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Comment by probably_wrong | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered: is there a paper/thesis somewhere suggesting a better alternative to democracy? I don't mean the usual (monarchy, dictatorship, etc), but rather something entirely new.

I imagine there must be at least one political sciences/philosophy student somewhere who gave this a thought, but I never found anything.

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There's demarchy - a random sampling of the population. Like democracy, it ensures that people have a way to change laws they don't like.

Unlike democracy, it doesn't suffer from the fact that the corrupt or power hungry rise to the top. Lobbyists would have less power.

There are also some suggestions that a random sampling of a population will lead to a better selection mechanism - similar to suggestions that promoting randomly would be better for organisations.https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/education...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

> Unlike democracy, it doesn't suffer from the fact that the corrupt or power hungry rise to the top.

I don't see any reason to believe that is true in any substantive way. Most of the corrupting and influence mechanisms that work in democracy work in demarchy, and some are cheaper. OTOH, there's an entirely new corruption mechanism introduced, corrupting the “random” selection mechanism (either at the source or between the notional mechanism and the public reporting of results, which is ultimately what really matters).

The idea is that the funding mechanisms at the heart of democracy comes with strings attached - people who are pretty much required to accept donations to get elected. These donations often have strings attached.

Besides that 'The desire to be a politician should be enough to ban you from ever becoming one' (Bill Connolly), those who don't accept dubious donations will suffer in advertising dollars compared to those who do.

Additionally it has been noted that psychopaths often rise to the top - a problem that isn't presented with demarchy.

Can't you just bribe them when they're selected?

Presumably ordinary people selected at random are harder to bribe than people who are pretty much required to accept donations to get elected. These donations often have strings attached.

I am big believer of AnCap and we should see few successful ancap societies in 10yrs. French Polynesian Floating Island may even be completed before 2020.

https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism

https://www.seasteading.org/floating-islands-project-in-fren...

The Sovereign Individual and Atlas Shrugged have interesting alternatives to democracy. Just work in ones rational self interest and watch the world collapse as you rebuild your own.

Not saying that’s a good alternative to democracy, but it sure is interesting

I liked the idea of "true democracy", in that everyone can vote on all questions all the time. Not just once every four years on blue vs red.

i dont endorse this, but there is also ”futarchy”

http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html

it would probably not work because of Goodhart's law, and be generally rejected for being too weird. something for vulkans to try out, maybe.

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