Technocracy

Main article: Political Systems

The system we are discussing is basically a technocracy, or more specifically to our case, a democratic technocracy. In many ways, we are already living in a technocracy and have been for many decades. Government agencies, run by technocrats, have significant leverage over policy because broadly written laws often give them the granular authority to do so. The EPA, for instance is given a legal mandate to control the amount of pollution emissions in certain industries but is then given the authority on how to implement it. The Fed has the power to control interest rates and the money supply and is given only the most basic legal framework to go by, the twin-mandate (maintain low inflation and low unemployment). Even if this implies technocracy, we still have a legislative body that is not particularly expert in anything. Government agencies, technocratic though they may be, are very much subordinate to Congress, and work directly for the President (another non-expert).

We might think the idea of electing our legislators from the ranks of experts as profoundly undemocratic. But today we have representatives chosen from an elite as well: those who rise in their party, know the right people, have enough money to compete or are adept at raising money, have a particular skill in turning out primary voters on wedge issues (who are a minority). It is a system that rewards political skill rather than policy skill and it hardly seems better than a technocracy.

Furthermore, nothing in our ratings based system says candidates can’t be chosen from a list of non-experts. Community rules (or laws) will decide who can run. However, the ratings system, since it automatically ranks people and organizations with the most expertise, will have a built-in advantage in producing candidates for representative bodies. A ratings-based society should, furthermore, rate more highly those experts who serve the community through government. If we are in a post-money/post-scarcity society then the rating given to service should factor as the most important goal in life. This should encourage experts to stand for office.

Perhaps the biggest problem with what we are proposing here is that although many expert organizations would exist, and produce elected representatives, they would not have any way to enact official policies. Thus we would imagine that a legislative body would have to be created, much like our Congress.

But a more straightforward approach suggests itself. What if we divided up government into subject matter domains (economy, environment, defense, etc) and elected a small group of policy makers for each of these? Each of the elected representatives would be an expert in their domain, drawn from the expert organizations discussed above. These small domain-based groups would then be charged with enacting policy in their respective areas, much like federal agencies do today (but with legislative power). The decisions made by these groups could always be reviewed by community members and perhaps a final direct-democracy style vote could be held to approve them. Another idea to check their considerable power would be to allow the other domain-expert groups to weigh in, to some extent, on whatever a particular group was deciding. The other groups would have, say a 20% vote in the final decision, not enough to be influential on their own but enough to swing a vote that may happen to be dominated by fringe or extremist views.

Obviously the world cannot be sub-divided into neat little domains of expertise where decisions can be rendered independently. Given our emphasis on systems thinking, we would expect there to be a large amount of interplay between groups and simulation of the holistic effects of any policy, not to mention simulation of how all policies interact. This, in fact, suggests another mechanism for bringing together disparate domains of policy: see how they do under detailed simulated conditions of the whole. The results of such simulations would then be made available to the public (or the larger representative body) for the sake of approval. In this sense the technocrats are less decision-makers and more modelers. Decisions are then made on the basis of modeling results.

Sounds simple but we emphasize that no multi-objective decision (as these certainly will be) is easy because there is no automatic way to combine the goodness of the multiple objectives. If our goal is to produce a low-cost transportation system that is also environmentally friendly, how much do we weigh each objective? If we want an education system that produces scientific, philosophical, and civic minded citizens, what is the proper balance? These questions are essentially subjective and relate to one’s internal values. We can attempt to construct overall figures of merit (FOM), and perhaps communities will settle on an agreed-upon few, but this is never guaranteed. The subjective, and ideological, perspective of every individual will always be brought to bear on even the most technocratic decisions.