Democracy Is Losing Its Race with Disruption
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I wholly agree that technological change begets social unrest. And that regulation, applying rules to the open market, with competent referees, has struggled to keep pace with technological change.
However. OC does not propose a theory for technological disruption leading to accelerating inequity.
My best guess of the probable root cause is when wages were decoupled from productivity. Productivity boomed, wages remained stagnant. The Productivity-Wages Gap. There are insightful, complimentary narratives of this phenomenon from Piketty, Turchin, many others.
Buy why did this happen when it did?
My current best guess is when finance got super charged by IT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization
When the majority of wealth creation transitioned from doing real world stuff to massaging balance sheets. When Capital transitioned from investment to rent seeking.
Advances in IT was the enabler, force multiplier, by dramatically decreasing transaction costs and improving financial analysis (eg playing what-if with spreadsheets),
Ok, fine. But why did wages stay decoupled?
At the same time, Capital led a sustained attack on Labor. Which hobbled the expected normal efforts society has historically done to redistribute wealth. There are many, many useful complimentary narratives about Milton Friedman, Chicago School of Economics, Heritage Foundation, etc.
Another "also true" story is Lobbying America: The Politics of Business from Nixon to NAFTA https://www.amazon.com/Lobbying-America-Politics-Business-So... Whereas other histories detail the obvious persons, ideologies, and culture war stuff, this book details the legislative knife-fight that actually made it happen.
PS- My starting assumption is the fight is, and always has been, wealth vs democracy.
Marx a long time ago gave a similar criticism concerning the socialist version of this line of argument, agreeing with the critique but pointing out:
"[...]In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.[...] Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of Socialism ended in a miserable fit of the blues"
And I think these kinds of articles are the sort of liberal American analogue. Technology has networked people in a way and created structures that will wash old democratic institutions away. If you want to salvage something, salvage the consensus building and free exchange of information, not the separation of powers, rights based discourse, outside imposed regulation and so on. Maybe we should try to bring back Cybersyn or something, it seemed kind of ahead of its time
Stuff like Oregon's experiments with Citizen Juries have kept my hope alive. Barely.
"Jefferson Smith talks with Linn Davis from Healthy Democracy. Linn oversees the Citizens Initiative Review, in which Oregon voters deliberate a ballot initiative and provide a statement for the voters' pamphlet. The use of citizens' juries to weigh in on public policy has been exported to other states and other countries, including Switzerland where Linn Davis visited in the Fall of 2019."
https://democracynerd.us/episode/exporting-oregon-style-demo...
Competent kings are great, but then we have to figure out how to get rid of them before they go literally crazy, or before their incompetent children mess everything up.
-----
Honestly, the main issue today just is the same issue that has plagued democracies for centuries. Misinformation and demagogues.
People like kings and authoritarians. People like breaking the rules as long as it supports their side. Caesar can march over the Rubicon in gross violation of law and become a national hero (and emperor)
This has been known for thousands of years. Republics die because the people get tired of it and give up for a king or dictator or Caesar.
Because preferential attachment leading to winner takes all is something akin to a natural law. Tyranny.
Because no open ended complex adaptive system can sustain a stable equilibrium. Revolution.
Democracy and other notions try to find a middle path, to avoid the two extremes.
Sometimes it works, a little bit, for a little while.
Just because no stable middle path is possible doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Over the ages, we've gotten a bit better at it.
h/t Robert Wright's book Nonzero.
What if instead of electing the leader of a country, we elected the group that hired the leader? Like electing the board of a company rather than shareholders voting directly for a CEO.
This group would be perpetual campaigners, always out and about to understand the needs of the community. This is a full time job and a skill set that is quite different from managing a high level team or creating legislation. They would relay these to the President and discuss issues regularly with them. The President would be a normal employee in a sense (in the way that a CEO is a 'normal employee'). They wouldn't have to campaign for their role, nor run for re-election. They would be appointed by the elected group and also removed by them should their performance be poor, or the dominant ideology of the group change.
I'm not mad enough to think this would be a perfect process. There would still be lobbying and deal making but my hope would be that it is one step removed from the leaders themselves. Let them actually do their job with some dignity rather than forcing them to always be running for the next election and being trashed by opponents in the media.
Can we normalise the jobs of our leaders to encourage higher caliber applicants? What if we could have a leader that wasn't hated by 49% of the population before they even started?
I don’t like the landscape. Not one bit.