In order to try and figure out your recommended system, I’ll apply it to Medium. First you want voters to rank the topics (ie pacifism, basic income, space colonization, epiphytes). Then you want Futarchy to optimize them.
Let’s say that voters decide that the most important topic is basic income. Should Medium spend $100,000 on stories about basic income? Futarchy answers this question by creating two markets…
- What will Medium’s revenue be in 2 years if $100,000 is spent on stories about basic income?
- What will Medium’s revenue be in 2 years if $100,000 is not spent on stories about basic income?
What happens if Futarchy reveals that $100,000 should not be spent on stories about basic income? Do you repeat the process with $90,000? If Futarchy reveals that $90,000 should be spent on stories about basic income… do you repeat the process with different amounts in order to find the amount that will maximize Medium’s revenue?
It seems like the fundamental question is… how much money should be spent on stories about basic income? But how is this question fundamentally different from… how much money should be spent on books about basic income? Or, how much money should be spent on books? How much money should be spent on clothes? How much money should be spent on food?
In a regular market, each and every person helps to decide, with their own money, how much money is spent on things.
Markets obviously don’t care about egalitarianism/equality. Nobody in their right mind equally divides their money between clothes, books and food. People don’t equally need things so they don’t equally spend their money. As a result, people don’t equally earn money.
You seem to be under the impression that a combination of equality (voting) and inequality (markets) will optimize… something. In economics, the goal is to optimize social benefit. Are you trying to optimize social benefit? If so, then your hybrid is certainly a lot different than a regular market. If it’s better than the regular market at optimizing social benefit, then this can’t only be true of the government. It would also be true of the private sector.
I wouldn’t be surprised if your hybrid system was better than the current system of government. But I would be very surprised if your system is better than a market.
My friend’s 4th grade class has a blog… Classtopia. On their homepage you can see their entries sorted by time. But on this page you can see their entries sorted by value. The value of the story is determined by a small market that consists of the students, their teacher and myself. It would be better if the market was as large as everybody in the world. But there are a few logistical issues.
I love the idea of safely testing different ways of dividing society’s limited resources. But in order to optimize testing, it helps to have a solid grasp of economics.
