There's a farm shop in Ragley, a 5-mile cycle from home. Getting there by bike, you roll under roadside oaks and between soft-purple fields (the crop looks like lavender, although probably isn't). The average age in the farm shop cafe must be 70. The other day, I met Margaret and Chris, a local couple.
Both are sharp: they have two masters and a doctorate, and their careers were civil service (Gove came up in conversation more than once). I asked them whether, politically speaking, they feel heard. Do you feel listened to?
They said no. Despite being aware of how to participate (letters to MPs, Twitter, town-hall meetings), they don't feel acknowledged; the politicians seem self-interested, they ignore the public.
It's a story I've come to expect from everyone I have the conversation with. And it's paradoxical: we have so much access to politicians, heck- they share what they have for breakfast (and sometimes substantially more), yet we don't feel any closer to having influence. And here lies one great challenge of our time: building a democratic system where people vote and feel that their vote matters. The chance of your vote having an impact is absurdly small: in the States, it's between 1 in 10 and 1 in 60 million.
The pair went on: small yet fierce minorities dictate the narrative. It's these minorities that drag the press along with them—leaving the moderate majority muted.
It's increasingly clear that there is no nuance to our political system. This is down to how our voting system works; every decision is binary. We are for or against an idea, and there is no room to express the strength of our intention. Inevitably, a no and a yes (and, perhaps, a silent a 'abstain') leads to a polarisation of perspective. Trump is an example; the democratic system could only capture whether people were for or against him. No one could say 'I like him a bit' or 'I'm indifferent. You're inside the tent, or you're out in the cold.
Lots of things are innovated. Not, however, the way we participate democratically. The way we (in the UK) make decisions is a pre-internet innovation. The UK introduced 'first past the post' in 1950, and it leads to majorities of one party or another, and therefore coalitions (with diverse perspectives) are unlikely. Aside from social media, which appears to impact awareness but not participation positively, tech has not been leveraged to help people make decisions or allow people to vote. The ballot box and the voting booth remain nineteenth-century innovations.
In managing the Ethereum network, Vitalik Buterin takes a keen interest in building resilient ways that organisations can make decisions for themselves without needing a central 'trusted' actor. By way of comparison, for referenda or elections in the UK, the Electoral Commission is trusted. The Commission impartially manages the process, and this is a vulnerability to the system.
One mechanism unearthed and now tested is Quadratic Voting. In this system, voters have to pay quadratic costs to their votes (e.g. 1 for one vote, 4 for two votes (2^2), 9 for three votes (3^3)). The voter might pay these with voting credits or (less likely) with money. This means that people are not equally constrained to having the same influence as the next person (if I care about something, I can use up more voting credits to vote in a particular direction). Yet, having just four times as much influence is 16 times more costly, so it becomes exponentially harder to have a powerful impact.
There are flaws with set-up, too. Will people trade credits on the black market? Will a small group of highly motivated people disrupt an indifferent nation. Yet, allowing people to express the strength of their opinions (beyond their social media channels) may be a good thing.
In a recent issue of the Pomp Letter, Pomp pointed to similar possible on-chain innovations. He highlighted (firmly) the contrast with how subjectively monetary policy is managed today:
Instead, the solution is to transition to a monetary policy that requires no human decision making. A fully transparent, programmatic monetary policy would provide significant benefits to the market. Every player, regardless of market position, could verify what is happening in real time across the system, while also having a high degree of certainty in future decisions that can be pre-planned around. This type of monetary policy would move us from a reactive policy and create an immutable system that would ask market players to take on the responsibility of becoming reactive.
The point is: there are other ways to organise society fairly and transparently that are outside of the norm. It might be time for governments to experiment with new technologies. Is the one person one vote (status quo) the best way to democratically cure our societal ills. Consider the change in the last few years (remote work, social networks, digital marketplaces): it begs the question, are are comparable transformations possible in electoral institutions?
My week in books 📘
The Fall by Albert Camus
A philosophical novel that is as good as it is hard to summarise: very!
Have a great week,
Hector x