A fundamental question about democracy
I would argue that a good democracy should work to achieve the outcomes wanted by the whole population with everyone having an equal ability to have those interests represented — regardless of wealth, connections, or inclination to expend time or energy in pursuit of those interests.
Others would argue that it’s important that people also have a voice in deciding what tactics and strategies are used to acheive those outcomes but this creates all sorts of problems that I’ll return to shortly.
It is important to understand how different organisational structures define their missions (with the side question of how well it designs the incentives that make it fulfil that mission). I would argue that having government managed partly by electoral politics, (the current system) is not doing the job as well as it could and I would like to look at the alternative options.
a. Electoral politics: a portion of the population (the electorate who vote) instruct elected aristocrats about what they say that they think that they want to happen in the future. They do so on behalf of the whole population even though they are not quite representative. Some of those voters are primarily concerned with outcomes (bins emptied promptly, economic growth, peace, social harmony, better work, social justice etc). However, very active participants also want to have a voice in the tactics and strategies that are used — possibly at the expense of the outcomes they would like (though they would usually disagree on that point — and usually they would be wrong).
Sometimes ‘at the expense of’ is a generous construction to put on this question. Sometimes, promotion of a particular strategy is a concerteded political attempt to exclude particular outcomes, or promote others. (e.g. “we should make this decision using a referendum.”)
All of this is filtered through a messy electoral system and is complicated by other explicitly rational factors (“you did a good/bad job last time, so I’ll keep/get rid of you”), other factors that are somewhat rational (“you look a dependable sort” and “you have / haven’t annoyed or offended me”). These factors taper down on the rationality front (tribalism, etc) to the very lowest level (“the way my vote is or isn’t cast is largely dictated by the way that I have been hoodwinked”).
Because of asymmetries in activity and funding, electoral politics is very open to manipulation and misdirection in the interests of active, wealthy and connected minorities.
There are also other important considerations about how the government we get through electoral politics is able to get its instructions complied with by government employees, and its laws complied with by citizens.
b. Consumer instructions to retailers; managed by retailers, and based on feedback loops, and consumer research. It is more focussed on outcomes and there is usually very little knowledge of, or interest in, the tactics and strategies retailers use to deliver goods to us. Additional factor — retailers have many advantages here. Market rigidities mean that monopolistic behaviour happens. Also lots of interference with rationality by advertisers, branding, coercive marketing, gaming of logical fallacies cognitive biases among consumers etc. In theory, consumer co-ops would be the solution here but retailers with access to capital can tilt the market in their favour by out-competing co-ops for a period to remove them from the marketplace.
c. Shareholder control of companies; owning the shares allows shareholders to appoint the directors of a company and tell them what they expect of them. Usually very restricted to a simple instruction such as “make us as much money as you can” though there are examples of shareholders imposing other duties on directors (fair employment practices, CSR, environmental practices, etc).
How sensible would it be for us to treat the relationship between retailers and consumers, or between shareholders and directors as being one that we could adapt as a replacement for electoral politics?
I’m posing this as an observation. I’d be interested to hear you comments on this.
