Startup Countries: Seasteading Lightning Talk
Here’s a 5-minute talk on seasteading I gave to an audience of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs last week, that I spent 10+ hours on. (It takes more time to write a short talk than a long one!).
Great for sharing with your friends (particularly entrepreneurial ones) who’d enjoy a quick video intro to seasteading!
More info on the event “Breakthrough Philanthropy”, hosted by the Thiel Foundation, featuring a number of innovative non-profits such as the X PRIZE Foundation and more.
After Napster was shut down as a company & a service, Kazaa was quickly written to address the central point of failure weakness. With a pure P2P system, there is no concentration of liability – the liability of any one peer is vastly less than a company and removing them doesn’t stop the system, so the benefits are far less. On the cost side, while the cost to sue one peer is less than suing a company, the cost to sue every peer is vastly higher than the cost to sue one central company.
On net, while it was very worthwhile to sue Napster, suing the occasional file-sharer doesn’t pay. The technology dramatically altered the incentives facing those who would enforce copyright protections, thus changing what gets done in practice.
While WikiLeaks may have benefited from having a known leader who could fundraise and recruit, we can now see the weakness of that system. When the US got angry enough, Julian Assange was the obvious target. But you can’t take vengeance without teaching a lesson, and the movement to free information for public benefit can now simply reconstitute around a model robust to the “find a guy and throw him in jail” attack. Already, next-generation solutions are in the works:
Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who left the site after disagreements with its founder, plans to launch Openleaks in the coming months.
The technology, which can be embedded in any organisation’s sites, will allow whistle-blowers to anonymously leak data to publishers of their choice.
Its founders say it will address problems they had with Wikileaks.
“We felt that Wikileaks was developing in the wrong direction,” Mr Domscheit-Berg told BBC News. “There’s too much concentration of power in one organisation; too much responsibility; too many bottlenecks; too many resource constraints.”
And that’s just one. The technology for darknets and anonymous submission & publication of information is easy, there are many variations and techniques. Over time, developers will create solutions, including ones that spread liability, thus increasing the cost and decreasing the benefit to going after any node. The fact that anonymous submission & publishing are now easy is a physical fact about the world and its technology, a fact which cannot be rolled back by government decree, or throwing any one guy in jail. Not saying it is good, not saying it is bad, just saying that it is – and it is bad to reject what is.
These examples and issues are, of course, related to our broad themes of changing politics through technological innovation. Yes, governments can and will push back against seasteads. But just as the development of ships fundamentally altered the movement of people goods around the world, the ability to create new physical land anywhere in the oceans (68% of the planet!) will fundamentally alter the governance industry. There will be many ways to change tactics to deal with push back, many options that did not previously exist, and that will almost certainly change the balance of power.
Technology changes incentives, incentives change the world.
Law Profs: We Need FDA-Style Approval for Laws
The FDA and its randomized trials have killed people. But never mind. The Boston Globe writes:
As Donald Green of Yale says, “We test pharmaceuticals because there are billions of dollars at stake, and lives.” The same, he argues, is true of our laws, yet we don’t subject them to the same scrutiny. “In some ways the question is, how badly do we want to know?”
Still, I like the spirit of the idea. One such trial over a fifty year period was Hong Kong versus the rest of China. We still have people who deny this obvious outcome and who, like the Boston Globe, rely on sentimental quackery and fairness-based homeopathy. The Globe expands its story on randomized law trials out of this paper:
In a paper to be published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review this spring, Yale professors Ayres and Yair Listokin and George Washington University law professor Michael Abramowicz advocate the systematic introduction of randomized trials throughout government — in legislatures and administrative agencies, at the state and federal level. They suggest that trials be “self-executing,” in that policies would be automatically enacted based on their results (though lawmakers would be able to overrule this default).
Not really “self-executing” if it can be overridden by vested interests, is it? Besides, the authors don’t even subject their own policy proposal to the same test–let’s suggest a “randomized” trial comparing countries who have FDA-style law approval with those that don’t.
Entry Barriers and The Power of the Permanent Bureaucracy
One of the things that Brad found when researching our recent public choice paper is that there has been some past economic work on switching costs, though not barriers of entry:
The first rigorous treatment of competitive government from an evolutionary perspective comes from Vanberg and Kerber (1994). As in the neoclassical understanding of Tiebout competition, governments have an incentive to attract mobile resources. To achieve this, they will engage in rule innovation and successful conjectures will be imitated, leading to an improvement in rules over time. Variation is generated by existing jurisdictions coming up with new rules, and the selection process is consumer choice. Wohlgemuth (1995, 2008) considers institutional competition as an evolutionary learning process and argues that the number of parallel experiments and the strength of the selection mechanism (that is, the ease of citizen exit) are crucial to the rate of institutional evolution.
However, we disagree with this past focus. For example, at The Seasteading Institute, we have been shifting to emphasize the idea of “startup countries” and the main benefit being the startup dynamic, rather than the modular rearrangement possibilities. This is because Barney Pell, Jon Rauch, Tim Lee and others have pointed out the weakness with modular rearrangement, and while I think it still provides some benefits, I agree that I overestimated them initially.
Fortunately, lowering the barriers to entry and allowing startup countries can still over great improvements. After all, the neoclassical assumption that existing firms can innovate as well as new ones is awfully questionable when applied to innovation in organizational structure, which is very difficult to change “in place”. And in the specific case of democracy, we know that special interests and unelected bureaucrats add significant rigidity to the system. When the very failure of democracy is the way that certain special interests entrench themselves at the expense of others, expecting a democracy to fix this “in place” seems naively optimistic.
As evidence, Moldbug offered me this great link on how the bureaucracy actually works, and how unresponsive it is to politics:
The first thing to realize about government service is that even in the most momentous election, a tiny fraction of government workers actually change jobs. A few hundred politicians and their staff and perhaps the heads of most of the agencies would lose their job after a significant electoral shift. At most, a few hundred people lose their job out of a total staff out of 1.8 million. In no other bureaucracy would anyone consider the removal of 0.01% of the bureaucracy a major change.
The day in the life of the head of an agency is very busy. He or she is shuttled from one activity to another. Generally the bureaucracy tells him or her what to say in all these situations. I get to write little statements for the head of my agency all the time. This busy schedule also serves to keep the head of the agency from actually accomplishing anything.
The fifth thing to realize is best realized by observing the recent “monumental” pieces of legislation that have passed. Where did Congressmen get 2,000 pages of laws on healthcare reform or financial reform? . . . If you answered that they slaved over a computer to write 2,000 pages, you’re wrong. They asked the bureaucracy for it. Your humble blogger wrote the first draft of an amendment in one of the recent mega-bills, for example.
The sixth thing to realize is an addendum to the fifth. If you read the recent mega-bills you’ll see a strange thing. Congress isn’t actually legislating most of the changes. In most cases, Congress lays some vague ground rules and mandates that agencies actually write the rules. Thus, the bills serve, first and foremost, to give power to the agencies.
This is not a situation than can be effectively fixed through mere politics. If one wishes to truly, deeply, radically change how government works, starting from scratch with a new set of initial conditions and rules for the evolution of that government, and then scaling it up over time, seems far more likely to be effective.
Seasteading Public Choice Paper
Patri and I have been working on an academic paper making the case for seasteading from a public choice perspective. Patri will be presenting a working version of this via video to the Australasian Public Choice Conference down here in New Zealand next week.
The paper is here. We’re still working on it, so we’d be grateful for comments!
Here’s the abstract:
We develop a dynamic theory of the industrial organization of government which combines the insights of public choice theory and a dynamic understanding of competition. We argue that efforts to improve policy should be focused at the root of the problem – the uncompetitive governance industry and the technological environment out of which it emerges – and suggest that the most promising way to robustly improve policy is to develop the technology to settle the ocean.
Thanks to Eric Crampton for organizing the event and encouraging us to get a working paper out earlier rather than later.
Juba: Secession in Sudan
Juba is a work in progress, but as the capital of Sudan’s semiautonomous south its profile could soon increase dramatically. On Jan. 9, the Texas-sized region of some 8 million people is scheduled to hold a referendum on whether to secede from northern Sudan.
If voters choose independence – and polls suggest that they overwhelmingly will – this former garrison town would become the capital city of the world’s newest nation.
The challenges that await it are immense. After decades of conflict and neglect, southern Sudan today looks much as it did in the 19th century: a landlocked tropical expanse in the heart of East Africa, with few roads, barely functioning schools and hospitals, only a handful of capable civil servants and, apart from some promising oil fields, hardly any industry.
Anarchist Yachting Documentary
From the Anarchist Yacht Clubb comes the interesting-looking documentary Hold Fast:
Moxie walks us through the history of scrappy folks who have built boats before him, back hundreds of years and then whisks us back to the present, where he is part of building the “Pestilence” on the coast of Florida. Their ragged crew of four get it ready to be ocean-faring and then hold through the Bahamas and up to Dominican Republic, faring surprise storms, deadly turns around cruise ships, fishing, and dropping their anchors manually by swimming them out. It’s an incredible voyage and numerous scenes were enough to make me squirm and feel like I was living the experience. It’s inspiring when a home-made documentary can be just as satisfying and interesting as anything Hollwood has to offer. This is a must-have.
Looks like a great example of low-road seasteading! You can buy the movie on DVD, download a torrent, or watch it on Vimeo. Here’s the trailer:
Foreign Policy: the 3rd Rate In Flight Magazine for JFK to Dulles
Perhaps you’ve seen this iPad ad:
The iPad is…what? Delicious. Current. Learning. Playful. Literary. Artful. Scientific? Of course, you know it’s not really any of these things. Whenever an advertiser uses adjectives to describe a product, he’s not describing the product, he’s describing you. Or, I should say, you want to believe he’s describing you. You think you are literary and artful and, by the power of totem and relics, you hope mere propinquity to this sacred object enhances those things about you. But it doesn’t.
I now ask you to turn to Foreign Policy’s list of Top 100 Thinkers, which isn’t a list of thinkers at all. It was written by advertisers calling themselves journalists, hoping you’ll call yourself a thinker after reading it. For you will think that by recognizing these names, and nodding your head to express familiarity, you’re a thinker too, but of course you haven’t thought about any thing at all. The flight into Dulles has entered its final descent and you’re happy there’s a car waiting for you.
If there were ever a yearbook for anti-competitive government, this is probably it.
Competitive Government in Bujold’s SF
Lois McMaster Bujold is one of the most acclaimed modern SF authors, tying Robert Heinlein for the most Best Novel Hugos (4). She also happens to be my favorite fiction author. Yet she’s unknown to many SF fans because so much SF is decades old, and she’s “only” been writing for 25 years. In the novel A Civil Campaign, the main characters (youngest generation of a warrior-aristocratic dynasty) discuss competitive government on their home planet of Barrayar:
“Among our father’s early reforms, when he was Regent, was that he managed to impose uniform simplified rules for ordinary subjects who wanted to change Districts, and switch their oaths to their new District Count. Since every one of the sixty Counts was trying to attract population to his District at the expense of his brother Counts, Da somehow greased this through the Council, even though everyone was also trying to prevent their own liege people from leaving them. Now, each Count has a lot of discretion about how he runs his District, how he structures his District government, how he imposes his taxes, supports his economy, what services he provides his people, whether Progressive or Conservative or a party of his own invention like that loon Vorfolse down on the south coast, and on and on. Mother describes the Districts as sixty sociopolitical culture dishes. I’d add, economic, too.”
“That part, I’ve been studying,” Lord Mark allowed. “It matters to where I place my investments.”
Vorkosigan nodded. “Effectively, the new law gave every Imperial subject the right to vote local government with their feet. Our parents drank champagne with dinner the night the vote slipped through, and Mother grinned for days. I must have been about six, because we were living here by then, I remember. The long-term effect, as you can imagine, has been a downright biological competition. Count Vorenlightened makes it good for his people, his District grows, his revenues increase. His neighbor Count Vorstodgy makes it too tough, and he leaks people like a sieve, and his revenues drop. And he gets no sympathy from his brother Counts, because his loss is their gain.”
Amen. Let’s hope that some Sci Fi like technology – like seasteading – can bring us that “downright biological competition” here on Earth.
Austerity in an Age of Jurisdictional Arbitrage
Many American corporations have used Ireland as a foothold in Europe because its corporate tax rates are relatively low. But now with all that meat on the table, the E.U. wants debt ridden Ireland to bite
The Irish government has been given a stark warning from some of the biggest American companies in Ireland on the risk of a mass exodus if the country’s low corporation tax rate is raised. The warning – from executives at Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Intel – spoke of the “damaging impact” on Ireland’s “ability to win and retain investment” should the country’s corporation tax rate be increased from 12.5pc…
Nicholas Sarkozy, the French president, said yesterday that while raising taxes will not be a condition of the bail-out, he expects Ireland to raise its corporation tax rate.
Let A Thousand Nations Bloom 