From: Mark Walker (mail@markalanwalker.com)
Date: Sat Jul 13 2002 - 07:45:46 MDT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Anders Sandberg" <asa@nada.kth.se>
>
> 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.
>
I believe there is something like this operating in the US where citizens
blowing the whistle on waste can get some sort of reward.
> 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.
Not a bad idea. It would probably make sense to target local governments
first--probably a little less institutional inertia. One worry is that this
still does not address the problem of motivating the insiders to get the
ideas to work. As anyone who has a business knows, a lot of the problem is
figuring out the good from the bad ideas, and then even then the best ideas
often require a lot of tweaking and fine-tuning before they work. This is
often where most of the hard work lies--how do we motivate those on the
inside to do this? My experience is that most (but not all) employees
absolutely loath change.
I am not so sure the contrast between minarchist versus bloated government
bureaucracy is always drawn correctly. Governments have traditionally acted
both as regulators and service providers. I see little hope that the free
market as envisioned by Libertarians will do a better job of delivering the
summon bonum than a market with more government regulation. I doubt that my
hillbilly neighbors would pay for their kids to go to school if they had a
choice, nor would they pay to have their garbage picked up if they had a
choice. (And no, I don't want to sue them every week to have it picked up).
So while I am happy for the government to regulate these activities it does
not follow that I want them to be in the business of picking up garbage or
running a huge teachers union. I have more faith in private enterprise
providing these services: the government can regulate the ecological niche,
private enterprise can find the optimal solution within this framework.
Mark
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:15:23 MST