Utopia from First Principles
People are complicated. Systems are complicated. We’ll probably never have a perfect system to organize people that everyone is happy with.
But historically, humans have tried many things, and many things seem to work well. Lots of economists, historians, and philosphers study systems and form opinions about how well they work. Decades ago, it was common for politicians to read these ideas and form policy based on them. Now politicians usually do not have a background in fundamental ideas and launch campaigns based on vibes and reasoning about lofty goals that sounds good in a campaign but is clearly and fundamentally flawed.
While some might argue that we need to keep trying and keep experimenting and figuring out some combination of all the political systems we’ve tried (or to discover new and untried ones), I disagree. I think we’ve learned enough and know how to build a well-governed country from what we know. I don’t think you need to be a genius to figure it out. These ideas are all out there, and none of them are mine. But they’re scattered and give out-of-date examples and some might be written in Latin or translated badly from German.
So here’s how to run Utopia if you’re starting from scratch. If you’re not, and you have to work from inside an existing system (which is very likely if you live in any country in the world), then these are things you can adopt, move towards, or let it be known that you’d vote for someone who wanted to use them.
I’m not a politician or an economist. I’m just some guy who read a variety of stuff from different people and different times. I saw first hand how different systems operate, and I thougth about the patterns I saw. There’s a possibility that this is all naive or wrong, but don’t think it is.
Power corrupts
The Invisible Hand
Liberalism - the simple version
Why government help can harm
The cobra effect
Don’t scar after one scratch
KISS
Entrepreneurs are more nimble than governments
Why governments exist
Nudges and ‘libertarian paternalism’
Our plans are measured in centuries. Governments last longer than a human career, so we need them to build infrastrucutre like roads, power plants, etc.
If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to far go together. Big organizations are very very inefficient. You wouldn’t believe how inefficient big organizations are. That makes sense for a power grid, railway network, because it’s more important that these things work reliably for 100s of years at a time. It doesn’t make sense for supermarkets because it’s easy to start a supermarket and if there’s a gap an entrepreneur will see it and start one. You can’t do that with a nuclear power plant.
Things that should be public vs private
- Insurance should definitely be public
- Railways and public transport should be public and operate at a loss
- All cities should be nearly car free