and UK) under COVID… while some technocratic places with bland leaders did really well.
I agree—and in fact small doses of what Cummings suggests does just look like holding enquiries and firing people, and maybe firing the leadership of a particular organisation (just not like 50% of all govt departments in one go). In fact in my original question to Brennan, I asked
For reasons it might strengthen the argument [in favour of technocracy], it seems like the institutions that did better than average were the ones that were more able to act autonomously, see e.g. this from Alex Tabarok,
and I listed some examples of particular bureaucracies that did well in countries that in general failed (one of which was the vaccine taskforce set up, in part, by Cummings). So clearly it is possible to just get the particular thing right without solving all the systemic issues.
My point was that, if you’ve decided you need wholesale reform of how government makes decisions, doing a complete end-run around most existing institutions to build your ‘startup’ replacements has a much worse downside than e.g. experimenting with epistocracy, because it concentrates power in a really small number of people, while epistocracy doesn’t.
But I don’t think either is what we should be reaching for to solve a particular imminent problem.
I’m not very familiar with Brennan’s work, but I can’t imagine how epistocracy could be feasible in the US...its just an invitation to civil war 2.0.
Edit
JB:For instance, I favor a system of enlightened preference voting where we let everyone vote but we then calculate what the public would have supported had it been fully informed
So...”we” the technocrats recalculate to get whatever result “we” like. And everyone tolerates having their actual vote erased and replaced with what they should have voted for.....yeah.
Lots of bureaucracies did better than the US bureacracy, so theres a blueprint for fixing bureacracies that doesn’t involve disbanding them, or implementing epistocracy.
Other countries do it by holding enquiries and firing people.
Cummings discusses these problems in a very abstract way, as though they are universal, but things actually function differently in different places. It’s noticeable that some places with strongman leaders, like Brasil, did really badly (worse than the US and UK) under COVID… while some technocratic places with bland leaders did really well.
I agree—and in fact small doses of what Cummings suggests does just look like holding enquiries and firing people, and maybe firing the leadership of a particular organisation (just not like 50% of all govt departments in one go). In fact in my original question to Brennan, I asked
and I listed some examples of particular bureaucracies that did well in countries that in general failed (one of which was the vaccine taskforce set up, in part, by Cummings). So clearly it is possible to just get the particular thing right without solving all the systemic issues.
My point was that, if you’ve decided you need wholesale reform of how government makes decisions, doing a complete end-run around most existing institutions to build your ‘startup’ replacements has a much worse downside than e.g. experimenting with epistocracy, because it concentrates power in a really small number of people, while epistocracy doesn’t.
But I don’t think either is what we should be reaching for to solve a particular imminent problem.
I’m not very familiar with Brennan’s work, but I can’t imagine how epistocracy could be feasible in the US...its just an invitation to civil war 2.0.
Edit
So...”we” the technocrats recalculate to get whatever result “we” like. And everyone tolerates having their actual vote erased and replaced with what they should have voted for.....yeah.