Ask HN: Design a government from scratch, how would it look?
This question is both exciting and depressing. On one hand there is so much potential to improve the way humans interact and direct resources. On the other hand, it doesn't matter what solution is found, because governments exist outside any market. Steve Jobs could have designed the most brilliant Constitution of his time, but it wouldn't matter because following a new constitution would still be considered illegal.
Given I'm a dreamer, why not imagine. The weakest component of a fighter jet is the human pilot. Now we have jets without human operators. I believe the weakest component of our government is also the human. Humans experience emotions, are susceptible to bribes, and aren't consistently reliable. Why not use computers to cut out the middle man, drive down costs, and increase satisfaction? Imagine how algorithms can be used to implement real-time, direct democracy. Imagine how multi-factor authentication can be used to ensure voter authenticity. Laws can be applied to geographical zones, while zones are dynamically created based on voter attributes and commonalities. Computers have restore points, so should governments. If the State gets our of control, a roll-back function could be implemented. Fact is there is infinite room for improvement.
If government is a service it should be a commodity. The best and brightest should be competing to write the most effective government. It’s unfortunate we’re content with our one party system. Citizens believe in the notion of Republicans and Democrats, while the only option is war and welfare.
31 comments
[ 175 ms ] story [ 570 ms ] threadSomething similar:
https://github.com/rbjarnason/open-active-democracy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_democracy#Electronic...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_e-democracy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_governance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_transparency
The Immortal Good King will be an intelligent computer. I, for one, shall welcome our new silicon overlord.
As far as the "best and brightest", it sounds like you're spewing elitism. What should dictate best or brightest? IQ? That's not democracy. Democracy is a representative sampling of everyone's opinion and while not everyone has a high IQ they still deserve to get represented. What you speak of is the 21st century Electoral College.
Beneath your argument, I see your point that we all have a few core values that we want served by the government. Agreed. We might be better served by these zones based on voter attributes. I think if more power is handed to the states, our current government can achieve what you're looking for (cutting out middle man, drive down costs, and increase satisfaction). K well back to dynamics now...
I realize that the two go hand in hand (capitalism/free market requires a hands off/light regulatory approach), something that so far only a Democracy has been able to deliver (although it will be interesting to see how the Chinese model evolves).
Given our current circumstances, it seems capitalism - i.e the central idea that a capitalist works for profit, etc - is now appearing to create economies which are now centralized around people/institutions which engage in nothing moving capital from one place to another, one industry to another, without the attendant in-betweens of the businessmen. And there's goes the concurrent property.
And I wouldn't knock democracy much. You might hate American politics now, but the Chinese version isn't better by any much.
I think you will begin seeing a trend away from the "no value creation" capitalism of the past 20 years- we're seeing people becoming more interested in physical inventions (see the popularity of the Make Fest and workshop clubs) and a rebirth of US industry (opportunities will open up as China and other "low-cost" centers see wage growth and people see other openings in fields such as shoe production, just to name one.).
The House acts as a normalization feature to vote indirectly on behalf of it's constituents, but this could be achieved in other way, for example, a simple poll that requires x% of approval. The approval algorithm could even be complex that uses machine learning and advanced math.
Basically, if regulation, safety and security is a service that citizens want, I believe the entrepreneur can best satisfy these demands -- exponentially better than any politician. Voluntary trade should always be a nontaxable offense, and regulation should be a competitive, non-monopolized market. Technology is consistently improving because it's a competitive market, this is not true for regulation.
It's like you have never read a single dystopian sci-fi classic. What you're describing sounds like GOogle writ large.
Count me out! (of course opt-out is not allowed in a system like this)
In particular about real-time direct democracy.
What we learned from the experience is that it's the social structure of the country, its history and traditions, that are the driving factor behind how we, as a class, wrote the constitution.
In our case, the fictional country had various social groups of different sizes in tribal areas. Each member of the group was assigned to one of the groups based on the group's size.
We developed a constitution quite similar to the U.S. constitution with a federal system, though I believe we used a proportional representation system rather than a winner-takes-all voting system like the U.S. and U.K. use.
In short, I don't think that modern technology would have a significant impact on how a constitution would be written because, as you said, it's all driven by human emotion, ambition, morality, and ethics. While certain aspects of the implementation of a government may be different if modern technology were applied consistently, the overall structure, design, and operation of government would be still end up being a compromise of the various ideologies of the citizens (assuming a democracy, of course).
But who decides when it gets out of control?
A few notions to look into:
* Condorcet voting systems * Mechanism Design Theory * Parliamentary systems
Finally, consider strongly the problem of the influence of capital on any system. In the US, there's the issue of campaign finance, for instance. But if you were to program a government, the problem would be worse: you'd only have to buy off the development team once, rather than bribing members of government repeatedly over time.
First, "what time is it?" There's lots of cases where a single centralized authority can provide definite and concrete advantages.
Second, ultimately, every system of authority (and note that I'm using the word in a very different sense now) is built on a foundation of a threat of death. And that kernel should be held at as much of a remove, as carefully controlled as is possible. Introducing "failover" regulators means that you now have multiple parallel columns of authority, and each basic threat of death needs it's own system of control. That strikes me as nightmarish.
The socio-political landscape has changed a lot since the 1700's. I think the biggest difference now is that nations are much less homogeneous than they used to be. In america in the 1700's there was a dominant faith that provided a set of common standards, e.g. that murder, homosexuality, and theft were all wrong. This is no longer the case, and people have become polarized around many different issues. Technology allows us to become convinced of the rightness of our own cause, through association with like-minded individuals.
Another significant change is that people are much more likely to move around the country, and have friends and family in different states and countries. Using geography as the basis for government divisions (counties, states, nations) is still a good idea, but is becoming less and less so every day.
The conventional solution to the first problem is to give more legislative power to the states, so that, for example, people in the bible belt can have more conservative laws and people in California can legalize pot. This isn't a long term solution any more, because of the second problem.
So we have widely-differing views on what should and shouldn't be legal, but we can't just tailor certain laws to certain geographical areas.
Given these factors, I make the following recommendations:
* Remove the states, and combine the Senate and House of Representatives into one. Allow cities and counties to control any and all issues that are linked to specific locations.
* Stop legislating morality. Enforcing the Truth (by any definition) isn't part of the government's core purpose. I personally believe that abortion is murder (although in a certain subset of cases it is justified), but this is an issue that comes down to personal conviction. It is therefore out of scope for the government. Theft, on the other hand, should remain illegal because it is demonstratively bad for social stability.
* All laws should be subject to rigorous logical and scientific analysis. For example, if a particular trade policy cannot be proven to have a net positive impact on the happiness of people, it should not pass.
* This would involve setting up a fourth branch of government, which is responsible for collating and evaluating scientific data, and performing the analysis of proposed laws. This branch, like the judicial branch, would have the power to veto laws. I envision that for every law, a formal scientific proof will be made available to the public. This will provide a degree of public accountability.
We now have a system in which bad laws (hopefully) won't get passed the scientific analysis, so the negative impacts of populism (rule by the popular) is decreased. Now, notice that the format of congress was decided when we didn't have instant communication. Therefore:
* Take away the congressmen, and make parties (rather than people) the fundamental unit. Discussions between parties should take place online, or at least be aggregated online. Copies of the discussions should also be made available at all public libraries.
* Allow people to choose a party to represent them, or create their own. Parties will have voting power proportional to their number of supporters (measured in votes, not verbal declarations), and a party must have more than 0.5% of the votes before it gets into congress.
* Parties must have a declared high-level policy on every issue, and they will be bound by these policies. This is to prevent people from setting up specific-issue parties; people must learn to support a governance paradigm that is bigger than any specific issue. Note that this does not stop parties from negotiating about details.
* Elections at ...
In regards to the single point of failure, I've got no real answer except that governments have scaled well so far. However, this answer doesn't deal with the fact that so far we've always had other governments to compare ourselves to, which keeps the population in a healthy state of mild envy.
Loss of control is a big issue, and not one that's going to go away any time soon. To take the extreme case, there is basically zero chance that any country currently under sharia law will adopt this form of government, because it gives human science the right to veto Mohammad's commands. Likewise, any attempt to join Canada and the USA will suffer from dissidents who don't like to give up their national character.
It is inevitable that large governments will be less attentive to the needs of individual communities, but not to the degree that it is often expected. The simple fact that 200 million + people can have one president indicates that social stability is more important that actually being able to make an impact on the people who rule the country.
I don't really feel like I've given a very good answer to your question. Perhaps the only route to world government is to start with a small country, demonstrate that it works better than the current forms of democracy, and aggressively support national revolutions during times of world turmoil. Because the fourth branch of government is based on independently verifiable science, it wouldn't be too difficult to set up an international confederation of government science. The social laws of different countries would tend to converge simply because everyone would be working from the same data and the same conclusions, and hopefully after fifty years or so the international confederation would collude to vote through policies of non-aggression in their respective countries.
So, yeah, the linchpin in the system - the property that allows it to work across national borders - is that government policies would be able to be verified and tested using internationally-standard science.
Let's say that we're playing with the idea that abortion is murder. You say that government shouldn't be able to affect people having abortions because it is a matter of "personal conviction." However, murder denotes killing a living being and, as you stated above, governments exist to "to allow us to live in peace with people we've never met before..."
Now the question becomes is a fetus a living being? OR at what point does it become a living being? Someone needs to make these decisions and for lack of a better option, people turn to the government because if they think that the fetus is a living being then the government would need to protect it.
You have proven that government should absolutely be involved when someone wants to have an abortion because it is no longer a person's personal convictions if she is going to murder another person.
(Disclaimer: I'm not saying how I feel about the subject, just pointing out your arguments.)
In a 'perfect' form of the government I described, this issue would be decided by the government based on hard science, so there would be some decision. But this still leaves the question of what position to take in the absence of any conclusive evidence.
To extend the flawed-ness: do you think this applies to issues such as homosexuality (to pick the most controversial)? Do you think that all morality should be legislated?
Too hard? They have all the good weapons? Then you don't care enough, and that's the check on reseting the government.