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by RobinHanson
4644 days ago
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It sounds like you think that while you like private law and anarchy, you don't think that it would actually achieve the ends that most ordinary people want to achieve. And you think speculators will agree with you, and in a futarchy would therefore reject anarchy proposals. |
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Not quite. I think that a private law/anarchy system would achieve the ends that most ordinary people want to achieve, better than any system that exists now, if people actually understood how it worked and were able to act accordingly. But that's a big "if".
And you think speculators will agree with you, and in a futarchy would therefore reject anarchy proposals.
I think this is probably true; I don't think there would be a significant number of people who would be willing to bet in favor of a private law/anarchy system. But, as above, that's not because it wouldn't actually achieve the ends people want to achieve; it's because too few people actually understand how it works.
However, I'm not sure how this is relevant to my criticisms of futarchy. I'm not criticizing it because I don't think it will lead to a private law/anarchy system; in fact I'm not criticizing it on the basis of any particular outcome I expect it to lead to. I'm criticizing it on the grounds that it requires a particular definition of "national welfare" (the one that gets the majority vote) to be imposed on everyone. I don't think "the ends that most ordinary people want to achieve" can be captured in any such definition. More precisely, as soon as you settle on one particular definition, someone will come up with a way to game it, by finding states of affairs that look good in terms of the definition, but do not actually achieve the ends that most ordinary people want to achieve (although they do achieve ends that the particular parties who are gaming the system want to achieve).
I don't think it's possible to come up with a definition that isn't vulnerable to this failure mode. The only way to avoid it is to discard the whole idea of "national welfare", which of course also means discarding the idea that there are policies, single policies that can be imposed on everyone, that will improve "national welfare", if only we can find them.