Is there somewhere where ideas like this are discussed intelligently?
A few thoughts
If the experiments in governance are atheoretical, then I’d expect most of them to be worse. Just as most random mutations in a complex organism are likely to be worse.
Experimentation has a cost, what is the expected benefit from experimenting with different forms of government. How is that expected benefit justified?
Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of seasteading and competitive governments, I just find it disheartening when people don’t want to try applying their brains to the problem of at least narrowing down the space of how governments should be designed.
Is there somewhere where ideas like this are discussed intelligently?
I’m not aware of a single central hub for such discussion I’m afraid. There’s academic work in the area of development economics which looks at countries around the world and tries to identify what traits of governmental institutions seem to correspond with economic growth and prosperity. This is where Paul Romer and his charter cities idea is coming from.
If you want some really out there but intelligent discussion of related ideas you might want to check out Unqualified Reservations. Maybe start with the gentle introduction series. Mencius Moldbug could be described as many things but concise is not one of them so you’re looking at a fair bit of reading there.
Arnold Kling blogs on this topic a bit as well, he has a particular interest in the idea of ‘unbundling’ government services.
If the experiments in governance are atheoretical, then I’d expect most of them to be worse. Just as most random mutations in a complex organism are likely to be worse.
Think of competitive government as a meta-theory of political mechanisms in the same way a well functioning market economy represents a meta-theory of producing efficient organizations rather than a theory of how to run an efficient organization. The question is how to structure things in a way that there is an incentive for good governance. If you get the incentive structure right then good governance will tend to outcompete bad governance. The individual experiments would not be atheoretical but the structure under which they operate is intended to be agnostic about what the best approach will prove to be.
Many of the people you’ll see talking about competitive government are libertarian leaning and so would have their own personal ideas about how to run a government but rather than privileging their own pet theories they want to put them to the test against other ideas about how to run things. A Thousand Nations emphasizes that traditional ideological opponents could in theory both get behind the idea of competitive government as it would give them the opportunity to go and test out their own utopian ideals without having to convince anyone else.
Experimentation has a cost, what is the expected benefit from experimenting with different forms of government. How is that expected benefit justified?
I don’t see how this is any different in principle from the question of the value of experimentation and innovation in general. Many technologies ultimately prove to be market failures but I think the evidence is pretty compelling that economies that follow a free market model and ‘waste’ resources on ideas that don’t pan out have a better track record of producing net benefits through innovation than economies that attempt to centrally plan innovation.
I just find it disheartening when people don’t want to try applying their brains to the problem of at least narrowing down the space of how governments should be designed.
I don’t believe advocates of competitive government are generally doing this. They just don’t believe that their own ideas should be given special privileges over everyone else’s.
Is there somewhere where ideas like this are discussed intelligently?
Hmm… Actually in most places, the host will be slightly biased towards their own ideas and will not really be engaging in discussing new ideas. In Matt’s endorsement of unqualified reservations, he’s suggesting a blog where the host almost never replies back to comments, but it is well written reactionary stuff.
I just find it disheartening when people don’t want to try applying their brains to the problem of at least narrowing down the space of how governments should be designed.
I guess that until competitive government becomes really feasible in a mass scale, this thought is very theoritical. Quite rationally, people want to cross the bridge when they come to it.
About the actual design, it’s like Eliezer explained when people asked him about how he did his AI box thingy, there is no substitute for thinking hard. You really have to think about incentives of every person in every role in the whole structure.
Mencius short circuits this by assuming a corporate structure and says that since it works well enough in the real world, it would work in a sovereign structure also. This is a good argument from the outside view. Simple hierarchy is definitely a solution to Goodhart’s law as I had mentioned in my post, but as Robin Hanson had pointed out in his comment, it feels like a cop-out.
I found the discussion between Moldbug and Robin Hanson interesting because whilst Robin Hanson has lots of interesting ideas he does not write terribly well. He communicates his idea clearly but there is no style to his writing. Contrast Moldbug (or Eliezer) and see the impact of interesting ideas expressed with eloquence and you being to appreciate the power of language.
I wonder if I give excessive weight to Unqualified Reservations because it has such greater facility with the English language than is typical of the blogosphere. Interesting and controversial ideas expressed with rhetorical flair seem to directly trigger the reward centres of my brain.
I guess that until competitive government becomes really feasible in a mass scale, this thought is very theoritical.
One of the things I particularly like about the idea of competitive government is it gives you something practical to do now as an individual. Look around the world and consciously pick a country to live in based on the value offered by its government. Surprisingly few people do this but the few that do have been enough to give us the likes of Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, Luxembourg, etc.
I think being an immigrant gives you a different perspective on things. I’ve spent most of my productive adult life in a country where I pay taxes and have no right to vote. This somehow makes the myth of democracy less potent for me.
Control of smaller organisations than governments, e.g. charities. Some charities have people vote for trustees, so you get similar problems there. So alternate systems might create charities more responsive to their stakeholders.
If the political systems were seen to be better in these smaller situations, they might very slowly move into the larger states (probably multi-century timescales).
Control of smaller organisations than governments, e.g. charities.
Organization and management of businesses and nonprofits is, if not exactly a well-understood problem, then at least the subject of a large body of expertise, and more importantly, of constant real-life tests in the marketplace. If there existed a way to reach useful insight there by theorizing from first principles, I would guess that someone would have already found it (and used it to great practical success).
Seasteading
Setting aside the questions about the practical viability of seasteading, it can be viewed as a special case of colonizing an uninhabited territory. While this may seem as an opportunity to design institutions from scratch, in reality it’s naive to ignore the culture that the colonists will bring with them, and the constraints this imposes on the way the colony’s institutions can work. As de Maistre wrote, “Sovereigns command effectively and in a lasting way only within the circle of things acknowledged by opinion, and they are not the ones who trace the circle of opinion.” How would your abstract model capture that?
If the political systems were seen to be better in these smaller situations, they might very slowly move into the larger states (probably multi-century timescales).
Even a casual glance at the history of the last two centuries shows that transplanting political institutions from one culture to another doesn’t work in practice. Attempts to do so occasionally work by sheer luck, but more often fail miserably, and it’s not at all rare to see them blow up spectacularly.
Control of smaller organisations than governments, e.g. charities.
Organization and management of businesses and nonprofits is, if not exactly a well-understood problem, then at least the subject of a large body of expertise, and more importantly, of constant real-life tests in the marketplace. If there existed a way to reach useful insight there by theorizing from first principles, I would guess that someone would have already found it (and used it to great practical success).
Organisation is different to control. I’m interested in changes to things like how the trustees are selected, rather than specific business practices. There is no incentive for the trustees to experiment with how the trustees are selected. So markets have little to work with.
Even a casual glance at the history of the last two centuries shows that transplanting political institutions from one culture to another doesn’t work in practice. Attempts to do so occasionally work by sheer luck, but more often fail miserably, and it’s not at all rare to see them blow up spectacularly.
And a casual glance another couple of centuries back shows political change springing up in a number of places due to the zeitgeist. Fairly violently, but we were probably better off for it (fewer religious purges and that kind of thing).
There are other ways of engaging in micronational secessionism. The best method prehaps is to unilaterally declare independence under the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, but do so in such a matter as to not attract the attention of the federal government (for example, keep on paying taxes, follow the laws). Then begin operating as if you are an independent government. Examples would include the Republic of Molossia and the Empire of Atlantium. You will lose status though.
The main problem is thinking you could generalize from one small situation into the macrolevel. There may be intervening variables that could explain why a government can succeed with small population and that same government collaspe when it runs a large population.
Thanks, good to get a second opinion.
Do you think there would be any way at all of developing new political systems that would be better than picking new systems randomly?
Are you familiar with the background to patrissimo’s comment? Competitive government is what he’s getting at in the comment you linked.
Is there somewhere where ideas like this are discussed intelligently?
A few thoughts
If the experiments in governance are atheoretical, then I’d expect most of them to be worse. Just as most random mutations in a complex organism are likely to be worse.
Experimentation has a cost, what is the expected benefit from experimenting with different forms of government. How is that expected benefit justified?
Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of seasteading and competitive governments, I just find it disheartening when people don’t want to try applying their brains to the problem of at least narrowing down the space of how governments should be designed.
I’m not aware of a single central hub for such discussion I’m afraid. There’s academic work in the area of development economics which looks at countries around the world and tries to identify what traits of governmental institutions seem to correspond with economic growth and prosperity. This is where Paul Romer and his charter cities idea is coming from.
If you want some really out there but intelligent discussion of related ideas you might want to check out Unqualified Reservations. Maybe start with the gentle introduction series. Mencius Moldbug could be described as many things but concise is not one of them so you’re looking at a fair bit of reading there.
Arnold Kling blogs on this topic a bit as well, he has a particular interest in the idea of ‘unbundling’ government services.
Think of competitive government as a meta-theory of political mechanisms in the same way a well functioning market economy represents a meta-theory of producing efficient organizations rather than a theory of how to run an efficient organization. The question is how to structure things in a way that there is an incentive for good governance. If you get the incentive structure right then good governance will tend to outcompete bad governance. The individual experiments would not be atheoretical but the structure under which they operate is intended to be agnostic about what the best approach will prove to be.
Many of the people you’ll see talking about competitive government are libertarian leaning and so would have their own personal ideas about how to run a government but rather than privileging their own pet theories they want to put them to the test against other ideas about how to run things. A Thousand Nations emphasizes that traditional ideological opponents could in theory both get behind the idea of competitive government as it would give them the opportunity to go and test out their own utopian ideals without having to convince anyone else.
I don’t see how this is any different in principle from the question of the value of experimentation and innovation in general. Many technologies ultimately prove to be market failures but I think the evidence is pretty compelling that economies that follow a free market model and ‘waste’ resources on ideas that don’t pan out have a better track record of producing net benefits through innovation than economies that attempt to centrally plan innovation.
I don’t believe advocates of competitive government are generally doing this. They just don’t believe that their own ideas should be given special privileges over everyone else’s.
Hmm… Actually in most places, the host will be slightly biased towards their own ideas and will not really be engaging in discussing new ideas. In Matt’s endorsement of unqualified reservations, he’s suggesting a blog where the host almost never replies back to comments, but it is well written reactionary stuff.
I guess that until competitive government becomes really feasible in a mass scale, this thought is very theoritical. Quite rationally, people want to cross the bridge when they come to it.
About the actual design, it’s like Eliezer explained when people asked him about how he did his AI box thingy, there is no substitute for thinking hard. You really have to think about incentives of every person in every role in the whole structure.
Mencius short circuits this by assuming a corporate structure and says that since it works well enough in the real world, it would work in a sovereign structure also. This is a good argument from the outside view. Simple hierarchy is definitely a solution to Goodhart’s law as I had mentioned in my post, but as Robin Hanson had pointed out in his comment, it feels like a cop-out.
I found the discussion between Moldbug and Robin Hanson interesting because whilst Robin Hanson has lots of interesting ideas he does not write terribly well. He communicates his idea clearly but there is no style to his writing. Contrast Moldbug (or Eliezer) and see the impact of interesting ideas expressed with eloquence and you being to appreciate the power of language.
I wonder if I give excessive weight to Unqualified Reservations because it has such greater facility with the English language than is typical of the blogosphere. Interesting and controversial ideas expressed with rhetorical flair seem to directly trigger the reward centres of my brain.
One of the things I particularly like about the idea of competitive government is it gives you something practical to do now as an individual. Look around the world and consciously pick a country to live in based on the value offered by its government. Surprisingly few people do this but the few that do have been enough to give us the likes of Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, Luxembourg, etc.
I think being an immigrant gives you a different perspective on things. I’ve spent most of my productive adult life in a country where I pay taxes and have no right to vote. This somehow makes the myth of democracy less potent for me.
I’d assumed there was something going on in the seasteading sphere. But I wasn’t sure what exactly.
An interesting idea, thanks for the link.
What exactly do you mean by “developing new political systems”? What kind of situations do you have in mind where such a thing would be possible?
Seasteading
Control of smaller organisations than governments, e.g. charities. Some charities have people vote for trustees, so you get similar problems there. So alternate systems might create charities more responsive to their stakeholders.
If the political systems were seen to be better in these smaller situations, they might very slowly move into the larger states (probably multi-century timescales).
Organization and management of businesses and nonprofits is, if not exactly a well-understood problem, then at least the subject of a large body of expertise, and more importantly, of constant real-life tests in the marketplace. If there existed a way to reach useful insight there by theorizing from first principles, I would guess that someone would have already found it (and used it to great practical success).
Setting aside the questions about the practical viability of seasteading, it can be viewed as a special case of colonizing an uninhabited territory. While this may seem as an opportunity to design institutions from scratch, in reality it’s naive to ignore the culture that the colonists will bring with them, and the constraints this imposes on the way the colony’s institutions can work. As de Maistre wrote, “Sovereigns command effectively and in a lasting way only within the circle of things acknowledged by opinion, and they are not the ones who trace the circle of opinion.” How would your abstract model capture that?
Even a casual glance at the history of the last two centuries shows that transplanting political institutions from one culture to another doesn’t work in practice. Attempts to do so occasionally work by sheer luck, but more often fail miserably, and it’s not at all rare to see them blow up spectacularly.
Organisation is different to control. I’m interested in changes to things like how the trustees are selected, rather than specific business practices. There is no incentive for the trustees to experiment with how the trustees are selected. So markets have little to work with.
And a casual glance another couple of centuries back shows political change springing up in a number of places due to the zeitgeist. Fairly violently, but we were probably better off for it (fewer religious purges and that kind of thing).
There are other ways of engaging in micronational secessionism. The best method prehaps is to unilaterally declare independence under the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, but do so in such a matter as to not attract the attention of the federal government (for example, keep on paying taxes, follow the laws). Then begin operating as if you are an independent government. Examples would include the Republic of Molossia and the Empire of Atlantium. You will lose status though.
The main problem is thinking you could generalize from one small situation into the macrolevel. There may be intervening variables that could explain why a government can succeed with small population and that same government collaspe when it runs a large population.