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.
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.
These are some great questions. I think, in general, policymaking should be done as close to ground level as possible. Some things are best at the "national level" though.
"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."
---I am glad you point this out as I realized this after I wrote this. Perhaps the infectiveness is a feature...not a bug? But if that were the case, I think we would expect Latin American Presidential systems to be thriving, most are not. Further, how I see it, it's probably better to have an effective state that is able to course correct and "undo" laws and regulations easily, than a state that doesn't get much done at all.
I think about this a lot! I'm not so certain about fast being better. The glacial pace of American legislation may have protected us from the mistakes that quicker moving European parliaments have made.
I think the goose that lays the golden eggs is incredibly vulnerable, and since most people don't realize how the eggs are made, they propose all sorts of anti-goose laws: Let's stick the goose in a cage. Let's feed the goose only broccoli. Let's fine the goose if it doesn't start laying magenta-colored eggs.
There are currently many anti-goose laws on the books, but the we've accreted them more slowly than you see in other parts of the world, so our goose is chugging along fairly well. Allowing for a "better," more responsive legislative process may well be the goose's death blow.
This is some good thinking. Hard to predict these things. I suppose there are two questions here. One, we want the government to enact the correct policy (or lack thereof), on the other, we want the bureaucracy to enforce and implement those policies effectively.
Funny you mention Landemore, for one of her political science classes at Yale she and her students wrote a constitution for a Mars colony as an illustration of how her Open Democracy ideas might be practically implemented. https://drive.proton.me/urls/X989G6MFP8#9I7DgmtF2ae7
I think even with perfect random sampling it would be a wise idea to factor in some sort of election. There’s a reason authoritarian states like North Korea and Venezuela still hold elections, and I think it’s because even when they are complete scams, they still give a sense of legitimacy to the government.
I could easily imagine a future where the representatives elected by sortition just happen to be uniquely bad, or there’s suspected fowl play in the selection process. People would rather have a government they choose, rather than one set up on a system they’re just supposed to trust will work, leading to social unrest and maybe even revolution.
Maybe it’s unnecessary but gut feeling suggests there’s good reason to have even a veneer of election, even if it doesn’t have much serious impact on policy.
Suggestion: Remove set terms for any elected officials. Have a completely random system every year for determining if there will be an election for an office that year with a 1-3 month heads up. A 20% chance gives a mean expected term of ~3 years. This could be as short as 1 if they are unlucky, or 6 if they’re very lucky. The effect is that it reduces politicians unique reelection seeking behavior until they know a new election is due. They can no longer start campaigning a year out, as they’d run out of resources and more likely than not, not have an election anyway.
In order to prevent really unlikely cases like 20 years of rule without an election (would happen ~1% of the time with those odds) maybe the chance of reelection gradually increases after 6 years 20% a year. After 10 years of rule an election is guaranteed, which would have the same problem of reelection seeking behavior, but at least it would be dramatically reduced.
There may need to be a more robust impeachment or recall system, so a politician who becomes suddenly unpopular due to inept or unethical behavior in his first year, doesn’t get to stick around for another 9 due to luck. Maybe an ethics committee or other mechanism can determine if an election should happen immediately, or maybe they just determine if there will be a referendum on if there should be an election that year, leaving it to the people to decide.
Just spitballing though, but I think if the conversation is already on a hypothetical Martian government, it’s a good opportunity to throw up some interesting ideas.
This is copy pasted from a comment I made on Elle's substack.
Three models I propose below for people who want more or less technocratic governance
1) Break all the big countries into independent city states with a NATO like mutual self defence clause and relative freedom of movement between city states. If all else fails in the very least you can vote with your feet. The city states can be theocracies, Republics or even secular dictatorships for maths nerds. More like ASEAN and less like the EU. Imo, when vote with their feet they vote without ideology.
2) Make political manifestoes into enforceable contracts. Before every election every party has to propose a contract for 5-10 years of governance with as much or as little detail as they want. Voters can do a class action lawsuit if they elected members don't govern according to the manifesto. If the government wants to renegotiate the contract for whatever reason they would have to call a snap election to vote on a new manifesto or party. This will prevent governments from making promises that can't keep. It might also stop voters from picking people who are likeable instead of intelligent because my theory is that voters need to pick people based on general "trustworthiness" instead of competence since there is no contract enforcement mechanism.
3) Liquid democracy. Elected representatives vote on most things but voters can override the decision of their representatives whenever they feel like it. This will prevent unpopular or interest group oriented policies from passing in parliament. There is other stuff about liquid democracy but they aren't useful imo.
Great article. I love the phrase ‘House of Wisdom’. I imagine that this was the original intention for the US Senate when Senators were nominated by state governments. By making Senators directly elected, it made them more populist and more like the House of Representatives.
My idea for the House of Lords (soon to be renamed ‘House of Wisdom’) would be for ten(ish) buckets that each represesents a different kind of expertise that we require (finance, social policy, culture, medicine etc) and there is a committee (or maybe just the relevant professional bodies) who nominate a slate of candidates for each bucket. The rest of us get to vote for candidates for each slate. The elections for each slate happen separately so the electorate can focus on one set of issues at a time.
Separate point: isn’t it the case that, outside of South America, most of the new democracies created in new countries have been parliamentary?
Can you link the studies that show that regulators that are funded via fees perform better than both that are dependent on government money? If this is true we should fund the FDA through taxes and make it so that the drug companies can get a tax credit later from the IRS as to reduce the regulatory compliance costs for small companies.
Excellent article! Structure influences so much of the game of politics. Proportional representation and sortition can be very useful. Very nicely done with research supporting the concepts!!!
Actually, I've got one more. Put your utopian hat on.
Is there any chance for our intrepid Martians to become less foolish?
The problem with government is that its run by flawed humans. That's not going to change. The US constitution attempted to adapt to this reality, as Hamilton explains in Federalist No. 51, but that only goes so far.
So are we stuck with today's cognitive biases? Can we do better as a society by instilling better thinking and calling each other out on our foolishness?
My tendency is to think that we can better education and access to education which will definitely help, but we still won’t eliminate foolishness altogether. Mitigating it will be crucial!
Thanks for a thoughtful post. One comment: turning technical things over to “experts” can be disastrous. Economic experts have pushed for lowering federal debt, deregulation, free trade, all with disproportionately bad outcomes for the average American.
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.
Yup! We can certainly test in charter cities. Something I have suggested, though I called them "pilot zones."
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.
These are some great questions. I think, in general, policymaking should be done as close to ground level as possible. Some things are best at the "national level" though.
"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."
---I am glad you point this out as I realized this after I wrote this. Perhaps the infectiveness is a feature...not a bug? But if that were the case, I think we would expect Latin American Presidential systems to be thriving, most are not. Further, how I see it, it's probably better to have an effective state that is able to course correct and "undo" laws and regulations easily, than a state that doesn't get much done at all.
I think about this a lot! I'm not so certain about fast being better. The glacial pace of American legislation may have protected us from the mistakes that quicker moving European parliaments have made.
I think the goose that lays the golden eggs is incredibly vulnerable, and since most people don't realize how the eggs are made, they propose all sorts of anti-goose laws: Let's stick the goose in a cage. Let's feed the goose only broccoli. Let's fine the goose if it doesn't start laying magenta-colored eggs.
There are currently many anti-goose laws on the books, but the we've accreted them more slowly than you see in other parts of the world, so our goose is chugging along fairly well. Allowing for a "better," more responsive legislative process may well be the goose's death blow.
This is some good thinking. Hard to predict these things. I suppose there are two questions here. One, we want the government to enact the correct policy (or lack thereof), on the other, we want the bureaucracy to enforce and implement those policies effectively.
"Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob." --Madison
intentional feature, from that view point quite traditionally.
re 2, you can look at California's Ballot initiatives process for an attempt (and mess)
Love these questions! For 1) I’m a yes. 2) I think Switzerland is the model of direct democracy they should follow!
Funny you mention Landemore, for one of her political science classes at Yale she and her students wrote a constitution for a Mars colony as an illustration of how her Open Democracy ideas might be practically implemented. https://drive.proton.me/urls/X989G6MFP8#9I7DgmtF2ae7
Ha, you're kidding? Very interesting.
I think even with perfect random sampling it would be a wise idea to factor in some sort of election. There’s a reason authoritarian states like North Korea and Venezuela still hold elections, and I think it’s because even when they are complete scams, they still give a sense of legitimacy to the government.
I could easily imagine a future where the representatives elected by sortition just happen to be uniquely bad, or there’s suspected fowl play in the selection process. People would rather have a government they choose, rather than one set up on a system they’re just supposed to trust will work, leading to social unrest and maybe even revolution.
Maybe it’s unnecessary but gut feeling suggests there’s good reason to have even a veneer of election, even if it doesn’t have much serious impact on policy.
Suggestion: Remove set terms for any elected officials. Have a completely random system every year for determining if there will be an election for an office that year with a 1-3 month heads up. A 20% chance gives a mean expected term of ~3 years. This could be as short as 1 if they are unlucky, or 6 if they’re very lucky. The effect is that it reduces politicians unique reelection seeking behavior until they know a new election is due. They can no longer start campaigning a year out, as they’d run out of resources and more likely than not, not have an election anyway.
In order to prevent really unlikely cases like 20 years of rule without an election (would happen ~1% of the time with those odds) maybe the chance of reelection gradually increases after 6 years 20% a year. After 10 years of rule an election is guaranteed, which would have the same problem of reelection seeking behavior, but at least it would be dramatically reduced.
There may need to be a more robust impeachment or recall system, so a politician who becomes suddenly unpopular due to inept or unethical behavior in his first year, doesn’t get to stick around for another 9 due to luck. Maybe an ethics committee or other mechanism can determine if an election should happen immediately, or maybe they just determine if there will be a referendum on if there should be an election that year, leaving it to the people to decide.
Just spitballing though, but I think if the conversation is already on a hypothetical Martian government, it’s a good opportunity to throw up some interesting ideas.
Neat ideas. Never heard anything like that suggested before.
This is copy pasted from a comment I made on Elle's substack.
Three models I propose below for people who want more or less technocratic governance
1) Break all the big countries into independent city states with a NATO like mutual self defence clause and relative freedom of movement between city states. If all else fails in the very least you can vote with your feet. The city states can be theocracies, Republics or even secular dictatorships for maths nerds. More like ASEAN and less like the EU. Imo, when vote with their feet they vote without ideology.
2) Make political manifestoes into enforceable contracts. Before every election every party has to propose a contract for 5-10 years of governance with as much or as little detail as they want. Voters can do a class action lawsuit if they elected members don't govern according to the manifesto. If the government wants to renegotiate the contract for whatever reason they would have to call a snap election to vote on a new manifesto or party. This will prevent governments from making promises that can't keep. It might also stop voters from picking people who are likeable instead of intelligent because my theory is that voters need to pick people based on general "trustworthiness" instead of competence since there is no contract enforcement mechanism.
3) Liquid democracy. Elected representatives vote on most things but voters can override the decision of their representatives whenever they feel like it. This will prevent unpopular or interest group oriented policies from passing in parliament. There is other stuff about liquid democracy but they aren't useful imo.
All interesting concepts. Thank you for sharing!
Great article. I love the phrase ‘House of Wisdom’. I imagine that this was the original intention for the US Senate when Senators were nominated by state governments. By making Senators directly elected, it made them more populist and more like the House of Representatives.
My idea for the House of Lords (soon to be renamed ‘House of Wisdom’) would be for ten(ish) buckets that each represesents a different kind of expertise that we require (finance, social policy, culture, medicine etc) and there is a committee (or maybe just the relevant professional bodies) who nominate a slate of candidates for each bucket. The rest of us get to vote for candidates for each slate. The elections for each slate happen separately so the electorate can focus on one set of issues at a time.
Separate point: isn’t it the case that, outside of South America, most of the new democracies created in new countries have been parliamentary?
That is an interesting idea and I like it. Yes, outside of SA, most new democracies are parliamentary.
Can you link the studies that show that regulators that are funded via fees perform better than both that are dependent on government money? If this is true we should fund the FDA through taxes and make it so that the drug companies can get a tax credit later from the IRS as to reduce the regulatory compliance costs for small companies.
If I recall, that came from the book that I cited in the essay, 10 percent less democracy.
Excellent article! Structure influences so much of the game of politics. Proportional representation and sortition can be very useful. Very nicely done with research supporting the concepts!!!
It's something that should be tried in practice at least. :) thank you
Singapore's "independent" judiciary always seems to find in the government favor on "political" measures. :)
Actually, I've got one more. Put your utopian hat on.
Is there any chance for our intrepid Martians to become less foolish?
The problem with government is that its run by flawed humans. That's not going to change. The US constitution attempted to adapt to this reality, as Hamilton explains in Federalist No. 51, but that only goes so far.
So are we stuck with today's cognitive biases? Can we do better as a society by instilling better thinking and calling each other out on our foolishness?
My tendency is to think that we can better education and access to education which will definitely help, but we still won’t eliminate foolishness altogether. Mitigating it will be crucial!
I agree. I think we can.
See Cipolla’s theory of stupidity, summarized here: https://qz.com/967554/the-five-universal-laws-of-human-stupidity. The social implications are at the end of the article.
This seems very accurate to me.
Maybe as they sail away from the pale blue dot and look back, they will do this on their own.
Thanks for a thoughtful post. One comment: turning technical things over to “experts” can be disastrous. Economic experts have pushed for lowering federal debt, deregulation, free trade, all with disproportionately bad outcomes for the average American.