Governments as they exist today seem antiquated to me as they are linked to particular geographic regions, and the particular shapes and locations of those regions are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
Meanwhile some governments are good at providing for their people – social security, health insurance, enforcement of contracts, physical protection, etc. – so that’s fine, but there are also a lot of governments that are weak in one or more of these critically important departments.
If there were a market of competing global governments, we’d get labor mobility without anyone actually having to move. The governments that provide the best services for the cheapest prices would attract the most citizens.
These governments could draw on something like Robin Hanson’s proposal for a reform of tort law to incentivize a market for crime prevention, could use proof of stake (where the stake may be a one-time payment that the government holds in escrow or a promise of a universal basic income to law-abiding citizens) for some legal matters, and could use futarchy for legislation.
They could also provide physical services, such as horizontal health interventions and physical protection in countries where they can collaborate with the local governments.
An immediate benefit would be the reduction of poverty and disease, but they could also serve to unlock a lot of intellectual capacity by giving people the spare time to educate themselves on matters other than survival. They could define protocols for resolving conflicts between countries and lock in incentives to ensure that the protocols are adhered to. (I bet smart contracts can help with this.)
That way, they could form a union of autonomous parts sort of like the cantons of Switzerland. Such a union of global distributed governments could eventually become a de-facto world government, which may be beneficial for existential security and for enabling the Long Reflection.
Such a government could be bootstrapped out of the EA community. A nonpublic web of trust could form the foundation of the first citizens. If the system fails even when the citizenry is made up largely of highly altruistic, conscientious people who can pay taxes and share a similar culture, it’s probably not ready for the real world. But if it proves to be valuable, it can be gradually scaled up to a broader population spanning more different cultures.
I’ve come to feel like it’s a red flag if such a project bills itself as a distributed state or something of the sort. There seems to be a risk that people would start such a project only to do something grand-sounding rather than solve all the concrete problems that a state solves.
I’d much rather have a bunch of highly specialized small companies that solve specific problems really well (and also don’t exclude anyone based on their location or citizenship) than one big shiney distributed state that is undeniably state-like but is just as flawed as most geographic states, because it would just add one more flawed and hard-to-coordinate actor to the international scene, and make international coordination harder rather than easier.
The ideal project here is probably something that incubates and coordinates other small projects that provide specific services to solve specific problems while not discriminating based on location or citizenship but that never uses terms like “state,” “government,” or “country” for itself.
An added benefit is that a lot of my conversations about distributed states quickly became about “Is this really a distributed state/government/country,” which is one of the least interesting conversations to have. (That’s something I’d rather leave to trained lexicographers with big corpora to figure out.) I’d much rather have conversation about whether it solves the problems it sets out to solve and at what cost.
Create global distributed governments.
Governments as they exist today seem antiquated to me as they are linked to particular geographic regions, and the particular shapes and locations of those regions are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
Meanwhile some governments are good at providing for their people – social security, health insurance, enforcement of contracts, physical protection, etc. – so that’s fine, but there are also a lot of governments that are weak in one or more of these critically important departments.
If there were a market of competing global governments, we’d get labor mobility without anyone actually having to move. The governments that provide the best services for the cheapest prices would attract the most citizens.
These governments could draw on something like Robin Hanson’s proposal for a reform of tort law to incentivize a market for crime prevention, could use proof of stake (where the stake may be a one-time payment that the government holds in escrow or a promise of a universal basic income to law-abiding citizens) for some legal matters, and could use futarchy for legislation.
They could also provide physical services, such as horizontal health interventions and physical protection in countries where they can collaborate with the local governments.
An immediate benefit would be the reduction of poverty and disease, but they could also serve to unlock a lot of intellectual capacity by giving people the spare time to educate themselves on matters other than survival. They could define protocols for resolving conflicts between countries and lock in incentives to ensure that the protocols are adhered to. (I bet smart contracts can help with this.)
That way, they could form a union of autonomous parts sort of like the cantons of Switzerland. Such a union of global distributed governments could eventually become a de-facto world government, which may be beneficial for existential security and for enabling the Long Reflection.
Such a government could be bootstrapped out of the EA community. A nonpublic web of trust could form the foundation of the first citizens. If the system fails even when the citizenry is made up largely of highly altruistic, conscientious people who can pay taxes and share a similar culture, it’s probably not ready for the real world. But if it proves to be valuable, it can be gradually scaled up to a broader population spanning more different cultures.
I’ve come to feel like it’s a red flag if such a project bills itself as a distributed state or something of the sort. There seems to be a risk that people would start such a project only to do something grand-sounding rather than solve all the concrete problems that a state solves.
I’d much rather have a bunch of highly specialized small companies that solve specific problems really well (and also don’t exclude anyone based on their location or citizenship) than one big shiney distributed state that is undeniably state-like but is just as flawed as most geographic states, because it would just add one more flawed and hard-to-coordinate actor to the international scene, and make international coordination harder rather than easier.
The ideal project here is probably something that incubates and coordinates other small projects that provide specific services to solve specific problems while not discriminating based on location or citizenship but that never uses terms like “state,” “government,” or “country” for itself.
An added benefit is that a lot of my conversations about distributed states quickly became about “Is this really a distributed state/government/country,” which is one of the least interesting conversations to have. (That’s something I’d rather leave to trained lexicographers with big corpora to figure out.) I’d much rather have conversation about whether it solves the problems it sets out to solve and at what cost.