the other issue with prediction markets is that we already have a wide range of ways to invest based on our beliefs about the future, eg. not becoming an apprentice buggy whip crafter after the invention of the automobile.
even betting on civilisation collapse can be done by stockpiling supplies or what have you.
Or to put it another way, Argumate, Capitalism is ludicrously powerful, and I’m searching for a way to do that for government but with a different utility function.
I think the fundamental problem is this assumes that government’s role is to search the space of possible policies looking for optimal outcomes, when in fact it’s a formalised way of handling power struggles and dividing up the spoils with less bloodshed.
I still think it can be improved to behave more like the former. Governments routinely spend over 30% of GDP in nations with GDPs in the trillions. Improving them even small amounts could yield huge dividends for human civilization, not to mention allocate the spoils in a way that makes them worth more.
Large gains are probably possible (based on the existence of states like Singapore). It wouldn’t even have to come with lower taxes. We could just buy another five hundred billion dollars in social goods. Seeing all sorts of raindance policies and wasteful policies is aggravating.
I think it runs afoul of so many measurement, externality, long tail, and other issues that what you’re going to get is a mess, especially if you try it on everything at once.
It’s part of a general vein of policies that don’t have to be implemented all at once.
For instance, we could start by requiring legislators to make non-binding predictions about the legislation they pass when it’s passed, with specific, measurable outcomes, like “the annual murder rate will decline by 3-5% with 80% confidence”. No differences in pay, no firing, just a formal record to compare to. It might not sound like much, but it’s a step towards explaining the expected outcomes of massive bills in clearer language that can be verified.
Then if that works, we can expand it and start awarding compensation based on the outcomes. (Although I admittedly have been thinking about a far deeper version where percentile score in a legislative outcome prediction market is part of a formula that determines public funding of parties, with lots of delegated voting and other things.)
Other options to improve governance include automatically putting sunset provisions in bills and various regulations so that they don’t just keep accumulating and accumulating if they aren’t actually that politically important. Again, small step that can be reversed.
If people weren’t such idiots, we could get cities to volunteer to test various policies like basic income or wage subsidies before national rollouts instead of just kinda assuming they’d work because it’s morally virtuous without successively larger scales of testing.
We could probably also pay more to legislators, like they do in Singapore. It was only about $250 million or something to give all the congressmen $500k-$1M salaries, plus another $30M for the President. For a bit more, we could pay them significant pensions and forbid them from working for anyone but the government afterwards. If it saves the US economy well under 1% of GDP (0.0014%?) due to getting a better quality of legislator, it comes out to a net gain. The exact numbers here are less important than the orders of magnitude. Congress has an enormous amount of power over the economy, but they aren’t paid based on that. However, they can use that power to get wealth by converting it via corruption.
There have got to be a hundred things we could do better.
