In some ways it seems the question “So how could you stop this happening?” is quite a bit like the jailer in the Prisoner’s Dilemma story was answering. The problem was getting the prisoner’s not to cooperate in their silence but rat each other out. What type of payoff matrix would be needed to induce political representatives to act in the public interests rather than party interests? Clearly you don’t get that from the parties so it would need to be operationalized within some Constitutional and Congressional structure.
Perhaps one thing that might also help in thinking through potential solutions would be trying to segregate legislation into a few different types of buckets to see if certain types of legislation (or the underlying class of problem the legislation is attempting to address) are more prone to generating such behavior.
I had the thought occur to me (some time ago) that we are in the 21st Century and in many ways it still seems a lot like the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries. Government is still very much an actor within society and still very much being a pain in the ass as often as it s being helpful. Could it be possible that in the 21st Century government could evolve into some general infrastructure that efficiently allows the interested people solve their own problems? Clearly that could not be all but the idea that government functioning as a tool that largely eliminated the organizational and informational cost asymmetries could allow a good number of things government now does be “delegated” to the people. I suspect certain classes of problems we currently see government’s creating legislation (and playing party politics with) could fall into that type of bucket.
If we also learned that those types of problems are actually where we see the highest incidence of the undesired political behavior....
In some ways it seems the question “So how could you stop this happening?” is quite a bit like the jailer in the Prisoner’s Dilemma story was answering. The problem was getting the prisoner’s not to cooperate in their silence but rat each other out. What type of payoff matrix would be needed to induce political representatives to act in the public interests rather than party interests? Clearly you don’t get that from the parties so it would need to be operationalized within some Constitutional and Congressional structure.
Perhaps one thing that might also help in thinking through potential solutions would be trying to segregate legislation into a few different types of buckets to see if certain types of legislation (or the underlying class of problem the legislation is attempting to address) are more prone to generating such behavior.
I had the thought occur to me (some time ago) that we are in the 21st Century and in many ways it still seems a lot like the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries. Government is still very much an actor within society and still very much being a pain in the ass as often as it s being helpful. Could it be possible that in the 21st Century government could evolve into some general infrastructure that efficiently allows the interested people solve their own problems? Clearly that could not be all but the idea that government functioning as a tool that largely eliminated the organizational and informational cost asymmetries could allow a good number of things government now does be “delegated” to the people. I suspect certain classes of problems we currently see government’s creating legislation (and playing party politics with) could fall into that type of bucket.
If we also learned that those types of problems are actually where we see the highest incidence of the undesired political behavior....