From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sat Jul 13 2002 - 04:02:56 MDT
Here is an idea I would like to kick around a bit to see if it could be
turned into something useful:
Open societies thrive on openness and accountability, since they allow
constructive criticism and can use this to improve themselves. We have
largely discussed how to help non-open societies over the last months,
but making sure open societies develop better ought to be a high
priority too - after all, most of us live in them and they are to a
large extent the leaders of the world. If they can be improved, the
transhumanist cause is likely aided (and in any case, it will be good
for a lot of people). My proposal is to institute rewards for useful
suggestions and criticism. It is not enough to just allow them, but they
ought to be promoted.
The system would involve giving rewards to people who discover
government mistakes or wrong-doings, or find ways the government can
work more efficiently. The simplest form would be a citizen suggestions
box with guaranteed openness (one ought to add some
anonymization/nymization cleverness so that one could make suggestions
with less risk of persecution but still get rewards). The authors of
"winning" suggestions that are implemented would get a percentage of the
savings. Similarly there could be a scale of bounties for various levels
of government abuse. Since the contents of the suggestions box would be
official it would make useful reading for journalists, so if a good
suggestion was made but not implemented or rewarded, the media (and
political opponents) would be all over it.
It is by no means a total solution. It cannot help areas of government
which are shrouded in secrecy or cannot be held accountable. There will
be resistance and inertia in the administration to suggestions. No doubt
plenty of people will suggest reasonable (to minarchists) cost-savings
by removing large chunks of government - these will largely be ignored
(at first, at least). It will mainly fix parts of government, not
government itself. One has to avoid the Dilbert pitfall where the boss
gives people money for finding bugs, and the programmers immediately
starts adding bugs to their own code to get extra pay (here
accountability could be used: the people accountable for inefficiencies
are not eligible for rewards of fixing them). People making suggestions
and revealing abuse need adequate guarantees that they will not suffer
repercussions for doing it (especially important if they happen to be
government employees); this can likely be fixed by using either a bit of
crypto-cleverness or having a trusted outside party handling the
suggestions box and the person-nym database.
The advantage is that this system can be instituted even without
government support. It could be run by a private foundation, and it
sounds like a cause one could get philantropists to support quite
easily. Of course, paying back a percentage of the savings might be out
of the question for a non-government solution, but this might work
especially well for rewarding whistleblowers and revelations of
government abuse. There could be several parallel systems for different
kinds of information. It can work even in places like Singapore where
political freedom isn't a high priority but efficiency is.
To sum up, this is a non-coercive approach to improve government and
institutions that strengthens one of the good sides of open societies
while being fairly politically acceptable.
Thoughts?
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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