Why Design A New System?
This post on Best Of A Great Lot is a part of a series on the subject of designing a new form of governance. Each piece aims to stand alone, but fits together on the Table of Contents. This is the first post.
I've run into two basic forms of objection to the concept of designing a whole new system of governance.
One common objection takes the form of a general opposition to radical change. Our system has produced amazing outcomes on a historical scale, and much of its wisdom is the equivalent of battle-tested against centuries of mistakes. Through incrementalism we can maintain the many things about our system which work, often even including things we don't really understand why they work. Radicals are often ahistorical and do not seem to care about the many benefits of the world around them that should be preserved.
In many ways I am an incrementalist, too. Incremental change gives us a chance to experiment and learn, and quite frankly, humans aren't made for fast radical change. It's hard on the brain. But at the same time, my main response to incrementalists is simply that their proposal isn't very inspiring. It doesn't offer a grand vision that we're working toward, and it doesn't seem to propose to fix the major problems that we see around us, it just offers us more of (mostly) the same. I'd like to work toward a longer term plan for a much better world rather than pursue changes that feel like blind steps in the dark.
Evolution teaches that incrementalism is incredibly powerful and also prone to getting stuck in blind alleys. If something requires a step backward to make a big leap forward, evolution is unable to take it. Thus we have legacies of earlier decisions that no longer make sense, such as the optic nerve running right through our retina, resulting in a blind spot. No human engineer would propose that as the best design, but it incrementally evolved.
Nevertheless, we should acknowledge that grand visions have, in the past, often led us astray into ideological lands far disconnected from reality. So I will attempt to lay out a grand vision, and then a plan to incrementally test it out. As we learn from it, new grand visions can be engineered from the discoveries.
For others, it seems simply unrealistic or impossible to imagine a better system. Perhaps it's because of the malign influence of Francis Fukuyama's concept of the End of History - the idea that liberal democracy had won, and was the best system, forever. It's worth remembering that this was said in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, and we should perhaps take it no more seriously than we do a sports player who has just won a championship and declares that they will forever be on top. Maybe we're finally ready to let that idea go now that it's harder to tell a coherent story of progress toward inevitably victory. Or perhaps we have difficulty imagining progress on something so fundamental when we live in an age that often feels stagnant and incapable of solving problems.
But let’s dispense with the idea that it’s impossible. It’s common to declare things impossible shortly before they are done.
The New York Times was only one of many who declared human flight impossible shortly before the Wright brothers found success
…We hope that Professor Langley will not put his substantial greatness as a scientist in further peril by continuing to waste his time and the money involved, in further airship experiments. Life is short, and he is capable of services to humanity incomparably greater than can be expected to result from trying to fly….For students and investigators of the Langley type there are more useful employments.
Famed surgeon Alfred Velpeau, writing in 1939 on the subject of anesthesia declared it an impossible dream:
The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it today. ‘Knife’ and ‘pain’ are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient. To this compulsory combination we shall have to adjust ourselves.
A new form of governance is no more and no less than a new form of the organization of people and society. There’s no second law of thermodynamics which prevents it. There’s no reason to think that sufficient inventiveness cannot create something that is better than our current system. Certainly it’s a difficult endeavor, and the fact that it is possible does not imply that any given proposal will actually be an improvement. The shortage of serious and novel proposals is evidence of either our underinvestment into it, or its difficulty. The fact that it is difficult is well matched with how incredibly important it is as a task, given the challenges we regularly face with democracy.
We know that there have been some major changes in our understanding of related aspects of reality since the US democratic system was first imagined in the late 18th century. Governance is fundamentally an aspect of our shared humanity and our efforts to organize and enforce rules, and we’ve learned a lot about both of those things in the last 250 years. When the US Constitution was written, the word psychology didn’t exist. Gustav Fecher and Wilhelm Wundt wouldn’t invent the word for another 70 years, and Freud and Skinner and Pavlov and Piaget and Jung were all decades more after that. Many key discoveries about how human minds work were far in the future.
Other key concepts and fields were young or not yet born, such as economics, incentives, decisionmaking, and systems thinking. The word incentive was around during the American revolution, but it simply meant encouraging or exciting. It had not yet taken on our current meaning. Consider for a moment the story of the Cobra Effect, a kind of perverse incentive whose name derives from 19th century British colonialists running Delhi.
The British government was so concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi it offered a bounty for every dead cobra… unscrupulous entrepreneurs began to breed cobras. When the government became aware of this money making exercise, the programme was scrapped, leaving cobra breeders with thousands of worthless snakes which they then freed, thus increasing the wild cobra population.
Another story from the same time period from the Belgians in the Congo is similar, but more gruesome. These ideas led eventually to the coining of the term “second order effect” and the beginning of an understanding of how difficult it is to write policy in such a way that the incentives are aligned around the desired behavior.
Or consider science as a whole. Science was still a fairly new field of endeavor in the late 18th century. For example, the first blinded experiment happened in 1784, so it’s possible that some of the framers of the US Constitution were aware of it, but unlikely that even scientific wunderkind Benjamin Franklin fully grasped the intricacies of designing good experiments on human systems. Given our current replication crisis, it’s possible we still don’t, but we’ve certainly learned a lot since then. Given all that we have learned, it should be possible for us to imagine new designs which are worth trying.
Ironically, James Madison argued much the same to his fellow citizens in Federalist #10: that we had learned so much that it was worth an attempt to design something new and different. He was right, and I imagine he would say the same of our still greater knowledge today.
The science of politics, however, like most other sciences, has received great improvement. The efficacy of various principles is now well understood, which were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients.
We should expect the task to be difficult. Governance is a fundamentally hard problem, and we should not expect that even an ideal form of governance will be without problems. Successful governance is a balancing act between the competing needs of many human beings. Humans, unfortunately, are not even internally consistent in their needs and desires, let alone consistent among populations of us. As a result, human systems are notoriously difficult to optimize for the greatest good, and governance is the height of such an imperfectly optimizable human system. Any system is going to have problems, both for some factions of people who have been traded off against, and for everyone in general where less than optimal solutions have been chosen due to imperfect knowledge and other challenges.
Yet it’s essential that we attempt it. If we do not find a way to do better, we risk various paths toward autocracy. Paul Valery, writing before WWII, warned that when the state does not live up to the citizens expectations, they will tend toward dictators.
As soon as the mind no longer recognizes itself—or no longer recognizes its essential traits, its mode of reasoned activity, its horror of chaos and the waste of its energy—in the fluctuations and failures of a political system, it necessarily imagines, it instinctively hopes for the promptest intervention of the authority of a single head, for it is only in a single head that the clear correspondence of perceptions, notions, reactions, and decisions is conceivable, can be organized and try to impose on things intelligible conditions and arrangements.
We’re living in a society that is getting worse for many of us on core metrics, where the lives we’ve seen our parents live were easier than ours, even while our government trumpets numeric successes that don’t seem to connect to our reality. Scott Alexander describes it thus
Look, really, our main problem is that all the most important things cost ten times as much as they used to for no reason, plus they seem to be going down in quality, and nobody knows why, and we’re mostly just desperately flailing around looking for solutions here. State that clearly, and a lot of political debates take on a different light.
Is it any wonder that citizens, frustrated that we cannot seem to fix these problems within our current system, yearn for something that can? When authoritarians promise that the problem is democracy, many will want to dance with strongmen. Prior to the Ukraine war we saw this in the West with the attraction to the strength of Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban. We must be able to offer the citizens a clearly better alternative. That alternative needs to be better both from the philosophical stance of the legitimacy of self-governance and also from an effective governance perspective of actually solving problems. Most people just want the trains to run on time, or in the United States, just want them to run at all rather than costing $105 billion dollars to go nowhere.