Whenever I read Vitalik's work, I find myself convinced that all of society and its various problems can be boiled down to incentives and their alignment or misalignment.
Mechanism design is a subfield of game theory and economics called mechanism design that tackles this directly.
Instead of having a game and figuring out how it works and what is the outcome is when agents play it, the problem is to design a game that creates desired outcomes when selfish agents play it.
It's possible to design mechanisms where utilitarian social-choice function is the best choice even when players are selfish. The most famous result in the field is Vickrey–Clarke–Groves mechanism to achieve a socially-optimal solution in auctions. Quadratic voting and quadratic funding is another interesting mechanism that results good outcomes. Vitalik Buterin is involved with this too.
Curious about if these ideas have been applied to constructing healthy effective companies? With happy employees
Or maybe one could say everyone that comes up with some KPI are doing this?
Links for anyone curious:
Eric Weinstein's The Portal Podcast - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLq9jO8fmlPee9ezOraOHA...
Lex Fridman's Artificial Intelligence Podcast - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuK...
They are related by questions of society, trust, and incentive design.
They seem largely aligned with Vitalik's assessment of the `0 of N`/`1 of N` assessment
Before clicking through to Goodreads, though, check out this book review of Seeing like a State by Scott Alexander:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-lik...
Next, check out both of these books:
- James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed [0]
- Michael Huemer, The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey [1]
Neither book will disappoint!
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20186.Seeing_Like_a_Stat...
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15794037-the-problem-of-...
Edit: for clarity.
However, I want to caution anyone from thinking that this book says anything about Game Theory. I'm not sure why it's being recommended here, it doesn't have much to say about the current topic, except in that it often points out that authoritarian governments are free to ignore any feedback, feedback of the kind that incentive schemes are usually designed to generate.
> except in that it often points out that authoritarian governments are free to ignore any feedback, feedback of the kind that incentive schemes are usually designed to generate.
A view of the modern state is made more accurate if one views the state as an entity desirous to ignore feedback from citizens, rather than actively responsive to citizen opinion.
Robert Caro has written amazing books. I'm half-way through this two-hour dialog titled "On Power"[0].
He says he essentially stumbled into writing The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York[1] after observing how Robert Moses (an unelected bureaucrat) completely controlled huge "democratic" institutions.
I mention the books because they highlight some of the means and ways in which the state encourages it's people to think it is responsive to them, but this responsiveness is a slight of hand, even as plenty of participants in the system (both as citizens and as representatives of the state) earnestly believe that the state is responsive to public input.
[0]: https://www.audible.com/pd/On-Power-Audiobook/B06XNKVH16
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1111.The_Power_Broker