It’s Time to Build

Glad I’m not allergic to bullshit because this comment would have me breaking out in hives.

>Markets would love to build nuclear power plants Sadly, markets would love to build nuclear power plants without paying the external costs, but I pretty much doubt the markets would like to pay all the costs associated with nuclear production.

And BTW, I say this in full support for nuclear power, in fact, I think that carbon, gas and oil are so cheap because they markets avoid paying the external costs that nuclear might be the better alternative. But this is because the markets are not great on accounting for this costs that are passed to society as a whole.

The essay takes it as a given that we should have no confidence in democracy.

[Some] government regulations are bad. How do we fix them? Answer: rich people should manipulate the government even more! Clearly, that must be the answer.

But isn't that how we got here in the first place?

Believe me, I know [our] democracy sucks. I've been to planning meetings in San Francisco. I've seen democracy sucking first-hand.

Our democracy systematically rewards the people who have the means, time and incentive to participate much more often than the average citizen. Anyone who visits enough town halls can tell: you see the same people over and over again, speaking louder than anyone else.

When you have a system that repeatedly gives bad outcomes in a variety of different situations, it's not enough to try to force new particular outcomes. You have to change the way the system works. That doesn't mean you try [and fail] again to get disengaged people involved in politics. Those people aren't involved in politics for a reason. They're busy; they're not rich or charismatic; they don't have strong motivations.

What you can do is change the situation around the disengaged people. The easiest facet is money. Most people do not spend money on politics. Only a small fraction do.

Andrew Yang had a proposal to give citizens a hundred dollars each that could only be spent on political campaigns. It wasn't near the top of his list of proposals, but I thought it was the best idea he had offered. Most people don't have the time or the desire to participate the way that social theorists imagine that they should. But what's great about money is that it is very easy to pool together.

The other thing that's great about money is that you have a lot of bandwidth for your signals. In an election, even a ranked-choice election, you submit maybe a few dozen bits of entropy to the great machine that rules the world and it tries to make something useful out of it. The advice bits are few; the world bits are many. The machine struggles. As the world becomes larger, the machine struggles more. Money is different; money can be spend in many, many different ways. The bandwidth becomes much larger; the machine can at least in principle function better.

In order to actually make sure that money is used in a positive way, though, you need to have a model of the people as they relate to the system of government. Economists like to talk about how the market aggregates information. So too should a democracy. But where a market aggregates information about people's activities, a democracy aggregates information about their opinions.

In other words, in order to fix democracy, you need to find the best way to aggregate people's opinions.

My theory here is simple: most people have a fair understanding of a few things and a poor understanding of most things. If the system could be organized so as to encourage people to spend money on issues they understand better than the norm, the information quality will be higher.

Some of this will have to depend on goodwill. The most clearly lucrative way to spend your money on politics will probably still be to lower your own taxes. But if we give people the opportunity to choose to spend their money on issues that relate to them, specifically, they might feel more included and more inclined to participate honestly.

There is a crisis of institutional trust in America.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/22/key-finding...

Improving democracy seems, to me, to be one of the best opportunities to rebuild this trust. People won't spend money -- "democracy dollars" -- in a positive and conscientious way if they don't actually believe it will work.

How do other large organizations build trust across diverse populations? They fragment. The Catholic Church wields its immense cross-cultural power through a network where most end-users are much more concerned with their local clergy than with the goings-on at the top. This isn't necessarily a model to be copied in its entirety. What's important is to understand how the architecture brings people in.

People are less frightened by small organizations than large ones. What's needed is a mechanism to connect people to those small organizations so that their unique personal knowledge can be propagated through the system.

I love the post, but it’s hard to ignore the cynic in me who thinks a large part of the problem lies in these VCs who have defined success to be achieving unicorn status. You know what’s never going to be a unicorn app? An app for tutoring kids. I would have loved to work on that. I tutored kids and I know first hand the impact of tutoring. But guess what, I’m only getting older and I need to make a living in an increasingly expensive world! Guess I better work in a startup with better prospects.

I don't think a fish can be allergic to water.