This post's read time: 4 minutes
Dear Friend,
Is this a radical approach to governance?
I only have a few minutes for a missive. Yesterday, I learned that the governor is not only a big Vonnegut fan, but that many of the connections I have with government, the young people I am excited to direct the future of my State, are part of a governor’s office which was formed because Vonnegut’s writings demand it.
Here is a poem by Gov. Janet Mills:
“For My Granddaughter” (2016)
Men running for office
Bellow about the future,
Punch the air,
Wave their arms,
Yell on the tv.
While in the delivery room,
It is the fist you notice first,
The quiet fingerlets
That cling to one another
With invisible strength
Clutching their own new skin,
forming a circle
Only she understands.
Then the face, wrinkly,
The little body,
A sturdy belly,
knees and feet
in miniature.
Eyes and ears
Ready to know
Everything that is new,
Everything that is.
A brain ready
To learn,
A heart ready
To love.
That is your god
Warming your own heart,
That is your god
holding your hand
So tight,
Never letting you
Go.
“Every government
Ought to have
A Department of the Future,”
Kurt Vonnegut said.
And here, she is.
Clenching all our
Tomorrows.
I’m a big fan of this poem, and now feel a newfound kinship with a Governor I already appreciated for many of her policies in rebuilding things like public healthcare and unemployment protections, shortly before a global pandemic proved how vital it is to have those things, and have them well-managed by good people.
I’d like to evolve a system of government which does not depend on rules, but on principles, which is designed from the ground up to assist people in making their own decisions as opposed to making decisions for them. It is is many ways taking the extremes of socialism, conservatism and libertarianism very seriously. We can have our cake and eat it too, but only if we are smart about it.
This really struck me this week listening to various podcasts. One was about the recent banking collapse, and one was about a “downward spiral” with our cities and especially their public transportation systems. In the public transportation podcast a very smart group of people with a very powerful platform discussed how “what they really need is money”. This struck me as ridiculous. We cannot lay new subway tracks out of linen and paper! Money is merely a tool, a powerful tool, but to reduce a policy discussion down to needing more of a made-up thing is destructive.
What we really need are people, energy, materials, actions. These are all typically coordinated within the construct of capital, but to trust that capital will do the right job is to assume that with enough hammers one will certainly build a house.
Here are my voice notes while I was driving (with quick formatting edits):
A new way to consider capital benchmarking it not against scarcity of mineral resources but against the real value of physical materials and the utility of finished products. For example you would devise a formula to value a house not based on what the market rate is but based on a relationship between the availability of the raw materials that the house is made out of and the value that the house has for the owner, say 1/3 of a typical owners income makes the value of the house. Individual materials and finished goods could be valued based upon the real measure of effort to develop and produce them, and upon the potential for the availability/sustainability of these solutions to meet demand. We can use algorithms!
Will the greatest benefit of the AI Revolution the common sense algorithms? As people become more familiar with AI and it’s Eerie ability to predict what we want and what we are going to say, perhaps there will be more opportunity for people to latch on to the concept of an algorithm.
So much of daily life today revolves around the most crude form of digitalism where we decide that people at very specific income levels or very specific points in their career get a bump in pay or an increase in taxation or an increase in regulation when it applies to companies of a certain size.
We can do away with all of this crudity and start having formulas which, for example with large banks, instead of having a cut off at 50 billion dollars at which point a bank is highly regulated, we would have a ramping up: the bigger a bank is and the more impact it has, the more regulation is put upon it.
A similar formula which would increase the sampling with a large Bank to make sure that proper validations are being done and the system is working as expected.
A small bank would have a small chance of a detailed review but those would still happen. Once this system is in place, it would be quite simple to put a feedback mechanism in so that when an organization such as a bank is caught having risky behaviors then an increase in scrutiny would be to measure it until for some period of time the bank was operating with few deviations.
This is very much how statistical process control and quality control in any major manufacturing organization works. It is boggling that we do not apply it to many of the most important parts of our lives revolving around finance and policy.