[MG] The Will Of The People

[Scott Raney]

Been busy restructuring the Matchism Manifesto (www.matchism.org) to
reflect what I've figured out from trying to implement the
decisionmaking system (proxyfor.me). The biggest change is a shift
away from having a "Goals" section to something more general that can
be used both for the proxy matching system and for the proposal
writers to gain some insight as to what The People consider to be the
domains that need more work, and in which direction. I'm calling it an
assessment of The Will Of The People. I used to call it "ideology"
until I realized that what we need is a more general concept than
that. I'm also starting to realize that there is considerable overlap
between this and the budgeting process, but haven't yet figured out
how to (or even whether to try to) combine these things.

Here's the list so far. Have I left anything important out?
Regards,
Scott

Please share your perception of how their current government manages
the resources (time, money, attention) it expends on these items, on a
scale of 1 to 7, with 1 being "Way too little", through "About right",
to 7 being "Way too much":

Immigrants and refugees
Children's health and welfare
Minimizing degree of economic inequality
Education
Crime and loss prevention (via police and criminal courts)
National security/defense
Acquisition, maintenance, and preservation of parks and open space
Economic incentives and protections for corporations
Infrastructure development/maintenance (transportation, utilities, etc.)
Scientific and technological research
Minimizing government spending and deficits/debt/taxes
Trade policy and protecting local jobs
An independent press/media
Protecting the environment
Economic protection for individuals (via regulation, and civil courts)
Increasing general happiness and decreasing level of stress or fear
Regulation of businesses
Enforcing moral codes (e.g. against drug use)
Supporting churches and organized religion
Improving health care access, quality, and efficiency
Maximizing individual economic efficiency (tax rates, commute times, etc.)
Disaster recovery, loss prevention, and infrastructure resilience
Mental illness and addiction treatment
Maximizing the median standard of living
Preservation of other cultures and traditions
Increasing overall economic efficiency or GDP
Improving individual health, safety, and/or lifespan
Age and benefit level for retirement
Managing per capita resource consumption (energy, land, minerals, etc.)
Ensuring a minimum standard of living (housing and wage supplements, etc.)
Diplomacy and international aid
Compensating for individuals with disabilities

[Ned Conner]

Quick general comments (just for the record):

This approach to enabling/empowering democracy seems to me to be too
"purely abstract" to be effective, for a combination of two reasons:

1. When a proposal is "purely abstract" (as all of the line-items are),
it is left to the executive to decide (undemocratically) what the
concrete manifestations of the abstractions will be.

2. Those executives will be operating under to the Rules For Rulers
(beyond any concretely effective vote-driven democratic control).

A further problem is that the concrete projections of the purely
abstract categories will hopelessly overlap the abstract categories,
which will exponentially increase the "wiggle room" that the executives
will have.

And, in voting such a list, I cannot decide how much budget to allocate
to each item without knowing exactly in detail *how* the money will be
spent.

    For example, if money allotted to Education is going to be spent in
support of the factory-school classroom teacher model that is currently
dominant, then I will vote that zero money be directed to Education. But
if the money will be spent on developing and making freely available a
really good online curriculum (that will have a near-zero marginal cost
per student), that has a "Tutoring On-Line On-Call" system available to
deal with potholes in the curriculum, then I will want to vote big bucks
to Education.

I look forward to reading the newly revised Matchism Manifesto (when I
can get to it), and am very happy to see that your project continues to
progress.

Post by Scott Raney
Been busy restructuring the Matchism Manifesto (www.matchism.org) to
reflect what I've figured out from trying to implement the
decisionmaking system (proxyfor.me). The biggest change is a shift
away from having a "Goals" section to something more general that can
be used both for the proxy matching system and for the proposal
writers to gain some insight as to what The People consider to be the
domains that need more work, and in which direction. I'm calling it an
assessment of The Will Of The People. I used to call it "ideology"
until I realized that what we need is a more general concept than
that. I'm also starting to realize that there is considerable overlap
between this and the budgeting process, but haven't yet figured out
how to (or even whether to try to) combine these things.
Here's the list so far. Have I left anything important out?
   Regards,
     Scott
Please share your perception of how their current government manages
the resources (time, money, attention) it expends on these items, on a
scale of 1 to 7, with 1 being "Way too little", through "About right",
Immigrants and refugees
Children's health and welfare
Minimizing degree of economic inequality
Education
Crime and loss prevention (via police and criminal courts)
National security/defense
Acquisition, maintenance, and preservation of parks and open space
Economic incentives and protections for corporations
Infrastructure development/maintenance (transportation, utilities, etc.)
Scientific and technological research
Minimizing government spending and deficits/debt/taxes
Trade policy and protecting local jobs
An independent press/media
Protecting the environment
Economic protection for individuals (via regulation, and civil courts)
Increasing general happiness and decreasing level of stress or fear
Regulation of businesses
Enforcing moral codes (e.g. against drug use)
Supporting churches and organized religion
Improving health care access, quality, and efficiency
Maximizing individual economic efficiency (tax rates, commute times, etc.)
Disaster recovery, loss prevention, and infrastructure resilience
Mental illness and addiction treatment
Maximizing the median standard of living
Preservation of other cultures and traditions
Increasing overall economic efficiency or GDP
Improving individual health, safety, and/or lifespan
Age and benefit level for retirement
Managing per capita resource consumption (energy, land, minerals, etc.)
Ensuring a minimum standard of living (housing and wage supplements, etc.)
Diplomacy and international aid
Compensating for individuals with disabilities
_______________________________________________
Start : a mailing list of the Metagovernment project
http://www.metagovernment.org/
http://metagovernment.org/mailman/listinfo/start_metagovernment.org

[Ned Conner]

(My bad -- my email client tricked me, and sent my email not to the list)


-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: [MG] The Will Of The People
Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2018 11:53:12 -0600

Post by Ned Conner
This approach to enabling/empowering democracy seems to me to be too

As opposed to what we have now, where not only does the executive
branch not know what we want, but *we* don't even know what we
(collectively) want and so there's no way to even judge the quality of
the management?

Post by Ned Conner
1. When a proposal is "purely abstract" (as all of the line-items are),
it is left to the executive to decide (undemocratically) what the
concrete manifestations of the abstractions will be.

Not exactly: Individual proposals still have to voted on by The
People. Again, the main purposes of this list are to find proxy
matches and so that the managers can use this information when
creating new policy proposals and budget items.

Post by Ned Conner
2. Those executives will be operating under to the Rules For Rulers
(beyond any concretely effective vote-driven democratic control).
http://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs

It's a nice story, but unfortunately really only describes the most
simplistic and primitive form of power, kleptocracy, which is seen
only in the very poorest and least developed places like Venezuela and
North Korea, notably excluding Russia which is a special case because
of the unique one-time ability for Putin to distribute massive wealth
in state assets to his cronies (or people willing to become his
cronies). Far more powerful, and far more common, is rule based on
ideology which that video didn't address *at all*: Hitler, Stalin,
Mao, Castro, and even wannabe dictators like Trump and Erdogan didn't
rely primarily on any sort of monetary compensation for themselves or
their "keys" to achieve their goals, but gained and maintained power
by exploiting ideology in their "keys" and in The People (particularly
nationalism, but also including happy talk about
communism/fascism/some religion or other/etc.) The solution, of
course, is not to hope for benevolent dictators, but instead to
severely restrict the power of the executive branch, including having
a very simple way to remove them (such as when their popularity drops
below that of some obvious replacement candidate, as described in
http://www.matchism.org/managers/)

Post by Ned Conner
And, in voting such a list, I cannot decide how much budget to allocate
to each item without knowing exactly in detail *how* the money will be
spent.

Right, which is why I'm inclined *not* to try to build the budgeting
system on top of this assessment. Besides the relative size issue you
mention, there is also a big problem with the lack of a one to one
mapping of items in the two domains. For example under the "minimizing
inequality" heading one would have to include a wide range of budget
items from job training to wage and housing subsidies to tax rates and
even what is taxed. While it'd be nice to have simplistic items like
these at least as category headings, it may have to suffice to have
the high-level overview of the budgeting system mirror something like
the organizational structure of the executive branch.

Post by Ned Conner
For example, if money allotted to Education is going to be spent in
support of the factory-school classroom teacher model that is currently
dominant, then I will vote that zero money be directed to Education. But
if the money will be spent on developing and making freely available a
really good online curriculum (that will have a near-zero marginal cost
per student), that has a "Tutoring On-Line On-Call" system available to
deal with potholes in the curriculum, then I will want to vote big bucks
to Education.

Right: This is a job for proposals and maybe budgeting, not for a
simple "will of the people" assessment. But maybe this also means that
this particular line item should be tweaked, perhaps like I did with
that other big-budget/high-conflict item, health care:
Improving health care access, quality, and efficiency

Post by Ned Conner
I look forward to reading the newly revised Matchism Manifesto (when I
can get to it), and am very happy to see that your project continues to
progress.

Next up is beta 3 for proxyfor.me. This run is going to be based on
local proposals (from cities in Colorado), and will include
authentication, at least for voters in Colorado: I've ordered the
state-wide voter database and the state has an on-line form where you
can look up your your ID and so we can use that for validation rather
than having to deal with sending out postcards to every voter. This
should work well for testing purposes, although I know it's going to
be tough to extend this design to other localities, at least until The
People start demanding some transparency: In some states (notably
Texas) there is no statewide database and so basically no one actually
knows what things like participation rates and party affiliation are.
Instead you have to contact and pay a fee to *each county* to build up
the database yourself which near as I can tell no one has done. My
guess as to why it's like that is that this design facilitates
gerrymandering because it makes it practically impossible for any
outsider to run their own analysis on where the district boundary
lines are (Texas, perhaps not coincidentally, being one of the most
gerrymandered states in the country). In other states the buying
database is prohibitively expensive (it's $50 in Colorado, but $500 in
Oregon, for example) or there are other restrictions on getting it.
Regards,
Scott

On 7/21/2018 6:14 AM, Scott Raney wrote:
(snip)

Post by Ned Conner
Please share your perception of how their current government manages
the resources (time, money, attention) it expends on these items, on a
scale of 1 to 7, with 1 being "Way too little", through "About right",
Immigrants and refugees
Children's health and welfare
Minimizing degree of economic inequality
Education
Crime and loss prevention (via police and criminal courts)
National security/defense
Acquisition, maintenance, and preservation of parks and open space
Economic incentives and protections for corporations
Infrastructure development/maintenance (transportation, utilities, etc.)
Scientific and technological research
Minimizing government spending and deficits/debt/taxes
Trade policy and protecting local jobs
An independent press/media
Protecting the environment
Economic protection for individuals (via regulation, and civil courts)
Increasing general happiness and decreasing level of stress or fear
Regulation of businesses
Enforcing moral codes (e.g. against drug use)
Supporting churches and organized religion
Improving health care access, quality, and efficiency
Maximizing individual economic efficiency (tax rates, commute times, etc.)
Disaster recovery, loss prevention, and infrastructure resilience
Mental illness and addiction treatment
Maximizing the median standard of living
Preservation of other cultures and traditions
Increasing overall economic efficiency or GDP
Improving individual health, safety, and/or lifespan
Age and benefit level for retirement
Managing per capita resource consumption (energy, land, minerals, etc.)
Ensuring a minimum standard of living (housing and wage supplements, etc.)
Diplomacy and international aid
Compensating for individuals with disabilities