=politics =government =institutions
What's wrong with governance in America, and how could it be improved?
part 1: politicians
The New York City subway system
has some problems.
Recently, there was
flooding.
A single mile of new track
has cost $3.5 billion.
What's going wrong? You could try looking at
cost breakdowns, and they'll show that there are lots of different costs and
they're all really high. Accountants do that kind of thing, so high costs
that exist are resistant to that type of inspection.
When that's the
case, it can be more effective to look at what happens when someone tries to
improve things.
Pedestrian Observations seems to think Andy Byford was doing a good job
for 2 years and was removed for political reasons:
after Cuomo pushed him out for being too successful and getting too much credit, Byford returned to his native Britain, where Mayor Sadiq Khan appointed him head of Transport for London
As part of state legislation passed in April 2019, the MTA was supposed to create a plan to reduce costs by the end of that June. A draft of the plan indicated that several departments would be eliminated, undermining Byford's role.
Oddly, Cuomo also
insisted on using UWB radio for train signalling. That's stupid and I
think it's likely there was some conflict of interest.
Byford was
replaced by Sarah
Feinberg, a former communications director and PR consultant. Yikes.
Cuomo also did a really bad job with the coronavirus: he ordered sick patients sent to nursing homes, and the majority of people in NYC got infected. Then he covered up the nursing home deaths. Overall, he was just really terrible in general.
In other words, the problems were
ultimately the fault of the political leadership and the people who voted
for it. Well, Cuomo's not popular anymore, so it's safe to mock him now,
but why did people vote for him? It probably has something to do with all
the praise he got
from media.
Eventually people figured out they were being lied to,
and Cuomo is gone, but the media that praised him is unchanged, and I'm sure
it will find some more terrible candidates to promote to people.
Cuomo wanted to stay in office, and Byford was popular, so why did Cuomo
fire Byford? Because Cuomo was pressured by people who would lose out from
Byford eliminating wasteful spending. Voters were at fault not just for
voting for Cuomo, but by demonstrating over time that the political ads,
endorsements, and media connections that can be gained from corruption are
worth more votes than eliminating the corruption.
When media is wrong about
something like Cuomo being competent or evidence for Iraqi WMD being even
plausibly correct, why don't people switch to different media that was less
wrong?
I think this is largely a standard case of lockin via network
effects: it's hard to switch your social group off of a bad newspaper the
same way it's hard to switch it off of Facebook. But there's another factor
with media specifically: collectively, it has some control over which
potential alternatives people are aware of.
Just how bad is the selection of
politicians?
Which famous youtuber do you think is the worst person?
Opinions vary, but I'll nominate Logan Paul. So he's an awful human being,
but is he worse than, say...Kevin Spacey? Absolutely not.
Now, Kevin
Spacey is a terrible human being, but is he worse than, say...Dick Cheney?
Absolutely not.
So, some people argue that
randomly selecting
representatives from the population would be better than the current
system. That might be true, which is a pretty strong condemnation of the
current system.
The quality of sortition is a low bar to meet because
most people could nominate someone more qualified than themselves. The
advantage of sortition over voting, then, is mainly in eliminating the ability of media
to manipulate the Schelling points of candidate selection.
We could
choose a random person, and then have them choose someone, but this
obviously raises the possibility of bribing or coercing the randomly chosen
person. But this problem can be mitigated with more randomness: if our
random person chooses 10 people they like, then one of those is randomly
chosen, then this reduces the benefit of bribery/coercion 10x without
reducing the risks.
But in general, people can only evaluate other
people within a certain range from themselves. If you want to get really
smart and competent people, you need multiple levels of
nominations...anyway, this is leading towards me mentioning
the process Venice used to select its doges. That sounds pretty weird to
most people today but it worked pretty well for hundreds of years.
New regulations for the elections of the doge introduced in 1268 remained in force until the end of the republic in 1797. Their intention was to minimize the influence of individual great families, and this was effected by a complex electoral machinery. Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, and the nine elected forty-five. These forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who elected the doge.
Well, it's fun to talk about alternative voting systems, but changing, say, the US constitution is a pipe dream. What's more plausible is taking over a political party and making it use some clever system for candidate selection, but still, if you have enough people to do that, they could also just...not vote for terrible people?
part 2: civil service
What's the process the government follows when it starts a $12B project and cost estimates keep rising faster than money spent?
1. Some
government officials make a contract specifying what they want built.
2. Some company with good lawyers finds a way to fulfill the letter of
the contract cheaply, and submits a low bid.
3. Because those
officials had no idea what they're doing, lots of changes are needed.
4. There's no agreement on what changes should cost, so each change goes
through the court system.
5. The company makes lots of money.
One such company is the Tutor Perini Corporation. Pedestrian Observations says:
In California, the problem is, in two words, Tutor-Perini. This contractor underbids and then does shoddy work requiring change orders, litigated to the maximum.
A comment notes this statement from a Tutor-Perini conference call:
As I have said before evidenced everyday by the minimum competition in the billion dollar plus projects. There are very few companies in the United States that can successfully build a billion dollar plus infrastructure projects and as in such there are very few bidders as we go forward.
So, if you want to control costs,
you need engineering expertise on the government side, so that the
government can write decent contracts. The question is, how do you get it?
Fire the incompetent people? Oh no, you can't do that.
How about
hiring really competent people? How? Some sort of intellectually demanding
standardized test? Well, that's what other countries do, and that's what was
done, but courts banned that because of disparate impact. Here's what I'd
say to those judges: if you really believe in disparate impact, then apply
it equally. Ban the SAT and GRE. Ban leetcode questions at software
companies. Ban the military aptitude tests. Do it, cowards.
Considering the limitations in place, I have a radical proposal: government acquihires. Buy some engineering companies and use those engineers to design the contracts.
part 3: judges
In theory, America has laws and
judges interpret those laws. But there's really no incentive to judges to
follow the laws as written; they just need to pretend they do, even if the
reasoning is
silly.
This is actually necessary, because the laws are incoherent if taken
literally.
One could argue that America is really ruled by judges rather than political
leaders, and because appointment of judges below the Supreme Court has poor
public visibility relative to impact that's a big target for certain kinds
of lobbying.
The good news is that in America, at least judges never
get bribed to make certain rulings...oh
wait.
Judges are appointed by
politicians, so if you want better judges, then get better politicians, I
guess?
But holding the set of judges constant, there's a significant
avenue for improvement: case assignment.
There are a lot of cases
with national scope where one rogue judge can shut down or require things
for a while. Eventually, this gets appealed and overturned, but then the
same thing is done again and again with a new lawsuit.
My proposal
here is simple: have both sides of a lawsuit write an initial summary of the
nature of the case, and have a selection of judges vote on which judge
should take the case.
There's also another problem in the American court system: many systems are overscheduled, with long waits for cases. This is bad. There should be excess capacity so cases can usually be heard immediately. There's some combination of local budget issues and political gridlock over adding any new judges that leads to this not happening, but as political problems in the USA go, this seems less unsolvable than most.
part 4: "connections"
Why is the EPA so bad at
regulating hazardous chemicals, including ones in consumer products. Because
it's
corrupt. The corruption
takes the
form of lucrative jobs being offered to high-level members of agencies
after they retire.
This is also why, for example, when Lina Khan came
in and decided to actually start enforcing antitrust laws, her staff
started quitting, because they didn't want to do their actual jobs, they
wanted to be friendly with the corporations they were supposed to oversee so
they could get nice jobs afterwards.
So what do you do about this?
Ban the EPA from communicating with corporations? That seems problematic.
Ban people from taking jobs with the corporations they regulate? That's a
problem for lower-level people specialized in an industry, but it seems fair
to apply that rule to the leadership - but then, what exactly counts as the
"same companies" or "same industry"?
So, what could be done about
that? The answer is: aggressive and continuous investigation by outside
people, then sending leaders to prison when they're making decisions for
later personal benefit.
When people propose rules for leadership of
agencies or corporations, the response is often something like, "It's hard
to find CEOs, and this will make it impossible!" Nah. I don't believe that
the restrictive criteria used to select leadership candidates actually
matter: the quality of resulting candidates is
pretty
poor. Sure, leadership is a skill, but the current system actually seems
worse than just picking some random smart folks.
part 5: directors
If you work for a big
corporation, its leadership probably has more control over your life than
the government. America has lots of big corporations that are monopolistic or
somehow quasi-governmental, and I'm not opposed (at least in principle) to
them being regulated as such.
Politicians are elected, but what about
the leadership of corporations? Well, shareholders vote for a board of
directors, and then the board of directors elects executives...but the
candidates shareholders vote on are controlled by the current board of
directors. That means that to get on a board of directors, what's important
is knowing people already on the board. The result is that most board
members are on lots of boards, and there's a lot of trading of board
positions for other board positions - perhaps for family members - or some
other favors.
My solution is simple: have the government require that
corporations use a better system. But you can be sure that there'd be
intensive lobbying against that.