Superstruct: Commonweal
Wikipedia’s page on commonwealth says: “The original phrase "common-wealth" or "the common weal" comes from the old meaning of "wealth," which is "well-being". The term literally meant "common well-being". Thus commonwealth originally meant a state or nation-state governed for the common good as opposed to an authoritarian state governed for the benefit of a given class of owners... Today the term is more general and means a political community.” We should take back the earlier meaning, giving it new twenty-first century overtones.
In this paper, I’ll attempt to flesh out a concept for a new political entity with these traits:
Teams compete to improve the common well-being of the society as a whole-- the Common Weal. Teams differentiate by prioritizing different well-being factors, and by the industriousness and talent of their members.
Prediction Markets determine the laws binding on different teams by predicting what will increase their metric of the common weal. Bets on predictions are placed with points, and track Weal factors.
Citizens earn points with tasks assigned them by the Prediction Market, and spend points to purchase benefits from competing civil service agencies.
I will call the Commonweal’s sub-groups “teams” because they compete to improve the Commonweal with grassroots work and sustainable living. Citizens of these sub-groups are distinguished not by *where* they live, but by *how*, and what benefits they receive in exchange for that compliance. Often states or provinces are a way for a nation’s citizens to have some measure of local independence in variations in their laws and civil administration. With the irrelevance of physical borders to this structure, teams could do that with much more fluidly. If you apply for a different team and the Commonweal puts you there, you are less inconvenienced than if you had to physically move and leave your loved ones.
Teams with unsustainable policies would atrophy, while the most successful teams would branch off new teams into experimental lifestyles.
Wait, why would that come about? Immediately this raises the question of how to determine whether specific policies truly resulted in failures or successes they experienced. I propose team membership be like a marriage that does not have any no-fault divorce policy, but has divorce only for cause.
We need a more objective method than popularity contests, to award citizens to a team from another team. Citizens should not be able to reap the benefits and then jump ship the moment they have to sacrifice. They should be able to prefer which team they would like to apply for when available-- but if they could choose when to switch without objective evidence of incompatibility, the Commonwealth will immediately collapse through ideological blindness, and people simply disliking other people on a gut level because they look funny. Then it would be composed of tiny, weak, ephemeral “teams”, too small for the concept to be of any use.
Each citizen has a Weal, defined by them in an official internet profile. “Commonwealth” comes from “common weal”, in which “weal” means “well-being”. Your Weal is a weighted and prioritized list of measurable factors by which you personally define the welfare of the entire Commonweal. Make note of that: not just your well-being, but the Commonweal as a whole. If you want something different for yourself than you want for others, your Weal is a declaration of what you want for others in your society. Examples may include:
the health of the unhealthiest
the educational attainment of the poorest-educated
the standard of living of the poorest citizens
cleaner surroundings
more free time
lower divorce levels
lower violence
lower prescription of antidepressants
That is a short sample list. There would be many more factors, each with a clearly-specified description of what is measured. The Commonwealth would put together a list of dozens of factors that are considered an end, not just a means. You would select from this list and prioritize them to create your personal Weal profile. This is your personal definition of what outcomes would constitute the national well-being in your opinion.
A computer algorithm like that of OKCupid compares your Weal with others in the Commonweal for compatibility. Shared values would influence what team you are assigned to at the age of independence from your parents, or if you become eligible for reassignment thereafter.
One of the centralized administrative services shared by all teams in the Commonweal will be a Prediction Market based on points. Citizens propose a new policy in the form of a bet. They state the policy and predict what effect the policy’s enactment would have on various factors of well-being in the Commonweal. Each prediction is a wager. After a period of time to research what they feel the effects would be, all Commonweal citizens from any team may bet points on those predictions, indicating which predictions the overall market predicts to come true.
When the market predicts a policy would result in net gain to your team’s averaged definition of the Common Weal, your team is eligible to earn points by carrying out that policy, or lose points for counteracting that policy.
Bets are then paid in points based on the measured changes in Weal factors.
Citizens pay points for calling the police, being heard by courts, identity documents, nationalized healthcare, social security benefits, education, and any other civil service agencies made available for point-sale to all Commonweal citizens by the weighted calculation of the common weal.
Conclusion
It’s good to see an implicit acknowledgement here of the reality, for better or worse, that corporations are another form of government in our lives. For that reason, I do not make an argument in favor of *completely* unbridled free enterprise-- powers should have checks and balances on each other. But at the same time, just as government can do good when harnessed by accountability, the idea of a corporation can be similarly re-tooled, to harness the things it does well.
Markets are known to be just incredibly predictively correct, when not rigged. Correct in the service of evil, sometimes, granted. But often just amazingly prescient. Collaborative games result in hive minds, and the free market is a very serious collaborative game. It has an unambiguous scoring system. Money was developed to be a type of game scoring system, and arguably serves no other purpose. Reality is your gamemaster and will infallibly penalize you, which is absolutely wonderful in a way. By definition, it is impossible to cheat reality or rig it, only its perception by other people. Unfortunately reality is a really lax gamemaster by other terms, because it doesn’t consider evil to be violating its game rules, and allows it to be rewarded on the short term.
Money is too easy to keep score with, so it’s *all* that’s scored in the existing system. The only metric a corporation cares about is to deliver money to stockholders. That's why corporations, when considered as a giant super-organism hive mind, are sociopaths. As in any brain, the reward system determines what it does. That is the thing to avoid in designing Government, Inc., or you’ll get the worst of both governments and corporations.
As described here, a Commonweal is a new organization, neither government or corporation, locating the scoring mechanism in multiple well-being factors of Gross National Happiness. These are metrics common in such indexes as the Human Development Index and Happy Planet Index.
Additional Reading:
Robin Hanson: "Shall We Vote On Values, But Bet On Beliefs?" Futarchy.pdf contains more detail on Prediction Markets.
David Pulver: GURPS Transhuman Space: Deep Beyond. Pages 83 through 87 describe the operation of privately-hired security forces and judges-for-hire in the lawless space frontier of an asteroid field. The system is "maintained through interlocking agreements between business associations, insurance brokers, and individuals."
Kim Stanley Robinson: Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars. The Mars Trilogy involves a type of organization called a transnational or transnat. In essence it is a megacorporation in which the employees are citizens with rights and a voice. The idea is that it has so many subsidiaries that it can provide for all their commercial needs. Such an organization would be incorporated in one of the world’s most tiny and dependent nations with a highly lax regulatory environment, in which it would own the entire country. A country in such an arrangement is called a flag of convenience. The reason they use a flag of convenience is to gain recognition from existing nations while retaining independence.
Comments
tesral on Nov. 7, 2008 5:02 AM
Where is the accountability? Power without accountability will lead to tyranny no matter the intention of the system designers.
The only really broken things about the system we have is that those in power have leached all the accountability out of said system, and the coercive nature of government itself.
Two things must be iron clad and immutable. One, that the right of the individual to self ownership is absolute, and the accountability of anyone with the power of any public office.
mpathytest on Nov. 11, 2008 3:22 AM — have you posted this on the Superstruct site?
This is AWESOME! is it in the database? (I found the link in Government Inc)
matt-arnold on Nov. 11, 2008 4:53 AM — Re: have you posted this on the Superstruct site?
Thank you. I'm glad you like it. Do you think it should be its own Superstruct?
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