Can democracies (or other systems of government) do better by more regularly voting on meta-principles, but having those principles come into effect N years down the line, where N is long enough that the current power structures have less clarity over who would benefit from the change?
Some of the discussion on Power Buys You Distance From the Crime notes that campaigning to change meta principles can’t actually be taken at face value (or at least, people don’t take it at face value), because it can be pretty obvious who would benefit from a particular meta principle. (If the king is in power and you suggest democracy, obviously the current power structure will be weakened. If people rely on Gerrymandering to secure votes, changing the rules on Gerrymandering clearly will have an impact on who wins next election)
But what if people voted on changing rules for Gerrymandering, and the rules wouldn’t kick in for 20 years. Is that more achievable? Is it better or worse?
The intended benefit is that everyone might roughly agree it’s better for the system to be more fair, but not if that fairness will clearly directly cost them. If a rule change occurs far enough in the future, it may be less clear who will benefit from the change.
This is perhaps related to Robin Hanson’s Near Mode vs Far mode. I think people are more idealistic in Far Mode… and at least sometimes this just seems good? Lack of clarity over who benefits from a change might improve people’s ability to think about longterm benefits and fairness.
I have a bunch of thoughts on this. A lot of the good effects of this actually happened in space-law, because nobody really cared about the effects of the laws when they were written.
Other interesting contracts that were surprisingly long-lasting is the ownership of Hong-Kong for Britain, which was returned after 90 years.
However, I think there are various problems with doing this a lot. One of them is that when you make a policy decision that’s supposed to be useful in 20 years, then you are making a bid on that policy being useful in the environment that will exist in 20 years, over which you have a lot of uncertainty. So by default I expect policy-decisions made for a world 20 years from now to be worse than decisions made for the current world.
The enforcability of contracts over such long time periods is also quite unclear. What prevents the leadership 15 years from now from just calling off the policy implementation? This requires a lot of trust and support for the meta-system, which is hard to sustain over such long periods of time.
In general, I have a perspective that lots of problems could be solved if people could reliably make long-term contracts, but that there are no reliably enforcement mechanisms for long-term contracts at the national-actor level.
I think lack of long-term contract enforcement is one part of it—the US congress routinely passes laws with immediate costs and delayed revenue, and then either continually postpones or changes it’s mind on the delayed part (while keeping the immediate part). I’d classify it as much as deception as of lack of enforcement. It’s compounded by the fact that the composition of the government changes a bit every 2 years, but the fundamental problem is that “enforcement” is necessary, because “alignment” doesn’t exist.
Trying to go meta and enforce far-mode stated values rather than honoring near-mode actual behaviors is effectively forcing people into doing what they say they want, as opposed to inferring what they actually want. I’m actually sympathetic to that tactic, but I do recognize that it’s coercion (enforcement of ill-considered contract) rather than actual agreement (where people do what they want, because that’s what they want).
Can democracies (or other systems of government) do better by more regularly voting on meta-principles, but having those principles come into effect N years down the line, where N is long enough that the current power structures have less clarity over who would benefit from the change?
Some of the discussion on Power Buys You Distance From the Crime notes that campaigning to change meta principles can’t actually be taken at face value (or at least, people don’t take it at face value), because it can be pretty obvious who would benefit from a particular meta principle. (If the king is in power and you suggest democracy, obviously the current power structure will be weakened. If people rely on Gerrymandering to secure votes, changing the rules on Gerrymandering clearly will have an impact on who wins next election)
But what if people voted on changing rules for Gerrymandering, and the rules wouldn’t kick in for 20 years. Is that more achievable? Is it better or worse?
The intended benefit is that everyone might roughly agree it’s better for the system to be more fair, but not if that fairness will clearly directly cost them. If a rule change occurs far enough in the future, it may be less clear who will benefit from the change.
This is perhaps related to Robin Hanson’s Near Mode vs Far mode. I think people are more idealistic in Far Mode… and at least sometimes this just seems good? Lack of clarity over who benefits from a change might improve people’s ability to think about longterm benefits and fairness.
I have a bunch of thoughts on this. A lot of the good effects of this actually happened in space-law, because nobody really cared about the effects of the laws when they were written.
Other interesting contracts that were surprisingly long-lasting is the ownership of Hong-Kong for Britain, which was returned after 90 years.
However, I think there are various problems with doing this a lot. One of them is that when you make a policy decision that’s supposed to be useful in 20 years, then you are making a bid on that policy being useful in the environment that will exist in 20 years, over which you have a lot of uncertainty. So by default I expect policy-decisions made for a world 20 years from now to be worse than decisions made for the current world.
The enforcability of contracts over such long time periods is also quite unclear. What prevents the leadership 15 years from now from just calling off the policy implementation? This requires a lot of trust and support for the meta-system, which is hard to sustain over such long periods of time.
In general, I have a perspective that lots of problems could be solved if people could reliably make long-term contracts, but that there are no reliably enforcement mechanisms for long-term contracts at the national-actor level.
I think lack of long-term contract enforcement is one part of it—the US congress routinely passes laws with immediate costs and delayed revenue, and then either continually postpones or changes it’s mind on the delayed part (while keeping the immediate part). I’d classify it as much as deception as of lack of enforcement. It’s compounded by the fact that the composition of the government changes a bit every 2 years, but the fundamental problem is that “enforcement” is necessary, because “alignment” doesn’t exist.
Trying to go meta and enforce far-mode stated values rather than honoring near-mode actual behaviors is effectively forcing people into doing what they say they want, as opposed to inferring what they actually want. I’m actually sympathetic to that tactic, but I do recognize that it’s coercion (enforcement of ill-considered contract) rather than actual agreement (where people do what they want, because that’s what they want).
Good example: the US tried to go metric and then canceled its commitment.