Under new management

[Scott of Hyperborea]

The government of Raikoth has remained as a kind of boring semi-republican theocracy for most of the past decade. The addition of the Priests of Joy was a big step forward, but I never sufficiently explained them and they didn't fit in with the rest of the structure very well. Today's the day the place gets its long-awaited overhaul.

Raikoth has always been based on my current best ideas of utopia, and the new government is no different. It's the kind of government I think a rational well-designed society ought to have - or at least one direction such a society could go in. It assumes an suspiciously well-educated, culturally homogenous population - but that's just the way Raikoth is.

The democratic portion of the government is that every citizen sends the government a copy of their utility function. Not the whole thing, of course. But they take a computerized census that determines how much they value certain things relative to one another. I'm assuming the existence of an entire utilitarian science developed far beyond that of the real world, but I don't think it's a science that it would be impossible to create - just very difficult. Its end result would be a matrix of values for each citizen that describes the relative value they place on things like lives, acres unspoiled wilderness, opals contributed to the economy, historical preservation, cultural traditions, et cetera. These would be adjusted for various biases according to well known formulae, weighted in favor of citizens who actually understand utility functions, and combined and averaged by computer to produce the Official Utility Function of Raikoth.

The less-democratic portion of the government would be a body called something like the College of Experts, but snazzier. This too would be run by combining computerized inputs from everyone in the country. People would be encouraged to predict the outcome of future events (giving their level of confidence, of course) in a system similar to a prediction market. The most consistently correct citizen-predictors would be given the option to leave their previous jobs behind and move to Tala to gain access to more information and become professional expert predictors. Everyone's predictions would be averaged out, weighted according to how frequently they were right before, and re-weighted to give extra weight to the professional predictors in the College, to come up with the Official Raikoth Prediction Plus Confidence Level.

After this, the system is pretty simple. Someone proposes a policy; for example, join the war on Ocia. The prediction system is called into play in order to predict the results of this: for example, whether we would win the war, how many Raikothlin would probably die in the war, whether the post-war government of Ocia would be stable and successful, et cetera. These values then get plugged into the Official Utility Function of Raikoth. If they make it go up, war is declared; else war is not declared.

Because this system is inhuman and hard to love, a constitutional monarch hangs around as a figurehead. The constitutional monarch is usually technically descended from the Kalirion family in one way or another, but since everyone has intermixed pretty thoroughly over the past few millennia, that includes a sizeable chunk of the Raikothlin population. In fact, the monarch chooses zir own successor, and is forbidden from choosing anyone in zir immediate family (see: succession of the Shirerithian Kaisership).

The system above is merely the decision-making branch of government. It's augmented by a bunch of other systems. Most important are the various city councils. While each city uses its own version of the utility function and prediction market, it's the city councils that come up with proposals, decide how the proposals should be interpreted and entered into the calculations, and play around with some of the second-level formulae. The national council at Tala is made of anyone who can make the pilgrimage to Tala to participate, but especially of people sponsored by the various cities to officially serve as their representatives, who have the highest status.

The three Priesthoods, those of Truth, Beauty, and Joy, feed into the system. The Priests of Truth are generally the ones who handle the technical side of things; they're the only ones both philosophically advanced enough and trustworthy enough. The Priests of Joy usually make last minute friendly amendments to the utility function and smooth out anything that can't be calculated directly. The Priests of Beauty have the hardest and most poorly defined task. Their job is to keep the whole system honest. If something's mathematically perfect but just plain wrong, for reasons too specific or too <i>human</i> to account for in the calculations, the Priests of Beauty are authorized to step in and fix things, as long as they don't abuse the power.

Because this system is incapable of handling day-to-day issues, the individual institutions of government are usually individual fiefdoms, in which only the most important decisions get put before the entire system. The two Hands of the Council, the Paladins and Heralds, for example, are both led by a powerful appointee who reports to the Council each year, follows any constraints put upon zir by the utilities and predictions, but otherwise has more or less free rein. Other important people are the deans of the various universities (especially the national universities), the head librarians of the various libraries, the three High Priests, the representatives to Eliria and Shirekeep, and the leaders of various small temporary committees.

Next up: flesh this out and think of snazzy names for everyone involved.

[Andreas the Wise]

As always, a refreshingly interesting and utilitarian society (with, of course, that necessary but questionable assumption of cardinal utility). I'm most interested by your idea to manage governance by SWF. Tell me, have you read anything of ParaEcon's? (Participatory Economy). The concept of putting everyone's utility functions into a computer is drawn out in that (they also put in workers and companies "what they want to produce" function, and through several rounds of readjustment, thereby determine what the economy makes).

One thing though ... Priests of Truth and Beauty I recognise well from your various war posts. When did the Priests of Joy come in, and what do they do?

[Scott of Hyperborea]

As always, a refreshingly interesting and utilitarian society (with, of course, that necessary but questionable assumption of cardinal utility). I'm most interested by your idea to manage governance by SWF. Tell me, have you read anything of ParaEcon's? (Participatory Economy). The concept of putting everyone's utility functions into a computer is drawn out in that (they also put in workers and companies "what they want to produce" function, and through several rounds of readjustment, thereby determine what the economy makes).

No, I've never heard of any of that stuff...but now I'm really interested. I've come at this entirely from the philosophy end, and I'm woefully unacquainted with political science and most economics besides what I've picked up arguing with libertarians. I'm going to look into it right now.

One thing though ... Priests of Truth and Beauty I recognise well from your various war posts. When did the Priests of Joy come in, and what do they do?

The short answer is I don't know.

The long answer: at some point, the various Hyperborean myths that swim around in my head told me that Truth and Beauty had at least one child, Joy, and possibly two others, Sorrow and Silence. I'm not sure if this is "true" yet, but right now I'm thinking that it's probably apocryphal but encouraged, in the same way as the Harrowing of Hell or the cults of various saints might be in Catholicism.

When I started working with the utilitarian idea, I figured that since utility is kinda like happiness, it should probably be the Priests of Joy who handle the whole thing. Now I'm backing away from that and I think they should probably have less of a role, and maybe not even exist at all. I've been thinking about the various priesthoods a bit recently, and a lot of the things I was going to place in the sphere of the Priests of Joy would really be better handled by the Priests of Beauty.

You're rarely on MSN or AIM, at least at the times I am. You should come on sometime so I can bounce ideas off of you.

EDIT: Looked at the participatory economics page on Wikipedia. It looks like communism only less practical. I'm sure you see the problems even better than I can.
I think the Hyperborean economy is basically capitalist, but highly regulated, similar to some of the Scandinavian countries but more elegant. Some excesses of capitalism are handled by social norms (if you buy a huge house, people will think you're ostentatious and laugh at you) and by attempts to correct the psychology that makes the excesses seem attractive (I'm thinking that there should be a way of explicitly broadcasting your level of wealth so that conspicuous consumption becomes unnecessary, but I need to flesh out that idea). There's also a death tax of 100%, free education, no corporate personhood (so corporations as such have completely different legal rights) and some more complicated things that have yet to reach the point where I can describe them coherently.

[Andreas the Wise]

Well, after my microeconomics exam on Wednesday I'm fairly light on in assessment until Finals. So I'll try and catch you some time in the next couple weeks.