The real reason Futarchists are doomed

post by lc · 2022-04-01T18:37:20.387Z · LW · GW · 2 comments

There are a lot of little ways political leadership is organized differently throughout the world. Looking just at outcomes, states themselves vary widely on a bunch of axes - you have command economies, like North Korea, and market economies, like Singapore and Switzerland. You have nation states with high state capacity, like North Korea, and nation states with low state capacity, like Somalia. And you have states that don't seem to have high per worker productivity, like North Korea...

But if you really look at how political leadership is chosen, there are only really two ways people govern. On the one hand you have representative republics, where citizens meet at a regular cycle to discuss and select rules by some kind of majority vote. On the other, you have autocracy, where a select group of individuals rule indefinitely and with relatively little checks on power, fighting (maybe bloodlessly) amongst themselves when any given ruler dies for the privilege. The quality of life of their citizens vary wildly and lots of the countries of the world must cope with very different cultural, economic, and geopolitical circumstances. Despite this, the means by which they do so tend to be mostly the same. 

This is curious. There's not a whole lot else that you can say about every country in the world. The fact that things seem to resist being organized any other way should give you pause. 

Despite this, rationalists, at least in my experience, tend to be big fans of alternative forms of policymaking. I don't find this strange. It seems like a natural side effect having a lot of nonstandard policy opinions and nerdily detailed models of economics and public choice that one might think that we need a better system of picking laws, perhaps even a radically different system. After all, even in Norway and Singapore, people seem to manage to commit gross inefficiencies all of the time. Surely there's some better, more ambitious political decision making process that sacrifices normal democracy in favor of jury voting, or prediction markets, or some other mechanism that is less biased towards the whims of the masses who have no particular personal incentive to get things right at the ballot box.

I like many of these proposals, but I am not so optimistic about their implementation. I'll clarify actually - I suppose no one is optimistic, but I have specific reasons to believe they would be very difficult to manage. 

To the daydreamer it may seem like constitutions are just arbitrary rules that civilized nations should be able to follow. Surely, if the founding fathers wrote something reasonable, like selecting members of a jury to vote for president, then it would have happened. If only Robin Hanson had been present at my nation's constitutional convention! However this mindset ignores (at least) one critical defining feature of a country's political organization, one America's founding fathers probably understood even if it wasn't elaborated upon in the transcripts or the document:  

All governments must put anyone capable of overthrowing the current regime in charge. Any government which wants to keep someone else in charge must give them the tools to organize a frightening counter-coup, and/or remove that capability from everyone else.. 

It's a simple rule - and easy to justify. If someone or something - whether it be the military establishment, a political party, a charismatic politician, or a religious leader, can organize a coup to overthrow the system you've designed, then your form of government is essentially reliant on that parties' goodwill. And there is only so much goodwill a nation can chance! If you want a country to last a few hundred years, it's going to have to reckon with someone or something that sooner or later does not hit the cooperate button. In this way the rule is a simple rephrasing of a Nash equilibrium as it applies to states - governments are the way they are because no single group has the power or reason to move them anywhere else. We can immediately see how the autocrat(s) sustain the equilibrium: they kill or oppress anybody else that could rise against them. They take control of the political and economic resources someone could use to mount a campaign. 

Yet even though this principle seems intuitive, what's not obvious to many people is how it applies to liberal democracies. Surely in democracies the point is that no one is able to organize a coup. You might have even thought that it's strange that democracies tend to be so stable. For all their citizens' worrying, the United States has lasted hundreds of years even while using the exact same founding document since 1786. They have managed to sustain strong civil liberties that should, at least under an autocracy like the Soviet Union, be destabilizing and open it up to agitators who want to seize things. Why hasn't our military seized power? There's a vague sense that it wouldn't be very successful, but surely the nation with the most powerful military in the world is somehow tempting fate.

I think the problem here can be resolved by using a different turn of phrase. Americans actually have coups all the time. The point of democracies is that coups are built into the system. They are writ large into the constitution as an indirect form of governance by the actual rulers, who organize their puppets like Joe Biden to be placed in power every few years. Who are these rulers?

Well, in theory, the people. More accurately, the majority coalition. The group that, in a democracy with strong civil liberties - perhaps even a law guaranteeing private ownership of firearms - by numbers should be the group most motivated and capable of overthrowing the government in the first place. The beauty of a democracy is that they don't have to. 

This is the fundamental reason why democracies tend to be so much more stable than autocracies, have more peaceful transitions of power, and have so many fewer civil wars. The democratic system automatically, as a mechanical mechanism, assesses and then gives power to the most powerful political party in the country. The tension that exists when the nash equilibria is out of whack simply isn't there; when it works well, any rivals that are actually capable of organizing a popular uprising to Joe Biden out of power know that the system will grant them that power within a few years. There's no reason for the majority coalition to organize a coup to express that power and take the risk when they can just sit back, relax, and watch that power be handed to them.

This is also the reason why the "more" democratic a nation gets the more it tends to support civil rights and civil liberties. The closer a nation gets to a true democracy, run indirectly by the majority coalition, the more that majority coalition will vote and organize for the tools and means to monitor (and potentially insurrect against) the rogue agents inside its government that want to take power from that majority coalition and give it to some other group. Civil liberties are not just some cultural artifact, present in some countries that "want to fight for them" and not in others; they're also the expression of the majority coalition's will to rule.

It's an imperfect abstraction, but it shows why jury voting (along with the more radical proposals, like statically skewed sortition and futarchy) will never be implemented. The reason reforms like ranked voting are politically plausible is because they can be sold to the majority coalition as a more accurate signal of their will. However, if jury voting for political positions is to be more effective than representative democracy, then ideally it's not necessarily representative of the preferences of the average voter. And if the jury, because of better insights or more time to think or anything else, doesn't vote like the majority coalition does, then that's a problem. The nash equilibrium is now unstable. There's no one, by default anyways, with the personal or psychological motivation inside the 'futarchic' system to oppose the majority coalition when it decides to act against the will of Metaculus.

I have heard of many proposed alternatives to the two systems, some of which I even find preferable, but I have yet to hear one that satisfies this criteria. I suspect it's probably because it's really hard to come up with one. Most people who grow up in liberal democracies in the west are very attached to the ideas of civil liberties, myself included. But civil liberties exist to protect the rights of the majority coalition. If you want your nation to be ruled by some other entity, then you have to do the hard work of figuring out how to ensure the survival of that entity's political power first. 

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