We give every contemporary citizen shares in a newly created security. This security settles in, say, 100 years (in 2119), and 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.
This gives contemporary people a direct financial incentive to do what future people would approve of, and uses market mechanisms to generate accurate judgments.
(One might think that this doesn’t work because people will go “I’ll be dead before this settles”, but I think this isn’t really a problem—there is also an Austrian bond that settles in 100 years, and that doesn’t seem to be a problem.)
Every financial security requires a matching liability. Who or what owes the money at maturity? If it’s funded out of general taxation it’s a vote on whether non-holders should pay money to the holders. Holders are incentivized to give high numbers, non-holders are incentivized to give low numbers, and accurate retrospective judgements don’t seem to be relevant at all.
My guess is that the price falls rapidly to zero, like failed crypto schemes, though the game theory is not totally clear.
Excellent. This is a much better idea than the “allow the 2119 people to decide whether to sentence the grandchildren of the 2019 political leaders to the tribunal of death” feedback mechanism that, disturbingly, came to me more readily.
It would be interesting to think about whether there are other feasible ways to see to it that the decisions of future people provide an incentive for the actions for present people.
Two concerns I have with this general kind of scheme is that it requires citizens to have lots of faith that the relevant institutions and the policy will persevere 100 years into the future (the 100 year bond stuff is relevant to this) and that they might not play well with high rates of immigration (since fluidity in polity membership could undermine the efficacy of long-term feedback mechanisms for members of that polity). But these might just be details to be ironed out rather than insolvable problems with the design.
...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.
Here’s another proposal:
We give every contemporary citizen shares in a newly created security. This security settles in, say, 100 years (in 2119), and 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.
This gives contemporary people a direct financial incentive to do what future people would approve of, and uses market mechanisms to generate accurate judgments.
(One might think that this doesn’t work because people will go “I’ll be dead before this settles”, but I think this isn’t really a problem—there is also an Austrian bond that settles in 100 years, and that doesn’t seem to be a problem.)
Every financial security requires a matching liability. Who or what owes the money at maturity? If it’s funded out of general taxation it’s a vote on whether non-holders should pay money to the holders. Holders are incentivized to give high numbers, non-holders are incentivized to give low numbers, and accurate retrospective judgements don’t seem to be relevant at all.
My guess is that the price falls rapidly to zero, like failed crypto schemes, though the game theory is not totally clear.
Excellent. This is a much better idea than the “allow the 2119 people to decide whether to sentence the grandchildren of the 2019 political leaders to the tribunal of death” feedback mechanism that, disturbingly, came to me more readily.
It would be interesting to think about whether there are other feasible ways to see to it that the decisions of future people provide an incentive for the actions for present people.
Two concerns I have with this general kind of scheme is that it requires citizens to have lots of faith that the relevant institutions and the policy will persevere 100 years into the future (the 100 year bond stuff is relevant to this) and that they might not play well with high rates of immigration (since fluidity in polity membership could undermine the efficacy of long-term feedback mechanisms for members of that polity). But these might just be details to be ironed out rather than insolvable problems with the design.
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 ;)
Can I sell my security? Why not just sell right before doing whatever it is I want to do that is going to screw the future over?