Hypothetical - Moon Station Government

nick012000

You are now in control of a habitat on the moon. It has no ties to any government; its creation was funded by a wealthy philanthropist who just wants people to emigrate from Earth. The cost of doing so is within the reach of a middle-class family if they sell their home; you can therefore expect a decent number of immigrants.

What sort of government do you establish? How do you go about ruling so that your new settlement on the moon will survive and thrive?

I hope it would be moderately self-regulating. Whether sufficiently self-regulating I'm not sure.

Lets say Fred sells his UOPs for money, and becomes known as such, other politicians might decide to not work with him, as he is hurting their ability to make UOPs by introducing bad elements into the market. Collusion is a problem in this situation again though.

I'll briefly sketch out my latest slightly more complex thoughts. It was designed to avoid the free rider problem. If you had multiple politicians getting UOP directly one may not bother to allocate their UOPs well or at all (as they don't give UOPs they have lots to bid, so are hard to dislodge).

Lets say you have 12 ministers each that get slightly different flavours of UOPs, each month you need a different flavour of UOP to bid on a political post, including ministerial seats.

So the different ministers would have to trade UOPs between them, if they wanted to have long term control. If one minister was perceived not to be distributing them well (selling them for example) by the others, they might not be allowed to trade or get bad trade terms.

This is supposed to be a way of having the populace be able to give different feedback signals to different politicians without them having to figure out who did what at a specific time. Not perfect, I really want a theoretical framework to allow me to test out these ideas.

Numbers/times scales are for ease of thought only.

I'm definitely interested in how you plan to try it out.

I'm going for an non-profit company devoted to trying to spread the word about this style of system, run by those same ideas. So definitely eating its own dog food.

So the organisation would try and get donors and fund research into the maths behind what would be stable, run experiments when people are encouraged to try to subvert the system (harmlessly) and build web applications/phone/facebook apps to manage the currencies. Hopefully some people will find it a novel and fun enough idea to want to take part/donate some and gain some control *.

If nothing else I'm willing to provide some enough money for web hosting or something and we can fight for control over that.

I've got a course to finish off first though.

Lets say you have 12 ministers each that get slightly different flavours of UOPs, each month you need a different flavour of UOP to bid on a political post, including ministerial seats.

This clause triggers my "too complex for human agents" switch.

I'm approaching this problem from the perspective of finding flaws exploitable by selfish agents, rather than reviewing it as a better method of organization between agents that desire to cooperate but have imperfect information; perhaps that's not the point, and you're not trying to make a system tha... (read more)