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Comment by tlholaday | Hacker News Reader

> where worker cooperatives take over the world?

Suppose that worker cooperatives have taken over the world.

Suppose then that the worker cooperatives must choose between policy options, for example { "increase payments to retired workers", "increase investment in disaster preparedness", "increase investment in infectious disease biochemistry" }.

What is your recommendation for how the worker cooperatives should decide how to allocate resources? Presuming you do not recommend prediction markets.

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There are many possible ways for the individual members to decide to vote, in the end it ends with one person one vote.

Otherwise the tools we have available are extremely powerful especially when fed good data that is freely available, which is what would be possible if you achieved the (perhaps impossible task) of switching most of the economy to worker coops.

> in the end it ends with one person one vote.

Do you see tyranny-of-the-majority and factional-rule as evils to be mitigated, or as desirable reflections-of-worker-cooperator-sentiment, regardless of consequences?

You can always change workplaces. Yes they are evils to be mitigated, but workplaces are not countries, you can leave and create them quite easily especially when you're entitled to part of the capital of your workplace.

I don't think it is impossible to shift the labour-intensive, non-capital-intensive part of the economy (which is quite a lot) to worker coops. They should be more attractive to both employees and customers than sad outfits with private equity vampire squids wrapped around them.

One member, one vote. Worker cooperatives are democracies.

> One member, one vote. Worker cooperatives are democracies.

Do you agree that the Democratic Caucus of the Colorado State House of Representative is a democracy? In 2020, they eschewed one member, one vote in favor of Quadratic Voting. More here: https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/quadratic-voting-i...

Interesting, see also the pol.is platform deployed in Taiwan for building consensus statements

These are probably experiments worth doing

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