Engineering Democracy: Economies I’d Like to See

[mithriltabby]

The Democratic Party are trying to get into the social-networking scene as part of organizing. While I don’t always agree with the party’s politics, they’re the major party that is closest to my own views, so I’m going to see what influence I can have putting a blog there: Engineering Democracy. Anything I post there will also show up here under the engineering democracy tag. Anyone wishing to gang up with me on the party at PartyBuilder is welcome to do so.

I’m not much on labels; I tend to have disagreements with nearly any group that fits comfortably under a given designation. I don’t know of any distinct philosophy that represents my particular views.

I like the free market. It’s a good system for allowing any individual or organization to rise to the level of their own competence; capitalism is fairly closely modeled on the system of nature, which has had a few billion years of natural selection to work out its process, after all. And it provides a nice effort-reward feedback that motivates me and plenty of other people.

There are places that it breaks down, though. Monopolies in business are bad in the same way that monocultures are bad in farming— consider the Irish potato famine and the numerous worms and viruses that propagate among popular operating systems. The tragedy of the commons becomes a serious issue when the commons is our atmosphere or oceans. And while all the problems that these create are ultimately self-correcting, I don’t want to be around during the self-correction process. That’s one place I want a degree of regulation: enough to keep the economy flexible, not so much that it’s prohibitively difficult to start new businesses, and certainly not a centrally planned economy.

Advocates of corporate social responsibility often talk of a triple bottom line. If we attached a dollar value to all externalities and required accounting for them— whether it be dumping mercury in the air or carefully engineering jobs to avoid paying for health insurance— we could get a single bottom line. Maintain a good standard for that and the invisible hand will steer a more sensible course than it is now.

It also makes sense that people should get together as cities and provinces and nations to leverage the economies of scale for good and services that we all want. Examples include health care, police services to provide security internally, national defense to provide security externally, keeping the economy on an even keel, educating children to become productive workers, and retraining adults when their industries change and they need to find a new line of work.

Some of these things require a careful balance: it’s good to provide support for people who are left as casualties of a shifting economy, but the safety net needs to be sufficiently uncomfortable that people would rather work than stay there. Build it well enough— so people who are training between jobs can still keep roofs over their heads and food in their bellies and their children in school— and we could abolish some of the regulations that make the labor market less flexible, even the minimum wage, making it easier for people to get off the safety net. The guideline I would seek in making these changes is that each change should come with a decrease in risk for the people affected.