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Hello darkness my old friend,
1) Visual Of The Week
This image shows the tragedy of the anticommons, or a vetocracy—when too many groups have veto power, nothing gets done. To understand it (in the context of other political mechanisms), let’s apply the Popper Criterion to Politics. 👇
I hope this article shows you the failure modes of political systems—why they sometimes don’t meet the Popper Criterion.
As a reminder, the Popper Criterion states that the long-term health of any system is based on its ability to remove bad instances from it.
In politics, the Popper Criterion is known as "democratic accountability." People should be able to remove bad leaders through a democratic election. Without this ability, authoritarians like Putin stay in power even if the people want to remove him. But with democratic accountability, governments can remove ineffective or corrupt actors.
Democratic accountability is one of three parts of Fukuyama's three pillars of a stable state:
To simplify it, we can combine Rule of Law and Democratic Accountability into a single pillar, Accountability (both laws and elections keep power accountable). It then becomes a clear tension. On one side: is the state strong and modern enough to make decisions that benefit the general public? On the other: if it's not doing well, is there a way to keep it accountable to the public?
I like to think of the strength of the state as the size of the arrow and accountability as the direction of the arrow.
As an example, China has an extremely strong state, but is not very democratically accountable. India is quite democratically accountable, but their state can't get much done.
The US is in an interesting predicament as well. Sometimes accountability is accountable to the wrong metrics. Democracies are often controlled by charismatic leaders, not necessarily the "best" leaders:
A system that routinely submits control over the largest, most deadly enterprises on earth to the winner of popularity contests between charismatic demagogues is bound to suffer for it in the long run.
FiveThirtyEight shows how the Republican Party in the US is no longer accountable to a majority of Americans. They can meet the desires of folks in small rural states (a minority), while still winning elections. This makes the signals from democratic accountability less strong:
Essentially, what this means is the Republican Party can go off the rails without really suffering any immediate electoral costs. They can win the presidency without winning the popular vote; they can control the Senate without representing the majority of voters. And so the self-correcting mechanism of American democracy—elections—is not working, because they’re not getting the signal that what they’re doing isn’t a winning strategy—because it is a winning strategy.
The GOP in America isn't accountable enough. Got it.
However, America also has a problem of too much accountability. This is the problem of vetocracy or the tragedy of the anti-commons. It happens when too many people have a voice over a given decision. Then the government becomes paralyzed and can't get anything done.
There's another failure mode here, what Mancur Olson calls Incentivized Minorities, Indifferent Majorities or what Taleb calls Minority Rule:
Small groups (like energy incumbents) are easier to organize than large groups (all Americans who would benefit from nuclear energy) because their direct incentives are greater. Benefits are concentrated and costs are diffused, so by acting legitimately through democratic channels interest groups will secure protection even at the expense of the greater public. The result is that “society, acting collectively through its democratic institutions” sends a clear message: “We don’t want these things.”
The generalized form of this is called Selectorate Theory. It states that a government only needs to be accountable to the "winning coalition." In a dictatorship, the winning coalition is just the dictator. The people don't have a voice. In an authoritarian state, the winning coalition might be the army and the executives of oil fields. In a democracy, the winning coalition is hopefully 51% of the population.
In the image below (from CGPGrey), we can see a democracy on the left vs. an authoritarian state on the right.
On the left, the government has a strong civil society and an educated populace which leads to lots of taxable revenue (the bottom-to-top arrow on the far left). These taxes then get redistributed in a programmatic way to both the people directly and to the winning coalitions, which represent those groups (unions, companies, etc.).
On the right, the government gets all of their income from natural resources like oil, gold, and diamonds. They give a tiny bit of money to the people but mostly want to keep the population uneducated so they can't rise up. Instead, most of the money goes to the winning coalition of the police, army, and maybe some rich tycoons.
We want systems to look like democracies (the left image), but it’s understandable when places with lots of natural resources (Venezuela, oil-rich countries in the Middle East) turn into authoritarians (the right image).
Th democratic accountability of modern democracies gives us the ability to express voice in a political system. Or, we can simply exit the system entirely. Don't like the US? Move to Canada. Then maybe Canada eventually outcompetes the US. This is a form of meta accountability, where the accountability comes from outside competition. Like
Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty also adds a third variable, loyalty. Loyalty modifies whether someone wants to express voice instead of exiting. For example, I have some patriotism for America, so my loyalty makes me less likely to exit.
Loyalty points us towards a crucial concept in political systems, legitimacy. A political system is legitimate if the populace has faith in the system even when specific policies don't go their way. Legitimacy is a function of a having a strong state that is also accountable.
It is a long line that the people trust to go in the right direction.
Hope this piece (Popper Criterion For Politics) helped you understand how democracies can create legitimacy through action and accountability.
LINKS
1) Future Proof: The opportunity to transform the UK's resilience to extreme risks.
I love reports like this that turn an abstract concept (x-risk mitigation) into government policy. It’s always fun to see Future Us longtermism manifest in institutions (like Finland’s Committee For The Future, founded in 1993!).
2) America's scarcity mindset: Is our society turning into a zero-sum competition for survival?
Noah Smith clearly describes one of our biggest issues—the creation of artificial scarcity. We’re doing this in housing, education, and immigration.
They’re all intesely frustrating, but housing is especially so (dat SF lyfe).
The Contradiction At The Heart Of Housing Policy shows why this artificial housing scarcity is created:
US housing policy claims to seek both affordable homes for all and also widespread wealth-building through homeownership. But these goals are fundamentally at odds.
You cannot have an economy with both abundant affordable housing and appreciating home values.
You cannot have affordable stable homes for all and also a universal wealth-building opportunity through homeownership—a “pathway to the middle class.”
You just can’t.
Homeownership only grows your wealth if home prices rise, and rising home prices make housing less affordable. Affordability or wealth building? You have to pick.
We need to get rid of housing-as-equity and only have housing-as-commodity. We need abundant housing!
3) Epic visualization of 1M soccer passes:
4) Babylon Bee: Texas Governor Signs Executive Order Donating City Of Austin To California
5) The Onion: Desperate Employer Offers Basic Dignity To Incentivize New Hires
6) Rhys: Dalai Llama "Red Pilled" On Ben Shapiro Show
7) TikTok of the Week. Drum beat based on asking Siri “what’s 1 trillion raised to the tenth power?”
JOBS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Primavera de Filippi is hiring ethnographers to understand crypto governance.
Pledge 1% helps companies pledge to self-tax their profits. They’re hiring a new Executive Director.
ETHGlobal’s HackMoney is June 18-July 9th. Register now!
The Community Infrastructure Fund for Mutual Aid. $25k-$50k grants for building infrastructure for mutual aid. From Omidyar. Apply by July 15.
New Public is looking for a part-time staff writer to cover digital public spaces.
Future of Life Institute announces $25M in Shiba Inu Grants and Vitalik Buterin Fellowships for x-risk and global coordination. Sign up to their newsletter to stay in the loop.
Special Projects Fellow at Hewlett Foundation.
Full Fact (UK fact-checking org) is looking for media folks to add to their board of trustees.
EVENTS
Oslo Freedom Forum on human rights. Oct 4-5, Miami.
Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience. September 7 - 24, 2021. Online.
Effective Altruist Events Calendar (recurring)
Interintellect Salons (recurring)
The Stoa (recurring)
MUSIC
I know I mentioned it last week, but Bo Burnham’s Inside is one of my favorite pieces of content in the last 5 years. Well worth your 90min, imo.
In this song, he satirizes White Women’s Instagram accounts.
Some of my favorite parts of the special aren’t even songs, like when he pretends to be a Twitch streamer or makes fun of Youtuber reaction videos.
It’s meta and nihilistic and smart and fun and creative all at once.
Hope you have a good week! Warmth, Rhys
If you like this newsletter, check out the online community of systems thinkers that I helped co-found, Roote.
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