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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

So, literally, whoever pays the most gets the policy they want, plus, if whatever aggregate indicator the legislature sent increases after the policy is adopted (regardless of the actual impact of the particular policy, which can't be isolated) you not only get a full refund of the cost of buying the policy but at least some extra cash, too.

And unless you've magically solved the influence of money on election campaigns, the legislators have an deep interest in setting metrics that favor the policies preferred by the already rich.

(Ignoring that given multiple simultaneous policies and the inability to measure isolated effects the actual payoff of bets is is going to be extremely noisy compared to the actual isolated impacts of the policies.)

So, it looks to me like an unnecessarily complicated version of extreme plutocracy.

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The difference is that people loose their money if the policy doesn't have the effect they predicted.

That's not a difference compared to straight buying policy, since you lose the purchase price unconditionally for that. The difference is that you have a chance of getting a refund of some size for buying the policy, depending on some aggregate welfare measure (but not actually particularly on the specific effect of the policy you bought.)

So you're saying futarchy is flawed because the metric measured will be gamed? How is it different from the present system, where legislative power has all the same incentives to only implement laws favouring the wealthy? IMO, futarchy is strictly not worse than the state of art. No one is claiming it's flawless.

> So you're saying futarchy is flawed because the metric measured will be gamed?

No. I'm saying that it is flawed because it introduced additional avenues for the influence of wealth to work (both “legitimately” and corruptly), makes the decisions for which decision-makers are accountable to the public less capable of being effectively overseen and evaluated by the electorate, because the kind of evaluation of policy it calls for is impossible (not merely impractical, though parts of it are that), that any revision to make it possible and practical adds a whole new set of problems (not least is likely to be a strong new incentives for ignoring long-term effects), and that it doesn't even begin to solve any actual, real problem.

> How is it different from the present system

That's kind of addressed above, but even if it wasn't, the idea of futarchy is it is better than the present system, not a layer of complication and indirection which retains the flaws of the present system.

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