So when we think about democracy I think there’s kind of a real interesting opportunity to
think about what is participatory democracy in the modern connected world.
And I think there’s all kind of versions that are much better than the vote every two-year
kind of version that we have right now.
For example there’s a lovely experiment that said what if people got to vote on where
five percent of their income tax goes to.
So you would get a list of all the things the government does, right.
Which is actually already a good thing because people don’t know what the government does.
At some point we went to the Chapel Hill Public Library and we asked people when was the last
time you got a benefit from taxpayer’s money?
People couldn’t remember when was the last time.
And they were in a public library funded by taxpayer’s money.
So, you know, we don’t really understand what the government does, what taxes go for.
But if you’ve got a list of all the things the government does and you could decide five
percent.
You probably don’t want people to allocate all of their income tax because there’s
some things that the government needs to worry about.
But doing some kind of marginal contribution and thinking where we want to be I think would
get people to be more involved, care more, look at waster.
I think it would make government offices a bit more accountable.
So that’s one version where I think we could get participatory democracy to be closer to
what we want it to be.
And another kind of direction is to say why do we need to vote for one person, right.
So imagine that we will have a voting procedure.
You could say I want Dan then really to vote for me on any issues that has to do with education
and health but not about I don’t know, space exploration and not about nuclear activities.
Can you imagine all of society as a network of people and you can assign your vote not
just to the representatives but you could assign your votes to other people in society.
Or you could say you know what Dan, I trust you on those topics.
You could vote for me and I could trust somebody else and so on.
So we could create a network in which we trust different people for different subtopics and
not have this idea that this one person who is representing us is the right person for
all topics around.
So that’s one.
The other of course big issue – I don’t know if you saw this but we did a lot of studies
about how people want society to be designed.
So originally we did it for inequality, financial inequality but then we moved to other areas
as well.
But in the area of financial inequality we asked people first of all what they understand
about the distribution of wealth in the U.S.
So we said imagine if we took all the people in the U.S. from the poorest to the richest,
we broke them into five buckets – the 20 percent richest, 20 percent less, less, less
and the poorest.
And we asked you from the 100 percent wealth total pie how much is allocated right now
to each of those five buckets.
And people think that the bottom two buckets, the bottom 40 percent of Americans own about
9 percent of the wealth.
Where, in fact, they own about 0.3.
And so this slope is what’s called the Gini coefficient, the rate of inequality people
know the rich have a lot.
People don’t understand.
Americans don’t understand how little the poor have.
And then we also asked them what would you like society to be.
And we used John Rawls, if you remember John Rawls had this interesting idea that he said
a just society is a society that if you knew everything about it you would be willing to
join in the random place.
If you’re very rich you might want a society that treats the rich nice and the poor not
so nice.
If you’re very poor you might want the other way around.
But if you don’t know where you’ll be, you’ll be allocated after the fact, you
have to consider all perspectives.
And they call this the veil of ignorance because you choose before you know where you’ll
be.
So we describe the veil of ignorance to lots of people and we say what kind of society
would you like to create?
And Americans created a society that is more equal than Sweden.
Not perfectly equal.
Nobody wants socialism but much more equal than in Sweden.
And not only that, the difference between republicans and democrats were tiny.
So, you know, republicans wanted slightly more inequality.
Democrats wanted slightly more equality but it was a small difference compared to the
gap between what we have and what people want.
And that’s another way to think about democracy in the modern world.
So you could say that we could vote on a topic.
Like we could vote on whether we want Obama’s healthcare version.
That’s one approach.
But to vote on that as individual it’s way too complex.
This plan is, I mean it includes so much we’re not going to be experts on it.
We don’t have the time to really read the whatever, 7,000 pages of this plan.
What we could do is we could vote on our principles, on how we want society to be, right.
Not about the concrete aspects but what are the guiding principles of a society.
How much we care about quality and how much we care about access to health and not to
vote on something concrete but to vote on it in terms of what are the principles we
believe in and then it will be the job of the politicians to take our principles and
translate them into policies.
Think about something like investment.
If you go to an investment professional to help you they don’t ask you what stocks
you want to invest in.
That’s their job.
What they ask you is what kind of risk do you want to take?
How much money do you want to give to charity?
They ask you kind of the general principles about life and then they go ahead and figure
how those principles are going to be played out in the details.
And that’s another kind of I think interesting version to think about politics which you
say we as citizens will never have the expertise to truly vote on everything.
But we understand our own values and we can say what kind of society do we want to create
and it will be the job of the politicians to take these values and translate them into
specific instances and rules.