I sometimes get a little bit melancholic when I read about Dath Ilan. Humanity could be so much better off, but due to economic illiteracy, we can't have nice things.
Better to light a small flame than to curse the darkness. So if you had to build a model econoliterate city on earth, how would you go about it?
There's lots of micronations projects out there. What I'm interested in is:
- How do you keep the city econoliterate, immediately and a hundred years in the future.
- How do you make this practical to achieve - most micronations projects dont go anywhere, and are actively thwarted by governments.
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my pen sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Dath Ilan,
In this earths green & pleasant land.
Tl;dr: Legalize prediction markets, make civilization adequate.
Spend a lot of money on ad campaigns and lobbying, and get {New Hampshire/Nevada/Wyoming/Florida} to nullify whatever federal anti-gambling laws exist, and carve out a safe haven for a serious prediction market (which does not currently exist).
You could alternatively just fund the development of a serious prediction market on the Ethereum blockchain, but I'm not as sure about this path, as the gains one could get might be considered "illegal" in some jurisdictions. Also, a fully legalized prediction market could rely on courts to arbitrate market resolution criteria.
In order for a prediction market to be "serious", it has to allow epistemically rational people to get very very rich (in fiat currency) without going to jail, and it has to allow anyone to create and arbitrate a binary prediction market for a small fee. Such a platform does not currently exist.
If you offer a large monetary incentive for people to be epistemically rational, they will become more epistemically rational.
Regular people will be able to Google questions like "what are the odds that Donald Trump will bring gas prices below $3/gallon in his first year if he's elected" and "what are the odds that Proposition 23, if passed, will reduce unemployment in the next six months". Normal people will actually be able to get real answers to these questions.
Political incentives shift. Legislation is now more likely to pass if it achieves its stated goals, so effective legislation now actually gets written. Presidential candidates that the markets say will improve {GDP/unemployment/poverty/violent crime} have an advantage over their opponents. Prediction markets let people call politicians on their bullshit, so they can't afford to bullshit as much anymore.
A prediction market hosted in the USA can also predict foreign elections. Decision markets on China's economic growth over Xi Jinping's successor emerge, and the Central Committee pays attention to them. American decision markets are a global public good, providing priceless intelligence to government officials of all nations. The honest conditional forecasts provided by prediction markets make world governments more effective and less Mazelike.
Institutions become adequate. American healthcare costs 10x less and works much more smoothly. Land value taxes are phased in, income taxes are phased out, a voucher system replaces public schools, government research grants actually fund innovation, the economy booms, the median salary grows, millions are lifted out of poverty, et cetera. It is very hard for me to forecast what an actually effective government would look like (because it's hard to predict something smarter than me), but I'm sure it would be good. Not exactly Dath Ilan, but in the right basin of attraction.
For some more detail on what this plan might look like, my 2nd-place-winning entry in the Future of Life Institute's "A.I. world-building" competition, was all about how humanity uses prediction markets and other new institutional designs to increase its level of civilizational adequacy, becoming strong/wise enough to manage the safe development of transformative AI.
See my lesswrong post here (which focuses on the details of how AI development is controlled in my team's fictional scenario), or the whole entry here (which includes two great short stories by... (read more)