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Comment by bcp2384 | Hacker News Reader

Convinced part of the problem with political offices is that elected politicians have no incentive to actually consider second order or third order effects of any piece of legislation they pass. Everything is optimized for first order effects only e.g. optics because that is what they think "shows" they did something.

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> elected politicians have no incentive to actually consider second order or third order effects of any piece of legislation they pass.

You're absolutely right. And why should they care? They don't own the power they wield, they're merely renting it for some period of time. After their time is up, and they're done throwing their weight around, they can wash their hands of all repercussions.

Exactly, this is a major problem. If anything, they're incentivized to not use second-order thinking, because most voters don't. Plus it's more complicated to communicate second-order effects.

> Convinced part of the problem with political offices is that elected politicians have no incentive to actually consider second order or third order effects of any piece of legislation they pass.

Whereas companies that harm the public often don't even care about the first order effects of their business.

As a result the entire planet is in grave danger due to climate change. How do we fix this? To borrow a little from Switzerland, I think a direct democracy at every level of government is needed. But first we must have many more remote jobs so people don't feel pressured to live in cities. They can then result in the creation of new cities elsewhere with a direct democracy via cryptographically secure apps.

This very much HN bubble thinking. In the grand scheme of things, a very small percentage of jobs are conducive for remote work.

Almost all office jobs could be remote only.

Sure, but office jobs are a fairly small portion of the overall workforce. Based on [0], it looks like the "Information", "Financial activities", "Professional and business services" and I'll assume 50% of "other" and the government jobs could be done remotely. I'm sure this is missing some jobs in the other categories, and there are certainly many, jobs in these categories that can't be done remotely, but so goes. That leaves < 30% of jobs that could be done remotely.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-...

I would say ~30% is not "fairly small". Also that 30% predominately works circa 9-5 and is disproportionately responsible for traffic congestion.

Plus, it's unclear how those industries get split. For example utilities, trade, healthcare, and leisure/hospitality all have a large number of office jobs. And cities have a higher concentration of office jobs than rural areas. I would be willing to bet that in most medium-large sized cities, half of all jobs could be done remotely.

A direct democracy would be even worse. In California, prop 13 didn’t come from the legislature. It came through ballot proposition. And that law is the granddaddy of second and third order effects.

I totally agree that it would be worse in the absence of an app based system. The point is to be adaptive and correct the legislative mistakes that get made. Adaptability is always a key requirement for the success of any system. Right now this rate of change is IMHO too bottlenecked.

A two-thirds vote can also be minimally required for major changes, so as to stabilize the system.

Are you sure? After Prop J and Prop K, I’m positive that the California populace will just go after things that seem like they’ll make them individually better off in the short term. In fact, I can’t see why an app would make it different. People will still want the stability of laws being enforced for a long term. I see your proposed system as amplifying the problem honestly.

Not even that - they optimize for public perception of effects.

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