Proposals for better forms of government

Getting a fundamentally new form of government that is in a different league to democracy working would drastically improve our lives – if succesful. For transhumanists, getting futarchy or something like it working ought to be a very high priority, because better decisionmaking will naturally favor Transhumanist technologies like life-extension, mind uploading and safe superintelligence. This is an area where I think a small group can have a massive impact if, and only if, they play their cards right.

Links: transhumangoodness.blogspot.com / news.bbc.co.uk

Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs

This short “manifesto” describes a new form of government. In “futarchy,” we would vote on values, but bet on beliefs. Elected representatives would formally define and manage an after-the-fact measurement of national welfare, while market speculators would say which policies they expect to raise national welfare.

Democracy seems better than autocracy (i.e., kings and dictators), but it still has problems. There are today vast differences in wealth among nations, and we can not attribute most of these differences to either natural resources or human abilities. Instead, much of the difference seems to be that the poor nations (many of which are democracies) are those that more often adopted dumb policies, policies which hurt most everyone in the nation. And even rich nations frequently adopt such policies.

These policies are not just dumb in retrospect; typically there were people who understood a lot about such policies and who had good reasons to disapprove of them beforehand. It seems hard to imagine such policies being adopted nearly as often if everyone knew what such “experts” knew about their consequences. Thus familiar forms of government seem to frequently fail by ignoring the advice of relevant experts (i.e., people who know relevant things).

Links: hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html / en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futarchy