ive been thinking about a political system kinda like the original position that i call “cement mixer politics.”
in it, we all live in 3 year cycles, and every 3 years, smart contracts randomly select another person for you to swap socio-economic positions with. politicians are randomly selected. my thinking is that if you don’t know how insulated you’ll be in 3 years, both the people at the top and the bottom will churn to ensure everyone is at least in the middle to avoid their getting a bad hand.
the cycles might have to be more randomized lengths though, as people at the top will tactically burn through resources on nothing in their final days because they’ll lose access to it.
oh also, today I talked to my students about a machine that would be able to record smells and then send it to people. I thought it could be used for dating apps. The students and teachers laughed at me and told me that men would just use it to record their farts. I kind of agreed with them...
yeah I think something like this would be a way to inject more equity into the decisionmaking process. A good political system needs to be able to deal with the formation of elites which can then take control of the government (if they weren't the ones that started the government in the first place).
I think the incentives, like you said would be kind of weird. would people be able to save anything i.e would any savings/assets be transferred over to the person that you're switching places with? I think it would be good for politicians to be randomly selected with a lot of support from different people in the government. Then there may be a problem with bureaucrats taking control.
It's fun to think through the incentives that are created from a decision. One of the big criticisms of Rawls was that the conditions for the original position were not stable i.e that you couldn't maintain the relative distribution that he prescribed because of inherent inequalities amongst people. It's called the Wilt Chamberlain argument. here is a link to a crash course video on the argument, if you have the time :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0CTHVCkm90&list=PLUHoo4L8qXthO958RfdrAL8XAHvk5xuu9&index=40
ive been thinking about a political system kinda like the original position that i call “cement mixer politics.”
in it, we all live in 3 year cycles, and every 3 years, smart contracts randomly select another person for you to swap socio-economic positions with. politicians are randomly selected. my thinking is that if you don’t know how insulated you’ll be in 3 years, both the people at the top and the bottom will churn to ensure everyone is at least in the middle to avoid their getting a bad hand.
the cycles might have to be more randomized lengths though, as people at the top will tactically burn through resources on nothing in their final days because they’ll lose access to it.
oh also, today I talked to my students about a machine that would be able to record smells and then send it to people. I thought it could be used for dating apps. The students and teachers laughed at me and told me that men would just use it to record their farts. I kind of agreed with them...
yeah I think something like this would be a way to inject more equity into the decisionmaking process. A good political system needs to be able to deal with the formation of elites which can then take control of the government (if they weren't the ones that started the government in the first place).
I think the incentives, like you said would be kind of weird. would people be able to save anything i.e would any savings/assets be transferred over to the person that you're switching places with? I think it would be good for politicians to be randomly selected with a lot of support from different people in the government. Then there may be a problem with bureaucrats taking control.
It's fun to think through the incentives that are created from a decision. One of the big criticisms of Rawls was that the conditions for the original position were not stable i.e that you couldn't maintain the relative distribution that he prescribed because of inherent inequalities amongst people. It's called the Wilt Chamberlain argument. here is a link to a crash course video on the argument, if you have the time :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0CTHVCkm90&list=PLUHoo4L8qXthO958RfdrAL8XAHvk5xuu9&index=40