Organizations as raters

Main article: Ratings system

Main article: Civility and battling entrenched bias

Organizations as Raters

We have discussed in these pages ratings organizations, for example, Freedom House for countries. We noted that people will likely delegate most of their ratings “weight” to trusted organizations (or individuals) that have the expertise in a particular area or capacity to do detailed studies that ordinary people can’t do. In fact, it is likely that many different ratings categories will be delegated to some organization or another. We might even use a ratings service of this kind for people, especially those we don’t know, to find out if they are trustworthy.

Our own society has several ratings systems both for individuals and organizations. We have a significant number of organizations that perform ratings of academic institutions, health-care facilities, consumer goods, etc. We have a large number of informal customer ratings for services and products. We are constantly being asked to fill out surveys to rate our experience in transactions. And we also have more formal systems: financial credit ratings for individuals, health ratings for individuals receiving government medical benefits, no-fly lists, a “good character” rating used by the Australian govt. to reject immigrants, etc.

Right now, the internet itself serves in many ways as a type of informal ratings system. If we want information on someone we don’t know, we can easily google them and see if anything negative turns up. We can also see if they have a LinkedIn or social media presence and make some judgements based on that. Other folks frequently provide recommendations on LinkedIn to people they have worked with, although these seem to be universally biased toward the positive. It’s not a ratings system per se but it gives us something to go on. If we’re really suspicious we can look up cases in the court system and see if the person has been arrested or convicted of any crimes. States generally maintain searchable websites of this kind.

Rating the Rater and Unfair Ratings

Our ratings system has always had the notion that raters can be rated on their ratings and their ability to rate. This is supposed to keep the system honest. But it is unlikely that members will spend a great deal of time assessing other people’s ability to rate others. In a system where ratings will take up a fair bit of time anyway, the requirement to rate the rater seems like it would be too much of an ask. But there are exceptions and these would include a rating for oneself or someone close that is deemed unfair. Then the rater can be expected to be put under quite a lot of scrutiny. In situations like these, a process would need to be developed to resolve differences. For example:

1. Direct communication between the ratee and the rater to discuss the disagreement over the rating.
2. A complaint lodged with an organization that rates other raters (as discussed above) expressing that the rating should be reviewed.
3. Investigation by the organization with results delivered to both parties.
4. If parties wish to continue, the complaint and investigative results are referred to “ratings” court for further investigation and hearing (ie “trial”).
5. If the trial court rules in favor of the aggrieved ratee, then the rating is expunged from the ratings system. The court may further investigate and rule on the reasons for the incorrect rating. If it is found that the rater acted out of malice or some corrupt self-interested reason, a sanction may be placed on them. If the rater simply made a mistake, or isn’t versed enough in ratings to contribute meaningfully, then an educational course of study might be recommended. Our ratings-based society will presumably educate its members on how to properly rate others from an early age. This will be a core function of the civics education in such a society.

Controlling Organizations that Rate

Let’s return for a moment to organizations that rate and ask how an organizational ratings system be controlled and kept in check? By the ratings system itself (of course). We have spoken before of a continuous circle of ratings throughout society. We presume to be using the system in the context of a direct democracy where the ratings system plays a central part in the organization of civic life. Any organization having as its function the rating of others will be subject to especially stringent review by other raters and, indeed, other organizations. In fact, such organizations will and probably should be subject to laws intended to control their behavior.

What might such laws be? The first might be to register with the community as an “official” ratings organization and to provide evidence of expertise in certain areas. The idea would be to show that the ratings organization is somehow more qualified than a random collection of the citizenry to conduct ratings on a particular topic. The idea that the organization would limit its ratings to certain areas where it had expertise would obviously be a requirement. Other rules might dictate that the organization be free of political or ideological bias. This could be assessed by some objective measure (eg membership in the Federalist society would be a disqualifier for court appointments) or by the community itself. If an organization’s bias rating gets too high they could be disqualified from their official status as a ratings organization. Other rules concerning transparency of operations, financial integrity, etc. could be put in place for these and other types of organizations which claim to serve in the public interest.

We mentioned that such organizations might also be used to rate individuals, mostly for the sake of facilitating trustworthy interactions between people who don’t know each other. This is a sensitive topic and highlights even more the need for scrutiny and rules. Such an organization would probably be able to find data on individuals from public sources, such as court records, and statistics that are willingly provided by people to the community government. Other methods might be to tap into the ratings of other individuals who know the individual in question. They might have to solicit such data or perhaps they could find it if people opened their ratings information to the public. Clearly a system such as this, given its power to disrupt the lives of community members, would require a highly disciplined system of checks.

Voting and ratings organizations

We think about voting methods because we anticipate, in line with the community members will delegate a significant amount of their voting power (ie ratings weight) to ratings organizations. But it seems like a short leap from an organization that rates on information-dense issues to one that also makes policy. And it seems like members who delegate ratings will also want to delegate policy decisions.

The difference between an organization of this sort and a legislative body is that the organization has presumably been vetted by the community members for expertise in a particular area. This is what the ratings system, after all, should accomplish. The ratings organization is simply one that is trusted by members to provide good information on some topic or another. It, along with expert individuals, will rise to the top of the trust scale naturally. Legislative bodies today, obviously, get no such vetting. In fact they are rated, in survey after survey, as having very low trust.

But if policy making is done by organizations that have risen to the top of the ratings pecking order, why are voting systems important? Hasn’t the ratings system already provided the necessary “vote”. Well, yes and no. The ratings system has certainly established who knows what about certain subjects. But it would seem like a more formal (and open) process of decision-making should occur on top of the intelligence that such an organization would possess. In other words, we wouldn’t want the organization making important policy decisions in the dark. We would expect them to have decision-makers, drawn from the ranks of their experts, of course, to follow a transparent process of creating policy. We would further expect the community to have some input as to who these policy-makers were. It seems like a good compromise that the policy makers are drawn from an organization of experts but then have to be approved by the community in some type of voting system.

Organizations as gatekeepers and elite overproduction

Recently an Ezra Klein podcast examined the recent populist shift of the Republican party in relation to the old role of parties in gatekeeping. His guests, the political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld, noted that Donald Trump would never have been nominated in the old days when parties had the power to shut out candidates that were considered too far from the mainstream. Today, the democratization of the parties has led to a type of extremism, in their view, because voters themselves can choose their candidates in primary elections. The party in this case used to be a gate-keeper, an elite force for good in their telling.

This notion of gatekeeping is an old one in US history and is the reason we have generally preferred representative democracy over direct democracy, elect electors instead of directly voting for the president, etc. But many of its tenets are simply outdated and a more directly democratic approach could certainly be tried given modern technology and the ability to acquire information. Nevertheless, some amount of delegation to experts (as we’ve noted), some gatekeeping, will certainly be in a community’s interest.

These organizations we’ve been talking about will represent an elite in our communities, just as they do in our own society. One danger of having elites is elite overproduction. This is a destabilizing factor in society pioneered by Peter Turchin and discussed by many political scientists/sociologists:

Niskanen Center interview with Peter Turchin

The Atlantic essay by Peter Turchin

NYTimes commentary by David Brooks on progressive elites

National Interest article on elite overproduction and foreign policy

This is a situation where society produces too many governing elites (as ours is right now) who then seek power, can’t find it, and then turn to destabilizing activities as a way of attaining it (eg the rise of fringe left and right extremism). Many unstable periods in history can be traced to this phenomenon.

Let’s first comment that direct democracies (or more direct democracies), the kind advanced by our ratings system, tend to mitigate this phenomenon by devolving power to the people and making it less attractive at the top. Of course, here we’ve been discussing delegation of power away from the people, but always with an ultimate check in the ratings system, a bottom-up construct of the people.

But our proposed government mitigates elite overproduction in another, probably more important, way: it reduces the number of “elites” and also gives them more to do. First off, the elite will be defined by a presumed objective ratings system, not by their ability to attain power, their connections, wealth, educational pedigree, etc. The ratings system greatly clarifies who is elite and who isn’t. In so doing, btw, it creates a culture of modesty instead of a culture where everyone thinks they’re a superstar. Anyway, for those who qualify as truly elite, their domain of expertise will be represented if it is considered a legitimate policy-making domain at all (usually elite means it has to do with policy, ie foreign relations, economics, etc.) If so, the elite member will take part in the extensive modeling and simulation work our new technocratic society will require. Given the demands of such work, it is hard to see how elite “overproduction” will be an issue. If anything we devote too little of our elite’s energy to policy-making today because we do not do it in as rigorous a fashion as we should.

Alongside the governing elite there is an economic elite which is also being overproduced in today’s society. The overproduction of economic elites is the result of class-based entitlement, not any real value-add. In other words, most of these economically elite people do nothing to deserve their excess wealth. As a result, their wealth must be expropriated from the productive classes. We’ve commented on this in the past so we won’t belabor it here. Suffice it to say that the economic system of a ratings-based society should preclude this phenomenon from the outset.