I like the goal of politically empowering future people. Here’s another policy with the same goal:
Run periodic surveys with retrospective evaluations of policy. For example, each year I can pick some policy decisions from {10, 20, 30} years ago and ask “Was this policy a mistake?”, “Did we do too much, or too little?”, and so on.
Subsidize liquid prediction markets about the results of these surveys in all future years. For example, we can bet about people in 2045′s answers to “Did we do too much or too little about climate change in 2015-2025?”
We will get to see market odds on what people in 10, 20, or 30 years will say about our current policy decisions. For example, people arguing against a policy can cite facts like “The market expects that in 20 years we will consider this policy to have been a mistake.”
This seems particularly politically feasible; a philanthropist can unilaterally set this up for a few million dollars of surveys and prediction market subsidies. You could start by running this kind of poll a few times; then opening a prediction market on next year’s poll about policy decisions from a few decades ago; then lengthening the time horizon.
(I’d personally expect this to have a larger impact on future-orientation of policy, if we imagine it getting a fraction of the public buy-in that would be required for changing voting weights.)
This is an exciting idea. My guess is that public buy-in would be easier than you might think; my impression is that the horse race aspect of betting markets appeals to the public and creates TV coverage etc. However, I think the surveys could be an issue. I suspect many people responding to surveys about events which happened 10-30 years ago would be doing so with the aim of influencing the betting markets which affect near future policy. There might end up being a meta-game regarding who will answer surveys 10-30 years down the line and what agenda they will have in mind.
I suspect many people responding to surveys about events which happened 10-30 years ago would be doing so with the aim of influencing the betting markets which affect near future policy.
It would be good to focus on questions for which that’s not so bad, because our goal is to measure some kind of general sentiment in the future—if in the future people feel like “we should now do more/less of X” then that’s pretty correlated with feeling like we did too little in the past (obviously not perfectly—we may have done too little 30 years ago but overcorrected 10 years ago—but if you are betting about public opinion in the US I don’t think you should ever be thinking about that kind of distinction).
E.g. I think this would be OK for:
Did we do too much or too little about climate change?
Did we have too much or too little immigration of various kinds?
Were we too favorable or too unfavorable to unions?
Were taxes too high or too low?
Is compensating organ at market rates a good idea?
I’m also very excited about this idea. The format of the ultimate judgement (i.e. the retrospective evaluation) seems important. A straightforward survey of the population suffers from the problem that teasing out an answer about the quality of a policy is hard, and most people won’t have put the time or effort in (even assuming they don’t have a hidden agenda, as John_Maxwell_IV highlights). But a survey of experts has its own problems too.
That said, I suspect these issues are surmountable, and would be keen to see this idea turn into action.
I like the goal of politically empowering future people. Here’s another policy with the same goal:
Run periodic surveys with retrospective evaluations of policy. For example, each year I can pick some policy decisions from {10, 20, 30} years ago and ask “Was this policy a mistake?”, “Did we do too much, or too little?”, and so on.
Subsidize liquid prediction markets about the results of these surveys in all future years. For example, we can bet about people in 2045′s answers to “Did we do too much or too little about climate change in 2015-2025?”
We will get to see market odds on what people in 10, 20, or 30 years will say about our current policy decisions. For example, people arguing against a policy can cite facts like “The market expects that in 20 years we will consider this policy to have been a mistake.”
This seems particularly politically feasible; a philanthropist can unilaterally set this up for a few million dollars of surveys and prediction market subsidies. You could start by running this kind of poll a few times; then opening a prediction market on next year’s poll about policy decisions from a few decades ago; then lengthening the time horizon.
(I’d personally expect this to have a larger impact on future-orientation of policy, if we imagine it getting a fraction of the public buy-in that would be required for changing voting weights.)
I really like this proposal! And agree it’s radically more tractable than such a major change to voting systems.
This is an exciting idea. My guess is that public buy-in would be easier than you might think; my impression is that the horse race aspect of betting markets appeals to the public and creates TV coverage etc. However, I think the surveys could be an issue. I suspect many people responding to surveys about events which happened 10-30 years ago would be doing so with the aim of influencing the betting markets which affect near future policy. There might end up being a meta-game regarding who will answer surveys 10-30 years down the line and what agenda they will have in mind.
It would be good to focus on questions for which that’s not so bad, because our goal is to measure some kind of general sentiment in the future—if in the future people feel like “we should now do more/less of X” then that’s pretty correlated with feeling like we did too little in the past (obviously not perfectly—we may have done too little 30 years ago but overcorrected 10 years ago—but if you are betting about public opinion in the US I don’t think you should ever be thinking about that kind of distinction).
E.g. I think this would be OK for:
Did we do too much or too little about climate change?
Did we have too much or too little immigration of various kinds?
Were we too favorable or too unfavorable to unions?
Were taxes too high or too low?
Is compensating organ at market rates a good idea?
And so forth.
I’m also very excited about this idea. The format of the ultimate judgement (i.e. the retrospective evaluation) seems important. A straightforward survey of the population suffers from the problem that teasing out an answer about the quality of a policy is hard, and most people won’t have put the time or effort in (even assuming they don’t have a hidden agenda, as John_Maxwell_IV highlights). But a survey of experts has its own problems too.
That said, I suspect these issues are surmountable, and would be keen to see this idea turn into action.