What makes a pack leader?

Mutually assured destruction is back in the news. I don't know if that's the best way to insure we aren't attacked with WMDs (ensuring the rest of the world knows that we could retaliate.) Mainly because I think the most likely attack is from people so hopelessly delusional they'd actually welcome the retaliation believing it to be a prophesy.

And I do see what I think is a much better way to protect our nation from WMDs of all kinds. It's basically the opposite strategy--get so close to your enemies that they can't use WMDs without unacceptable collateral damage. And, as a nation, we are more uniquely suited to accomplish this than any other. By a long ways. I see this strategy as a way to leverage an enormous yet under-appreciated asset into a fuel that rockets us upwards in the hearts of all humanity.

We have tens of thousands to millions of people who've recently immigrated from almost every other nation and that have ties to extended families and still speak the language. Suppose we decided to expand the foreign embassies in America into sovereign foreign cities. I realize that it is a radical idea. But why is it unreasonable?

We are uniquely situated right now--with the collapse of the housing market and millions of empty bank owned homes rotting away to create such places cheaply. If, for example, we took a few square miles of Stockton, California (where the housing market is abysmal) and handed it over to a european nation inviting them to build a showcase city that will be their sovereign land for at least a century or two what effect would it have on us?

All I can see are enormously positive consequences. From an immediate reversal on the direction of property values in Stockton, to a whole new economic sector for the US economy. I can't see any friendly foreign nations turning down the opportunity to expand their markets here more effectively, or promote tourism to their nation by showcasing the best of their culture here. The really wise ones will insist on a trade--that we do the same thing there. But most nations are far more xenophobic than we are, and their people will be a much harder sell than ours.

If America was peppered with foreign cities how much better would our industries become at designing and marketing products and services with worldwide appeal? How much wiser and more worldly will Americans themselves become with so much more potential exposure to foreign peoples, cultures, and products? What happens to the job market for Americans when employers from all over the world can hire them without them having to leave America? What happens to the theory that we're an imperialist nation when we voluntarily do exactly the opposite--giving our land to some other nation with an invitation to become a neighbor?

Every nation claims to want world peace. But if they really meant it, why don't they take the sort of steps that would force it? This is such a step. It makes disagreement between nations with foreign cities much more difficult. Fighting just isn't as much of an option any longer. Other mechanisms, like the courts, legislature, and vote will emerge to take its place.

I want America to shine so brightly in the hearts of other peoples that they simply cannot miss the deep beauty of our approach to government. That our nation is all about not imposing a religion, perspective, or even much of a nationality on people, but rather doing everything we can to leave ourselves free to live as we wish. Americans are so free they sometimes join the enemy in conflicts. It's not hard for them to do. I hope it stays that way too--the freedom to express our hatred for our own government is the most important one we have.

Think of it as the opposite of the Bush Doctrine. A way to get closer to other nations to undermine any future potential for conflict. (I'd often get ideas by working out the opposite of what I'd see Bush do. But I actually got this one watching the Berlin Wall come down and realizing that the same effect might be used to undermine dysfunctional governments in other nations with the expats we already have here--like Iran.)

I can think of no better way to ensure America has a leading role in the league of nations for the foreseeable future, secure a larger set of opportunities for our people, or better prepare ourselves to achieve the highest standard of living in an ever more competitive world. Let us once again breech the barriers of tradition to brave a promising new frontier. It's our heritage to do so.

'Technically just' is an oxymoron

What's the difference between a fine and a fee? If the answer is that the former is intended to punish, and the latter is just a price, then how could any fine punish people equally? We aren't equally wealthy, so the punishment from a given fine will be unreasonably small for an exceptionally wealthy person, and unreasonably large for an exceptionally poor one. This is a glaring injustice that undermines our respect for law itself.

You might counter this argument with the reasoning that perhaps the fine is simply to redress the damage done to the community by the infraction and thus does equate to a fixed cost which becomes the fine. There might be some cases where this is true, but it would have to be the exception because, for example, most of the infractions I can think of are crimes that don't so much harm the community, as they do particular people in it. Like parking in a handicapped spot, or fire zone. It also makes one wonder why we'd call that an infraction instead of just a service provided for a fee. If there is no punishment then why call it a crime?

And you might feel that all of this is much ado about nothing. You might be right. I disagree and see it more as the death of a thousand tiny cuts. No single defect in our laws undermines our respect, but collectively they seem to be doing just that. From a five year old essay by an intellectual property attorney on the public's ambivalent attitude towards IP to a recent essay from an ex deputy attorney general on the dysfunctional perspective of legal advisors at the highest levels of leadership the message is the same; I'd call it jurisprudential liquefaction. It really is akin to the evaporation of the very soul of our nation--what made America most endearing to a fairness hungry world.

Law works only because we respect it. The kind of respect we have for what we consider sacred--not just essential, but irresistibly attractive, awe inspiring, and deeply cherished. The machinery we can build to enforce law will never amount to more than a selective pressure to evolve better criminals. That's just a consequence of the geometry of our reality. Nature will engineer something to fill every niche. (To really be rid of something you have to destroy the environment that it is suited to fill.)

We must love our law for what it genuinely is--the embodiment of justice, the fastener necessary to build enterprise, and the test to which we subject all policy. It must strive above all else to be fair in the sincerest sense we are capable of imagining and measuring. Law, and every shred of the infrastructure involved in enforcing it, must earn that admiration by being honestly worthy of it.

And that's why I started with something so seemingly trivial--because what makes it seem so trivial is only our attitude towards the injustice. Our laws are the true religion of our nation and it really is our faith in them that bring us the gifts of freedom and prosperity. It's too easy to lose respect and too hard to earn it to be so reckless with something so precious.

Especially when it is so easily fixed. There are other nations that deploy more equitable mechanisms to levy fines (for example Finland's day fines scale by income.) There are policies we could adopt that would require us to craft laws with more care, reengineer any that are not or can not be reasonably well enforced, and even ways to force a rethink in strategy periodically by requiring laws on vice, for example, to have expiration dates. It took a private attorney to force the justice department to use the new technologies of DNA testing to check prior convictions for serious crimes and that resulted in the release of many people that had been wrongly convicted an spent many years in prison, some even scheduled to be executed. This should be deeply embarrassing to our nation and infuriating to citizens. Can't the folks who work at the justice department read the name on the building? What do they reckon it means? Just ice?

Perhaps we should start with a better map of our laws that depicts everything we know and can measure about them; the socioeconomic background and reasoning behind them, the measured impact after enactment, the ongoing costs/benefits of enforcement, the case histories of their application, and our discussions about them. A resource that would help us all better see and understand the role law plays in our lives, how it is created and maintained, and why it so deserves our gratitude and respect. It's a lot easier to respect something when you can actually see and touch the sense of it.

My America, the body of an enchanting meme

I've always thought a lot about truth, justice, and the American way. But not because I'm a fan of superman. Because I'm a human being and can't help but find those things sacred. Even a crook has a code of honor. That emotional reward is most likely why we have minds designed to cooperate, master a language, and outwit the various things in our world. Discovering truth feels so good because it leaves us better at working out the consequences of some hypothetical we're contemplating. Our sense of justice is no different, complicated by the fact that fairness isn't as easy to test as truth. And I love the American way most of all. I didn't know why as clearly for much of my life, but I do now. It's because for me, America stood for nothing so much as a deliberate effort to make those metaphysical ideas more robust and tangible than even we are. America was the flesh and bones of justice itself.

America to me seemed more like a process than a place--we were a nation of immigrants from all over the world. It was the very formula for fairness; the honest desire to create the most liberating and genuine parity of opportunity that the best and brightest of us could engineer. It seemed so incredibly ingenious, like life itself--create an environment suitable for useful things to grow and thrive and they will. We call those things enterprises. They combine land, labor, and capital to create profit using a recipe called a business model that is really just the DNA of the enterprise. Those recipes that generated the most profit per unit of input were the basis for the next enterprises that emerged. How could a system like this possibly fail?

What gets in the way of living up to our principles? In a word, I think it's design. We aren't sufficiently wary of our own designs. Good design just doesn't come from a conscious deliberate attempt to build something, but from creating the environment where what you want can evolve and will be best suited, and then waiting for it to show up. If you take the former approach, you're constantly trying to shore up a poor design. But with the latter, you're constantly getting closer to an environment that permits nothing else. It's a fundamental shift in perspective that sees human force as the most expensive and therefore worst solution to any problem and gravity as the cheapest and best. Don't look for a law to prohibit what you should be trying to use geometry to leave impossible or never worthwhile. Does it strike anyone else as curious that punishment is such an obvious solution to humans while utterly absent anywhere else in nature?

Laws, and the infrastructure needed to enforce, adjudicated, and punish the condemned is often more expensive than the actual damage done by the injustice all that infrastructure is intended to dissuade. In my reality, that's a red flag that something more fundamental might be broken. Like our perspective on what crime really is. And that's what I needed all this context to get to and what I'll write about next because one the greatest problems I see facing our world is that when law was spun off from religion, the geometry of those memes didn't allow sacred respect to go with it. For law is little without the respect that makes obeying it pleasurable. And threats are the very poorest way to motivate behavior working only when the consequences are perfectly predictable and utterly unavoidable. When it's less than that we call it a challenge. And that's one of the main things that makes us so remarkable to begin with--the love of challenge.

Reinventing the political campaign

The total amount spent by political lobbyists per capita last year in the USA was about eleven dollars. So how come special interests have so much more influence with leadership than the people they're supposed to serve anyways? Should we spend twelve dollars to bribe them back? For just two dollars per month we could utterly overwhelm the private interests if it weren't for just one thing; We couldn't agree on what to tell them to do. We need a community mind and that begins with a community brain.

A neural network for a city

Suppose a small community was looking for ways to invigorate their economy and create a greater sense of their shared purpose among residents. (Shouldn't this go without saying?) But instead of relying on themselves, they decide to look for a way to get the community itself to self-organize around the powers and functions of their city government--to reinvent their electorate. Their goal is to create a parallel virtual city council that they can use as a resource in making the decisions that face them. Their idea is that by having a vote from the community, and discussions about each issue, their eventual decisions can only be better informed, while also leaving each voter with more context to evaluate their performance and grateful to be a part of the process.

Connecting the senses and muscles

Using free tools and web resources they put all of the non-confidential information they can about their city into a site available to all members of the community. They establish a small fund, say $5/resident, to encourage the development of software that presents the data in ways the users find useful (which developers split according to how much their software gets used.) The data is stuff like the budget, infrastructure maps, codes and ordinances, maintenance schedules, issues to be addressed by the council and the reports or other information related to those issues. Everything the city isn't obligated to keep confidential and that would be useful to voters playing the role of council members.

Processing the sensory input

To encourage participation by people in the community they organize the site to provide two different roles for users. They can be either virtual council members, or city evangelists. The latter is for those folks who believe they have a vision for their community and should probably be running things already. Their job is is evangelize the issues presently facing the community, help users explore the available data, learn more abut the community, and explain their own positions and policy goals. They are people hoping to one day serve on the city council (if they aren't doing so already) and see this as an opportunity to campaign for that position by explaining how they would approach present day issues.

(It's campaigning via a demonstration. The site creates only a few slots for each public office and city evangelists must win their slot by bidding for it with real money in a Dutch auction. Instead of spending what they would to campaign in traditional ways, they buy a slot on the site for a lot less and get a chance to better prove their competency and much more exposure. Besides, that money goes into a pool that becomes the political capital spent by the voters and can be earned back.)

Everyone else joins for free and becomes a virtual council member earning a monthly virtual income of political capital. They can spend it on the site to support or oppose the issues they care about. The city evangelists earn a share of what is spent in accordance with whatever position they've been advocating on each issue. In other words they earn political capital by convincing the virtual council members to spend it the way they recommend, which they then spend to advocate their position on upcoming issues (which is then redistributed as share income to the virtual council next month.) This structure is intended to gradually concentrate political capital into the hands of those city evangelists who best represent the wishes of the community.

Enabling the phenomenon of emergence

I've left out the details and some important points about the site to focus on the strategy and goals. The hope is to do the minimum sufficient to get it started, and then let the community itself take over the evolution of the specific mechanisms that emerge to best harvest their political will and insight. My belief is that we might stumble onto an infrastructure that does a far better job deploying our collective resources simply because our behavior, wants, and expectations have changed to suit the realities of what we learn by virtue of participating and being so much more aware of present conditions and what can be done theoretically.

I'm hoping it results in a rudimentary community mind. In a genuine sense. No one of us will feel any differently but something will be very different. Our city should function in a way that exhibits an ever growing self awareness and intelligence that emerges from no one of us so much as it does from the political technology we've created to empower and guide us wisely.

Where fools rush in

To be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer you must be accredited. We have an infrastructure to ensure each person entitled to practice a profession with potentially significant consequence to their clients or the public has been trained and become demonstrably competent to do the work they've chosen.

But for the very most important jobs of all--the ones with the greatest consequences for the largest number of people--we have no such requirement. We don't even require any competence from the people who decide who should fill those jobs either, or even take note of the reasoning behind their choice. And we don't have any kind of apprenticeship or training program for those elected. They simply go from being ordinary people to extraordinarily powerful people in the blink of an oath. If you didn't know the reasons for this, wouldn't you consider it strangely reckless, at the very least? Why is it so much harder to be entrusted with a planeload of people than an entire nation full?

I don't think it matters why this is the case. What matters is that it is hard to believe anyone considers the system we have to be better than simply randomly selecting all political candidates from a list of landowners. At least they would be politically debt free. I also don't believe that even if we had a convincingly better mechanism for filing those jobs, that it would be possible to adopt if it required anything other than very minor changes to our current government. People are too frightened of any change to something they understand very poorly.

So changing who is eligible for office is too hard, as is changing who is eligible to vote for them. But we can do something to enforce a training period ourselves using the web and nothing more than a bit of clever software and the motivation to use it.

I wanted to explain my motivation for making this suggestion first, to avoid a lengthy introduction when I go into the details in the next post. I'll simply tell you now that it involves making something we don't typically notice much a whole lot more tangible--our political capital. It is something we've had since our nation was born but don't think much about until we're angry about how some politician has decided to spend it. I'd like to see us harness some of its energy for ourselves on the way there.

Our real Independence Day

The odd thing about my last few posts is that I'm not terribly interested in health care--it became important only because its sucking up so much of our GDP that it has become a drain on what I care most passionately about-- ensuring our nation offers the greatest depth, breadth, and parity of opportunity of any--by as large a margin as possible. This is, in my opinion, the most important issue simply because no matter how efficient we get, everything still costs money. And it's that unmatchable opportunity that draws the best, brightest, and most driven to build their enterprises here, and make the ones we have better.

Today is actually our 233rd anniversary, not the fourth. That's just the day we celebrate it. I remember when America was a very deeply loved nation. When I felt incredibly lucky to have been born an American. Other nations seemed like propeller planes while America was a jetliner. I remember thinking, or being taught/indoctrinated to find the reason for this in our constitution and form of government. The sociopolitical landscape that our nation established was just a lot easier to build robust enterprises on.

At least in theory. In practice it looked more like an old boy network. Perhaps in a room with bigger windows. I've always tried to put my finger on why our government is so gimcracky. I think the weak link is actually us. The founding fathers created some great roles. But they did a piss poor job of working out how to fill them in my opinion.

The basic idea is good--let the people decide. But it seems to go straight downhill from there in practice. With so many issues to understand to even comprehend the proposed alternative strategies to our problems we're left with little but the gut feeling we get watching the people we elect to guide us act out roles. Amidst a din of spin from pundits.

Of all the things I can think of that would enable our nation, and ourselves, to once again leap frog the rest of the world in the race to create the most personally liberating and empowering society it is a minor change in the way we vote that seems to offer the most bang for the buck. I'll try to explain one way I think we might vet leadership far more effectively tomorrow.

Putting some soul into health care

My previous three posts have all been about health care. I'ld like to briefly summarize them here and then finish. In the first one I define a governmental agency, like the National Institute of Health, that would act as a transactor for every payment that can be considered a health care expense or a purchase of health care insurance and why I think it is such a wise approach to health care reform. In the second one I outline how that change would affect the basic components of our present health care system and better motivate them to focus on on their specific role, and not just any old way they might increase profits. (And assumed that the present practice of allowing employers to pay the health care expenses of their employees with pre-tax dollars was on its way out.)

In the third one, the previous post, I brought your attention to a particular node or place in cyberspace that would hold all of your medical information and suggested it should exist inside the transactor's databases because that is the most private information about us and that should be very important to our government to protect. The goal is to create an environment where that node actually becomes a personal life advocate for us. A sort of virtual personal assistant that remembers everything about us, has a nearly perfect knowledge of our health history, diet, habits, and myriads of other information that it can use to detect the sorts of things that correlate with opportunities for preventative medicine and make us aware of those choices.

Building a soul for ourselves in cyberspace

Health isn't just being physically fit. It's being educated enough to at least make informed health choices. It's having the infrastructure a person needs to function. Those things are just forms of preventative medicine. The real medicine we'd need by neglecting them is more expensive than the non-medical preventative medicine we need to treat them. If citizens are so important to their governments, how is it no government has even thought to create a computer program that looks for the people it can easily find, would benefit from help, and that it can easily afford to help? That's what this is. Nothing more than a task running on some server in cyberspace with no more to do than be there for you. It's job is to keep you as happy and healthy as you, and it, can figure out how to do.

Think of it as a crude attempt to create a soul for humanity designed to help us be us. We create this computer program that knows a lot about everyone, and uses that information to help us make wiser decisions. If, for example, your behavior changed in some way that correlated well with people who later had a medical problem, this little advocate will make you aware of it. Have a pain you don't understand? It might save you a visit to the doctor or direct the ambulance to where you're lying. If you wanted to change something about yourself, it could be of help since it could look for what worked for others like you that wanted the same thing and got there. If you wanted to learn something, same deal. It will be capable of whatever we are clever enough to teach it. As computers grow in power and software in sophistication I wouldn't be surprised if it renders the field of psychology utterly obsolete in just a few years by doing a much better job of helping us see ourselves clearly and make the changes we want.

The idea is to create a focal point, like the iPhone did, where everyone is invited to deploy their solution to help us be better people (or get more out of the device). Does this imply that I consider people devices? Yes, I suppose it does. Why is that a problem? Doesn't an actor want to get the most out of their instrument? I'm not suggesting we look for ways for others to get more out of you. Just how we can enable you to get the most out of you. No one is going to use an iPhone application that they find annoying. It's the same thing here. If the sort of software that emerges from a system like this was a nuisance, who would use it? Okay, I suppose masochists would love it. But they can almost certainly find devices already that are better suited to amuse them.

Creating the incentive to empower us

Like the iPhone, I'm advocating a standardized forum where anyone can deploy software they believe would be useful helping people become better. We will be the ones to decide how we interact with the data made available this way, and the developers of the software we choose to use will be paid a tiny amount per user by the transactor. The first applications will most likely be electronic patient advocates that help people avoid treatment mistakes (like taking a drug while you are using a different drug that is incompatible,) follow progress, and be sources of information, encouragement, and a connection to supporters. But I would expect lots of stuff to emerge, from software that helps kids do well in school or learn an instrument, to ones that teach adults how to eat more wisely or cope with tragedy.

I see these things as going a long way to lowering the level of overall uncertainty and stress in our lives. I think collectively they'd lead to substantially lower health care costs and healthier longer lives for most people. I also think they would push many other boundaries that limit the opportunities that appear to us and thereby increase the growth rate of our economy.

But most importantly, I see this as a solution we can adopt very quickly and without undue immediate impact (other than starting to phase out employer paid health care.) We can even delay the flow of insurance premiums through the provider to give that industry time to come up with standardized contracts, computer procedures and the other infrastructure needed for a smooth transition. The providers should be routed that way as quickly as possible because there is simply no reason not to. The limiting factor there is to standardize the format of medical information and design and deploy equipment well suited for error-proof collection and delivery of it. All of that should happen regardless of what we do because we need that information for so many things--from better evaluating the efficacy of treatments to the competency of practitioners.

I should also note that I've pretty much avoided any discussion of funding mainly because this suggestion is actually independent of how health care costs are ultimately reckoned with. This is just about how we might get the most out of whatever we do decide to spend.