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Aspiring Wizard's avatar

This is a really interesting and thought-provoking article. I think however, that we don't have to wait for Mars to test this out. Though Mars and similar places will be an ultimate challenge, we can test these ideas with charter cities. This is something I'm really excited about. Maybe during this century we will establish dozens of different semi-autonomous cities that could test these governance ideas. Then best practices can be adopted both by the older states and by our new colonies outside of Earth.

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Andrew Perlot's avatar

Good piece. Three questions:

1) If martian citizens thrive and reproduce in large numbers, should governing units be shrunk to city state size to maximize the "laboratories of democracy" aspect of policy making? Have you read Ober's The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece? He makes some fascinating points about Greek city state GDP growing faster than it had in history, and the high living standards in Greek cities. That topped out at the Roman conquest, and began to shrink thereafter, until Greece was quite poor under the Byzantines.

2) What of Switzerland (small population, moderate-sized country) with its direct democracy? It seem to function way better than I'd suspect. Is this because it's so small? Could a large state function with some version of their governing structure?

3) Is there an argument to be made for the impairment of the legislative process? America turns like a bloated cruise ship — slowly, and only after great effort. But yet America does surprisingly well in many regards. America gets plenty wrong, but because it's so hard to make changes, stupid choices are avoided that would have otherwise strangled GDP growth and other positives.

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