From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Fri Sep 29 2000 - 14:55:24 MDT
J. R. Molloy wrote:
>Will a technological spike render politics obsolete by enabling instantaneous
>social justice or will it simply offer perfectly privatized legal systems?
I have been exploring the idea that economic growth rates might increase
by a factor of a hundred or more, and I've been thinking about what this
might imply about politics. It seems that such a vast speedup would require
a lot of "breathing room" for some economic processes to make rapid choices
with large consequences without a lot of political oversight. You can't
have an economy double every two weeks if it takes months for a political
process to consider and approve substantial changes.
So somewhere somehow familiar political processes would have to take a
back seat and allow some golden goose to lay lots of golden eggs, even
when a lot of eggs get broken. Maybe a new hitech political process
(like futarchy) could react fact enough to keep up with such rapid
change, but it seems unlikely that familiar political processes could.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
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