...its settlement value will be based on the degree to which 2119 people approve of the actions of people in the 2019-2119 timespan, as determined by a standardised survey—say, on a scale from 0 to 10.
A potential risk is that people might not be very good at assessing whether the last century’s actions/policies have, on average, been good for them or not. To study that risk one could run such surveys today, testing whether people in different countries approve of the actions of people (in their country) in the 1919-2019 time span. Then one could match those survey results against expert judgements of how well different countries have been run during that period. (The experts aren’t necessarily right, but agreement or disagreement with the experts should still give some evidence.)
It’s worth noting that one important assumption here is that experts are pretty good at determining the counterfactual value of past policy decisions. I think this is right, but if we gave it up then no system like this one would be effective, since the feedback from future generations would be near-random. On the other hand, if the assumption is correct then there should be some feasible system that provides useful intergenerational feedback of the kind described here, though it may need to include a mechanism for increasing the influence of experts in the decision process.
A potential risk is that people might not be very good at assessing whether the last century’s actions/policies have, on average, been good for them or not. To study that risk one could run such surveys today, testing whether people in different countries approve of the actions of people (in their country) in the 1919-2019 time span. Then one could match those survey results against expert judgements of how well different countries have been run during that period. (The experts aren’t necessarily right, but agreement or disagreement with the experts should still give some evidence.)
It’s worth noting that one important assumption here is that experts are pretty good at determining the counterfactual value of past policy decisions. I think this is right, but if we gave it up then no system like this one would be effective, since the feedback from future generations would be near-random. On the other hand, if the assumption is correct then there should be some feasible system that provides useful intergenerational feedback of the kind described here, though it may need to include a mechanism for increasing the influence of experts in the decision process.
That’s a survey I’d like to see a top longtermist EA aligned psy-scholar perform ;)