I envision a society with lots of mandatory insurance as part of its stealth social safety net and part of pricing in the real cost of recklessness into something people can immediately see.
@remedialaction Although I guess I will add on one more thing, regarding my policy proposals not being “innovative” enough -
I’m an edgy centrist, not a far-right reactionary, extropian, or Anarcho-Lumberjack. My idea of a “cool authoritarian regime” is Singapore, which is noted for being successful, safe, fairly open, and wealthy.
I tend to favor incremental policy rolled out experimentally, which won’t break the economy or be non-reversible. I’m proposing things that I think are likely to actually work, which in some ways means they won’t be so different in kind from existing programs. Revolution is, after all, overrated.
It’s true that in the space of all possible political policies, “ease up on zoning laws, end rent control and issue housing vouchers instead, throw on a tax based on expected new infrastructure required, then let the new housing stock roll in” is not particularly radical or revolutionary, but it’s likely to work and if it fails it isn’t likely to fail catastrophically.
It’s still innovative relative to typical American and European politics, but my goal isn’t to be an innovation-maximizer within the absolute space of all political ideas.
I was half-joking when I suggested that I’d use the statue controversy to remark on how to carry out an imperialistic foreign policy.
But I was half-serious as well.
Nationalism is one of the main drivers of imperialist foreign policy, but it is also one of the primary forms of opposition to the same.
Consider, however, an Empire with a different plan - it wants to spread not its people, nor, per se, its culture, but its ideology. (It may not even consider itself an Empire.)
The thing to do with Nationalist sentiments in other countries, then, is to merge and entangle them with the ideology to be installed (or rather, instilled). For each country, an adapted version of your ideology, fit more closely to the local needs and patterns. Not all countries need to be exactly the same. This allows you to deflect some of the popular will away from direct opposition to your imposed form of government.
This is actually part of why Democracy has had what success it has in its acts of imperialism. (And yes, Democracy as an ideology has a bit of a habit of imperialism, though a lot of that has been driven by America.)
How to interweave them?
Take elements of the local culture that are aesthetic or which are not in opposition to your ideology, and make them official and protected. (For instance, you probably want people to be timely, so if being chronically late is one of the local things, you need to get rid of that. On the other hand, architectural style can generally vary without crushing the GDP.) Pick various writers, historical works, and so on. Tie your ideology into the history of the region, as part of its self-narrative. Elevate local historical thinkers that can be described as proto-your-ideology. Build statues of locals that exemplify the positive qualities you want your ideology to represent.
You must create a new national mythology as a legitimization for the new government.
Over time, if executed well, your transplanted ideology will become part of the socially legitimized history of the country and thus gain the protection that affords.
In the meantime, most countries you could conceivably do this in are going to be relatively underdeveloped. Take advantage of the physical security you can manage to impose in order to pursue a long-term program of development.
Borrow a page from Milton Keynes and have the price of the development paid for by speculating on the values of the land to be developed. If you don’t drop the ball on this, the country is going to undergo a 7-10% annual rate of economic growth for some years. Investors would normally be skittish due to concerns about corruption and physical security, but you have the power to calm those risks.
The development doesn’t have to take place across the whole country, but a critical mass is needed so that future development will be self-propelling, and local talent must be trained (in your universities) so that it can continue to operate in the future.
Now I know this sounds incredibly expensive, and of course it is, but the goal here is to turn those countries permanently to your ideology and increase your ideology’s share of total global resource output - and that is, in itself, very valuable.
(Also, your pension funds can ride that 7-10% annual growth as your corporations are able to buy up assets at low prices.)
It also requires a great deal of political will. Will that, in Afghanistan and Iraq, America did not have.
The simultaneous cowardice, foolhardiness, and ignorance of the American political establishment and voters made for a military campaign that was not only highly aggressive, but failed to accomplish all that much for all the blood it spilled.
Something more ideologically imperialistic that sought to convert Iraq and Afghanistan into true, developed democracies, with all the basic underpinnings that required, would have been better. Alternatively, not going at all would have many advantages. Instead we get the worst of both worlds - a willingness to invade without a willingness to see a conversion through to the end, fueled by the naive belief that liberal democracy is the natural state of humanity and will flourish in all soils if it is simply unleashed.
There are, of course, far crueler ways to expand dominion if one has different goals. I will not go over them here. The age of such empires is over, now, and for the better.
One of the weirdest policy proposals is where you put an expiration date on cash, to encourage spending.
ooh I’ve played with that one, it also fits well with some basic income proposals
inflation
All the kool kids nowadays are talking about negative interest rates.
They’re not yet talking about forming quasi-autonomous state agencies that compete for assignment of implementing government programs, with contracts that can be renewed, but
Shhhh, they aren’t supposed to know about it yet. I only know because I’m from the future.
Anonymous asked:
If funding could be secured, it would be possible to start a think tank, because there is a lot of work to be done. These ideas are exotic, they escape the Overton Window by travelling orthogonal to it, but they have to be refined, tested, and experimented with.
The goal would be to synthesize a new scientific art of organizational design and policy incentivization from a diverse group of fields, including political science, economics (particularly behavioral economics), psychology, philosophy, and mathematics. Most existing organizations and politics are running on pre-digital organizational technology, and very few people even think of “organizational technology” as even being a concept.
Various proposals would be drafted, analyzed, refined, and then simulated using human testers (against competing speculative policies) before being refined again cyclically and suggested for institutions smaller than the US Federal Government. To improve efficiency, various competing domain experts would be hired for short periods of time.
Actually improving governance in the United States would require doing things that deeply offend both the Democratic and Republican parties and which are at odds with their ideological pre-commitments. Formation of a political party is right out due to the First Past the Post System which makes success with policies that are only inspiring to the kinds of people that read this blog extremely improbable. Policy advocacy should therefore focus on attacking avenues which are not sufficiently defended by partisan trench warfare, municipalities, and shifting politicians on individual issues through lobbying and electoral guides, functioning as a Special Interest Group.
Until then, one can follow this strange political time travel blog and dream of the future, if one wishes, in addition to whatever political activity one normally carries out.
Anonymous asked:
I want the DCOs hungry enough for money to [edit: make better policy], but not so ludicrously hungry that they’ll work hard to sabotage all the metrics and cause the state itself to become delusional.
Does that make sense?
Therefore, while their pay must be coupled to their performance, it needs a layer of indirection. They bet with a fake currency that can’t be directly converted into real money, and they are paid based on their overall performance over multiple bets, which is unlikely to rise or fall quite so sharply that one of their personnel will freak out and cause an incident of corruption.
There may be other ways to accomplish this goal.
One thing I keep wondering about is the question of “What’s going to happen in the next economic downturn?“ We’re almost 10 years from the last one, and there are all sorts of possible ways the next one could happen. Given that we haven’t really recovered from the last one, what’s going to happen after that? I think it’s in the crisis that the policy for the next economic era is going to made, so what’s it going to be?
mitigatedchaos: Good question. That’s why I keep chanting “wage subsidies” at all of you.
Yes, the unemployed will be very grateful for wage subsidies.
Combined with a much lower minimum wage, it moves a lot of people from “unemployable” to “employable and making enough money to live off of”.
Others should be covered by some sort of disability scheme (which won’t eliminate eligibility for the wage subsidies). Children, of course, are to be supported by their parents and the various other child protection systems we need.
At a low enough minimum wage, but with subsidies so the pay is actually reasonable, the economy will find work for these people to do that isn’t digging holes and filling them back up again.
Anonymous asked:
esoteric-hoxhaism answered:
what
I tried to figure this one out, but I don’t get it either, and I think about applying insurance to everything.
learn-tilde-ath asked:
This seems reasonable to me on first reading.
My late night tired concern is that the census might not update the house seats fast enough to account for changes in policy or something.
It could act as a pressure against the politicians to be Tough On Crime, or at least for them to use whatever means they can to try to strip their opposition from voting. On the other hand, I’m not sure I want certain convicted criminals voting until they are, at least, out of prison again.
I may return to this later.
A. Outwards-spiraling iterative development across multiple successive levels.
Among key factors is that the experiments must have ways for experiment members to act contrary to the wishes of the pro-policy members, or to move sideways within the model as it were. Additionally, experiment members should be rewarded with real-world money to drive an incentive other than just appearing nice/virtuous. To achieve this adversarial nature, the anti-policy forces must be involved in planning or approving the experiment.
A framework of methods for game-theoretical defections (or however you want to put it) could be developed, since in the real world, “cheat and kill the guy” is an option in many scenarios.
While not strictly going to capture every way that a policy could go wrong, this should act as a series of sanity checks for preventing some of the worst policies, and highlight promising policies.
B. Proportional Block Grant Committee.
Have the national government collect some share of national tax revenue for conducting policy experiments. Since most experimental policies would be de facto subsidies relative to other states, issue it to states proportional to some factor like population or size (or maybe population times size). This means all the states are subsidized about the same, at least in terms of the policy spending, depending on implementation.
Use block grants awarded in such a way as to make it difficult to just use the money to offset tax cuts. Generally, give experiments to the subnational governments that most want to attempt them, since those same governments will be less likely to sabotage the experimental policies.
C. Internal migration is an experimental result.
Yes, putting a UBI in a province might result in people migrating to that province to freeload off it. Or it might result in taxpayers fleeing. Alternatively, it might not.
However, unless your country is going to ban emigration and immigration, this is actually important information, as are shifts in jobs, building, etc across the economy so long as your country must compete in the global economy.
None of this will be perfect, but it should be feasible to gather a good harvest of information.
On Wednesday, a federal judge was told that while Paramount Pictures and CBS have produced a “limited number” of Star Trek television episodes and films, “they do not not own a copyright to the idea of Star Trek, or the Star Trekuniverse as a whole.”
The proposition comes from Alec Peters’ Axanar Productions, which put out on YouTube a 20-minute “mockumentary” titled Prelude to Axanar and was in the midst of pursuing a feature-length version touted as a professional-quality Star Trek fan film before being hit with a copyright lawsuit. The litigation survived an initial motion to dismiss, and despite some hopes expressed by Star Trek Beyond director Justin Lin that all this would go away, Paramount and CBS are marching forward in their lawsuit.
Also of interest: Peters attempted to meet with Netflix to produce a Star Trek show.
One of the challenges of copyright is that it applies to works that are, for many people, part of their formative experiences.
Not that the alternative is better, but we could probably stop Disney expanding the copyright laws for so long if we made it have a shorter period which was renewed by creating derivative works. (Star Trek (as a franchise) would still be copyrighted because they keep making it.)
