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Shall We Vote on Values, but Bet on Beliefs?

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Shall We Vote on Values, but Bet on Beliefs? Shall We Vote on Values, But Bet on Beliefs? Robin Hanson ∗ Department of Economics George Mason University† July 2000 Abstract A key question to ask about any social institution is how well it generates, aggregates, and distributes information. Speculative markets seem to do well at this, while familiar democratic institutions, relying in part on academic institutions, seem to fail in many ways. So perhaps we should consider “futarchy,” a form of government where betting markets become our primary common source on matters of fact. Democracy would say what we want, while speculators would say how to get it. That is, elected representatives would formally define and manage an after-the-fact measurement of national welfare, while market speculators would say which policies they expect to raise national welfare. If we are willing to recommend policies that macroeconomic data suggest are causally related to GDP, it seems we should be willing to consider futarchy. Using an qualitative engineering-style approach, this paper considers thirty design issues with futarchy, and then presents a relatively specific proposal which responds to those concerns. ∗For their comments, I thank Peter Boettke, Nick Bostrom, Tom Breton, Bryan Caplan, Roger Congleton, Tyler Cowen, Hal Finney, David Friedman, Karl Hallowell, Bernardo Huberman, Peggy Jackson, Hassan Masum, Peter McCluskey, Jim McKinney, Eli Lehrer, Karen Vaughn, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Richard Zeckhauser, and participants in the Monomedia Berlin: Value conference and the 2000 GMU Public Choice Outreach Seminar. I thank the Mercatus Center for financial support, and Edward Stringham for research assistance. †[email protected] http://hanson.gmu.edu 704-993-2326 FAX: 704-993-2323 MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030 1 Introduction A fundamental social problem seems to be this: which social institutions are better at generating, aggregating, and distributing knowledge? This is a key question at three levels: economics, politics, and abstract information.1 That is, this question seems to be a key issue for understanding which economic institutions do better, which political institutions do better at regulating them, and which abstract information institutions, like academia, are better at informing ordinary citizens about economic and political institutions. If we call this topic “social epistemology,” then we should want our position on social episte- mology to be consistent across these three levels. For example, a standard position is that current economic institutions do best, that current political institutions best regulate them, and that current academic and media institutions reliably tell people these things. A common alternative position is that academia, while usually reliable, has misestimated the harms that democratic interventions inflict on economies, a mistake that advocates within academia will eventually overturn. This paper will explore another position, that betting markets are in many ways superior to familiar academic-style institutions for aggregating and distributing knowledge on many important topics, both specific and abstract. If so, perhaps those who disagree with the current academic consensus on political institutions should work to have betting markets displace such academic institutions, at least in part, as sources that ordinary people rely on for evaluations of political institutions. This third position also suggests that we give betting markets a more direct role in the way political institutions evaluate the promise of economic interventions. While there are some more limited ways in which this could be done, this paper will explore an extreme proposal, to see just how far we can take this idea. After reviewing the centrality of information institutions and how democracies may have failed while betting markets have succeeded as such institutions, this paper will present an “engineering-style” proposal for a new form of government called “futarchy,” and will discuss thirty issues and objections to the concept. In futarchy, the public would vote on values, but bet on beliefs. The democratic process would be limited to managing an after the fact measurement of “GDP+”, a measure of national welfare that they would define. The basic rule of government would be that when a betting market estimates that some proposed policy would increase expected GDP+, that proposal becomes law. Democracy would still tell us what we want, but betting markets would tell us how to get it. If we are willing to recommend policies that macro data suggest are causally related to GDP, it seems we should be willing to consider futarchy. 1In this paper, “knowledge” and “information” are treated as synonymous. 2 Information Institutions The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined pre- cisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use ... exists ... solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. ... Which of [central planning or competition] is likely to be more efficient depends mainly on whether we are more likely to succeed in putting at the disposal of a single central authority all the knowledge which ought to be used but which is initially dispersed among many individuals, or in conveying to the individuals such additional knowledge as they need in order to enable them to fit their plans in with those of others. (Hayek, 1945). Economic theorists today wholeheartedly accept Hayek’s once-revolutionary claim that an un- even distribution of knowledge, now called asymmetric information, is the key problem in social systems. They also accept that policy interventions are mainly constrained by a very wide dis- persion of relevant knowledge, and by the fact that those who know may not want to tell. Most even accept Hayek’s claim that unregulated competition is better than pure central planning. Most economists today do not, however, accept Hayek’s stark choice being these polar extremes. Hayek’s argument that our choice is effectively binary was based on human cognitive biases toward the seen over the unseen: When we decide each issue solely on what appear to be its individual merits, we always over-estimate the advantages of central direction ... [Thus] freedom can be preserved only if it is treated as a supreme principle which must never be sacrificed (Hayek, 1973). Most economists, however, are not persuaded that they suffer from such severe cognitive biases.2 Instead, most economists now study what can go wrong in economies with asymmetric infor- mation, and how they might best intervene given their knowledge constraints. That is, they study how to pursue policy goals when one understands the overall structure of some policy area, but is ignorant of many details. And few economists believe that the exact best policy is always exactly zero intervention.3 An institutional critique of this perspective is that our choices are much more limited. Ordi- nary citizens can not choose from all possible intervention policies; they can at best only choose from feasible stable institutions, which will then choose more specific policies.4 The question then 2Many economists instead argue that cognitive biases are against government intervention. 3One might deny that we can know much about the overall structure of an area of life. But at best this argues for using more abstract economic theory, which makes fewer specific assumptions. 4A “constitutional” critique appears to go further, arguing that we can at best choose among constitutionally- defined forms of government, which will then choose more specific government institutions. 3 becomes which institutions, including a “no intervention” institution if that is feasible, produce better policies on average. Public choice critiques of government intervention argue further that familiar high-intervention democratic political institutions suffer greatly from problems like rent-seeking, coordination failures, commitment failures, adverse selection, and especially low incentives for voters to become informed (Holcombe, 1985). Defenders of democratic interventions, in contrast, suggest that such problems seem to be manageable in practice, as rational agent theory suggests that they should be (Wittman, 1995). Whichever side has the better arguments, such arguments seem too complex for ordinary citizens to evaluate personally. So most citizens must again choose institutions, instead of specific policies. That is, ordinary citizens with little time to directly study political institutions must instead defer to some indirect information sources for answers to such abstract questions. And since citizens also have little time to evaluate the reliability of information sources, a handful of such sources must serve them for all such topics. Thus at the abstract information level, citizens must again typically choose between a few broad long-lived institutions, perhaps as specific as particular academic disciplines or news media, but more likely academia and mainstream news media taken as wholes. Academic opinion on the effectiveness of political institutions has for many decades seemed to lean more toward democracy’s defenders than its detractors. Mainstream media has on the whole leaned the same way. Critics who think democracy results in too much intervention, as well as those who think it results in too little, often explain this mistaken judgment as due to various institutional failures in academia and news media, failures which
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