Yeah, there's certainly a strong general case for indirect over direct democracy on those sorts of grounds. I've just grown skeptical that our representatives are actually any better. (I agree that stronger, less "democratic" party structures would also be an improvement, but popular ideology is so deeply opposed to that that I don't see…
Yeah, there's certainly a strong general case for indirect over direct democracy on those sorts of grounds. I've just grown skeptical that our representatives are actually any better. (I agree that stronger, less "democratic" party structures would also be an improvement, but popular ideology is so deeply opposed to that that I don't see much of a pathway to implementation. It's easier to imagine legislators passing a "charity vouchers" bill, by contrast.)
Part of my thought was that people vote expressively *because* it is so "cheap" for them to do so (cf. Caplan on rational irrationality). They can easily ignore tradeoffs, express their support for everything bagels, and generally be stupid and obnoxious, without any noticeable (to them) downside. Charity vouchers would force people to confront those trade-offs. Security hawks could make their case for why people need to choose to invest more in the military (or whatever). I imagine their pitch would be appealing to many conservative men, at the very least. But yeah, in general people would need to become more comfortable with instrumental reasoning for this to work at scale.
Given all the uncertainties, I wouldn't recommend immediately decentralizing 100% of the federal budget in this way. As I note at the end of the post, the experiment could start small, and gradually build up from there if it seemed to be working out OK.
That's a very interesting approach -- raise the price of expressive voting for people -- that I'd once have been a fan of but I've come to the conclusion that people -- indeed society -- actually get something of value from expressive voting.
It's just not feasible for even highly educated, intelligent and very motivated individuals to reach an informed deciscion on even a relatively small fraction of the problems/issues we need government to handle (w/o considering coordination) so we really should want some way that we can communicate what our values are so agents/politicians can do that for us. Besides, I suspect we are literally evolved to both want to express our values and to defer to the society when our values are rejected with sufficient clarity. So other things being equal it's better to help people express them via some vote.
And I don't think indirection is as hard to sell people on as you expect. The trick is just to frame it as increasing our control/options not limiting them. I think the natural way to do that is via transferable voting interests. Ideally started in the primary system.
Since lots of people don't vote in primaries telling people they can assign their voting interests to some institution/respected politician/activist group (ACLU, Greenpeace) who will assign their vote feels like an expansion of democracy. But the effect is to both allow people to more clearly express the values they care about (especially if you can divide up your vote into pieces) while at the same time moving the actual work of optimizing for those values with a smaller group of full timers.
I don't think people mind if they assign their vote and their trusted institution tells them "we know it's not our ideal canidate but an unelected canidate gets nothing done" as long as they personally feel they expressed their values via their choice of vote assignment.
What's the advantage of transferable votes over transferable funds? An advantage of the latter, as I stress in the post, is that you avoid artificial thresholds around the 50% mark. I think trusted intermediaries could still bargain / co-ordinate to address the problems you raised in your first comment.
It's that transferable votes still appoint someone/some group to do the hard task of hammering out a complete budget (not to mention non-budgetary concerns) that trades off competing needs appropriately.
Transferable funds make that virtually impossible.
The transfered votes effectively create a mini-legislature whose members are incentivized to compromise (if you refuse to do that they'll make the deal with someone else to pass a bill/choose a canidate). You have common knowledge there that failing to compromise means no one gets what they want.
Transferable funds creates the opposite incentives. Instead of the vote holders who are less willing to compromise ending up outside the majority coalition the fund holders who are less willing to compromise keep all their funds for their unique goals while the others fund the less sexy/widely seen as important.
And voters themselves just can't possibly devote enough time to actually work out the optimal funding ratios for space exploration versus NIH versus helping the poor even to order of magnitude (time and too big a coordination problem).
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Besides why would that look any different that the utterly disastrous distribution of charity money given in cash now? A bit to givewell but alot to dogs with sad music and paying people to uselessly raise awareness or pay themselves giant salaries.
Interesting! I was thinking that there would be some incentive for the holdouts on either extreme to coordinate on "moral trades" that better advance their collective goals (it's hardly a one-shot prisoner's dilemma, after all), but it would be interesting to hear a game theorist map it out.
(I agree that voters themselves would generally be pretty hopeless, but that's why many would naturally want to transfer their budgetary power to a trusted intermediary, like I donate to EA funds rather than trying to work things out myself.)
Why would it look different to conventional charity? Partly because people currently rely on the govt to fund core public services (including altruistic obligations like foreign aid), freeing up charity to be more "personal" and frivolous. I think there would be more of a sense of civic duty to use one's "civic voucher" (as we could call it) wisely, much as many people feel a sense of civic duty towards voting responsibly.
Still, your counterargument that the centralization of voting is helpful for *forcing* coordination is an interesting suggestion that I hadn't come across before. Thanks for pointing it out!
Yeah, there's certainly a strong general case for indirect over direct democracy on those sorts of grounds. I've just grown skeptical that our representatives are actually any better. (I agree that stronger, less "democratic" party structures would also be an improvement, but popular ideology is so deeply opposed to that that I don't see much of a pathway to implementation. It's easier to imagine legislators passing a "charity vouchers" bill, by contrast.)
Part of my thought was that people vote expressively *because* it is so "cheap" for them to do so (cf. Caplan on rational irrationality). They can easily ignore tradeoffs, express their support for everything bagels, and generally be stupid and obnoxious, without any noticeable (to them) downside. Charity vouchers would force people to confront those trade-offs. Security hawks could make their case for why people need to choose to invest more in the military (or whatever). I imagine their pitch would be appealing to many conservative men, at the very least. But yeah, in general people would need to become more comfortable with instrumental reasoning for this to work at scale.
Given all the uncertainties, I wouldn't recommend immediately decentralizing 100% of the federal budget in this way. As I note at the end of the post, the experiment could start small, and gradually build up from there if it seemed to be working out OK.
That's a very interesting approach -- raise the price of expressive voting for people -- that I'd once have been a fan of but I've come to the conclusion that people -- indeed society -- actually get something of value from expressive voting.
It's just not feasible for even highly educated, intelligent and very motivated individuals to reach an informed deciscion on even a relatively small fraction of the problems/issues we need government to handle (w/o considering coordination) so we really should want some way that we can communicate what our values are so agents/politicians can do that for us. Besides, I suspect we are literally evolved to both want to express our values and to defer to the society when our values are rejected with sufficient clarity. So other things being equal it's better to help people express them via some vote.
And I don't think indirection is as hard to sell people on as you expect. The trick is just to frame it as increasing our control/options not limiting them. I think the natural way to do that is via transferable voting interests. Ideally started in the primary system.
Since lots of people don't vote in primaries telling people they can assign their voting interests to some institution/respected politician/activist group (ACLU, Greenpeace) who will assign their vote feels like an expansion of democracy. But the effect is to both allow people to more clearly express the values they care about (especially if you can divide up your vote into pieces) while at the same time moving the actual work of optimizing for those values with a smaller group of full timers.
I don't think people mind if they assign their vote and their trusted institution tells them "we know it's not our ideal canidate but an unelected canidate gets nothing done" as long as they personally feel they expressed their values via their choice of vote assignment.
What's the advantage of transferable votes over transferable funds? An advantage of the latter, as I stress in the post, is that you avoid artificial thresholds around the 50% mark. I think trusted intermediaries could still bargain / co-ordinate to address the problems you raised in your first comment.
It's that transferable votes still appoint someone/some group to do the hard task of hammering out a complete budget (not to mention non-budgetary concerns) that trades off competing needs appropriately.
Transferable funds make that virtually impossible.
The transfered votes effectively create a mini-legislature whose members are incentivized to compromise (if you refuse to do that they'll make the deal with someone else to pass a bill/choose a canidate). You have common knowledge there that failing to compromise means no one gets what they want.
Transferable funds creates the opposite incentives. Instead of the vote holders who are less willing to compromise ending up outside the majority coalition the fund holders who are less willing to compromise keep all their funds for their unique goals while the others fund the less sexy/widely seen as important.
And voters themselves just can't possibly devote enough time to actually work out the optimal funding ratios for space exploration versus NIH versus helping the poor even to order of magnitude (time and too big a coordination problem).
--
Besides why would that look any different that the utterly disastrous distribution of charity money given in cash now? A bit to givewell but alot to dogs with sad music and paying people to uselessly raise awareness or pay themselves giant salaries.
Interesting! I was thinking that there would be some incentive for the holdouts on either extreme to coordinate on "moral trades" that better advance their collective goals (it's hardly a one-shot prisoner's dilemma, after all), but it would be interesting to hear a game theorist map it out.
(I agree that voters themselves would generally be pretty hopeless, but that's why many would naturally want to transfer their budgetary power to a trusted intermediary, like I donate to EA funds rather than trying to work things out myself.)
Why would it look different to conventional charity? Partly because people currently rely on the govt to fund core public services (including altruistic obligations like foreign aid), freeing up charity to be more "personal" and frivolous. I think there would be more of a sense of civic duty to use one's "civic voucher" (as we could call it) wisely, much as many people feel a sense of civic duty towards voting responsibly.
Still, your counterargument that the centralization of voting is helpful for *forcing* coordination is an interesting suggestion that I hadn't come across before. Thanks for pointing it out!