RE: Political systems (was Re: Reality bites)

From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rafal@smigrodzki.org)
Date: Thu May 29 2003 - 16:49:08 MDT

  • Next message: Rafal Smigrodzki: "RE: Status of Superrationality"

    Damien Sullivan wrote:
    > On Wed, May 28, 2003 at 01:58:19PM -0700, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
    >
    >> the formation of such bodies like EPA, or OSHA, which through the
    >> decisions of career bureaucrats are rewriting the landscape of
    >> America. The volume of low-quality, almost unaccountable law
    >> produced by these and similar entities exceeds the law produced by
    >> people's representatives (such as they might be)
    >
    > OTOH, the EPA and OSHA bureaucrats have a chance of knowing what
    > they're doing. The EPA recruits actual scientists. What would you
    > want to pin on the scientific understanding of congress?
    >
    ### The problem with scientist-bureaucrats is that although they might have
    the factual knowledge in some narrow domain (e.g. concentrations of dioxin
    in Superfund sites) they are not asked to take into consideration the costs
    they impose on the subjects of their regulations, and they respond to the
    legislated wishes of politicians, who have neither the knowledge, nor much
    of an incentive to contain costs. If an EPA scientist finds that a Superfund
    site contains some concentration of dioxin, he will use the rules demanding
    complete cleanup of the site (passed by Congress), regardless of whether the
    dioxin has even the remotest chance of affecting human life, resulting in,
    literally, billion-dollar expenses without a shred of proof that a single
    human life would be saved (of course, spending a billion dollars on a
    useless endeavor actually kills people by taking the resources away form
    useful ones, but this is a different story). Basically, delegation of
    legislative authority to bureaucratic bodies removes the feedback loop
    between politician and citizen that normally constrains legislations a bit,
    and replaces it with a much weaker feedback loop between politician and
    bureaucrat. Bad idea.

    There are some tricks one could try to solve the science-laden problems in
    legislation. One is the stretchable parliament - the number of MP's selected
    by lot would be adjusted to keep the number of laws per MP stable. One MP
    would be assigned (perhaps in a lottery/first-come-first-serve basis) a
    certain number of pages of law to read, understand and vote on (there would
    have to be enough MP's to assure that each law is covered by a statistically
    valid sample of all MP's), so they would only vote on stuff they really know
    or like.

    The other trick is to defer most decisions to insurers, with EPA-like
    bureaucracies providing only the factual information (e.g. how many people
    will be killed by dioxin disposed of in a certain way, versus another
    method). Most of the issues addressed by EPA and OSHA are related to
    identifiable harms to identifiable persons stemming from identifiable
    activities of other persons. As such, they can be quantified, adjudicated by
    courts and risks can be pooled by insurance. A general demand that agents in
    the economy (workers, employers, organizations) purchase liability insurance
    sufficient to cover all their likely liability could be made by the
    legislator, and adjudicated based on the EPA-provided information by courts
    using the strict liability principle. Then, independent decision-makers
    would try to maximize their benefit - by finding the best balance between
    expenses on dioxin remediation, avoidance of dioxin in the first place, by
    adjusting insurance premiums to best convey information about the costs of
    certain behaviors, etc., much more flexibly and precisely than the current
    system - because the feedback loops would be between the wallets of closely
    collaborating individuals, and not the global choices of millions of people
    made once every four years. Some behaviors, although not illegal, would
    disappear, because the cost of liability insurance associated with them
    would be higher than the economic gain from them.

    Rafal



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu May 29 2003 - 14:00:37 MDT