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One difficulty here, if the idea is to identify policies that should be adopted country-wide, is confounding factors. Say you ban cash, and also introduce a 198

One difficulty here, if the idea is to identify policies that should be adopted country-wide, is confounding factors. Say you ban cash, and also introduce a 1984-style police state, and lastly pay for education and health care for all citizens. Crime drops versus the rest of the country. Is it because you're living in a police state, or is it because people are well educated and healthy? This difficulty seems especially problematic when some top level entity is a priori choosing what the new policies will be, versus choosing them as reality indicates. A better system might be to have a number of startup countries, let the people in them choose what laws they will or will not have, and also allow people to move easily between countries, so if the policies enacted in one turn out to suck, people can vote with their feet. And with a large number of countries to choose from, the ones with the best policies will tend to win out over the long term. Say to start, let's have fifty of them.

Vivtek 16y ago
I see what you did there.
abstractbill 16y ago
And with a large number of countries to choose from, the ones with the best policies will tend to win out over the long term. Say to start, let's have fifty of them. I don't get the feeling people really move from state to state for the politics though. I would guess things like natural resources, weather, and historical accident play a bigger role. I'm in California, apparently because Fredrick Terman encouraged a couple of his students to start a company here [1], and because the place has nice weather. [1]: http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/computer-history-museum-112008-presentation http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/computer-history-museum-112...
- rdl 16y ago
  People absolutely do move between states for politics. People who move directly for political reasons (taxes, regulations, etc.) are relatively small, but for instance I left California due to California firearms laws and taxes. A lot of people move for second-order effects of politics -- there is more new business activity in Texas than in Louisiana, New Hampshire vs. Vermont, and in South Dakota than Minnesota, etc. due to government actions, and people move for those jobs.
_delirium 16y ago
One problem with open immigration is that it makes all these supposedly separate experiments actually interdependent, which tends to lead towards either: 1) them all converging; or 2) immigration restrictions. For example, Social Democratia has a free-rider problem with respect to its neighboring Low-Tax Libertonia: healthy and prosperous people will go live next door so long as they're healthy and prosperous, but anyone who gets sick or ends up destitute will conveniently move across the border to Democratia for the social safety net. Social Democratia will have to either drop its social programs (converging with Low-Tax Libertonia) or institute some sort of immigration restriction. Or, say Crime Preventistan sets up a really good set of programs, education, etc., such that there would be virtually no crime in their country, and they can have very minimal police and virtually no government surveillance of their citizens. But they live next door to the Wild West Republic, which spends money on neither prevention nor police, and its rampant criminal population enjoys carrying out cross-border burglaries, or maybe even moving next door to set up their outlaw shop in Preventistan. The Crime Preventistan experiment can't really happen unless they're able to close their border with the Wild West Republic and restrict who's allowed to immigrate. In short, I think it'd be difficult to maintain any differences between countries in the face of complete lack of border controls (open immigration, free trade, etc.), because any differences between them would be arbitraged away as soon as someone found a way to exploit them.
akadruid 16y ago
I think free movement between governing systems would do a lot to weed out some bad ones and make them all more competitive. Your big problem is of course geography - you couldn't, for example, allow tens of millions of badly governed people to migrate into a small country, as they would destroy what made it desirable. But if you could vote to put your physical area under the control of a more desirable government, that would be a great leveller. Imagine you lived in Darfur and you could vote for the Swedish government instead of your own. It'd be a bit of a pain for the succesful government to adjust to ruling a culturely, geographically, and economically different area, but in the longer run, well managed governments would probably benifit from the increased territory, population and diversity.

Vivtek 16y ago

I see what you did there.

abstractbill 16y ago

And with a large number of countries to choose from, the ones with the best policies will tend to win out over the long term. Say to start, let's have fifty of them. I don't get the feeling people really move from state to state for the politics though. I would guess things like natural resources, weather, and historical accident play a bigger role. I'm in California, apparently because Fredrick Terman encouraged a couple of his students to start a company here [1], and because the place has nice weather. [1]: http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/computer-history-museum-112008-presentation http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/computer-history-museum-112...

rdl 16y ago
People absolutely do move between states for politics. People who move directly for political reasons (taxes, regulations, etc.) are relatively small, but for instance I left California due to California firearms laws and taxes. A lot of people move for second-order effects of politics -- there is more new business activity in Texas than in Louisiana, New Hampshire vs. Vermont, and in South Dakota than Minnesota, etc. due to government actions, and people move for those jobs.

_delirium 16y ago

One problem with open immigration is that it makes all these supposedly separate experiments actually interdependent, which tends to lead towards either: 1) them all converging; or 2) immigration restrictions. For example, Social Democratia has a free-rider problem with respect to its neighboring Low-Tax Libertonia: healthy and prosperous people will go live next door so long as they're healthy and prosperous, but anyone who gets sick or ends up destitute will conveniently move across the border to Democratia for the social safety net. Social Democratia will have to either drop its social programs (converging with Low-Tax Libertonia) or institute some sort of immigration restriction. Or, say Crime Preventistan sets up a really good set of programs, education, etc., such that there would be virtually no crime in their country, and they can have very minimal police and virtually no government surveillance of their citizens. But they live next door to the Wild West Republic, which spends money on neither prevention nor police, and its rampant criminal population enjoys carrying out cross-border burglaries, or maybe even moving next door to set up their outlaw shop in Preventistan. The Crime Preventistan experiment can't really happen unless they're able to close their border with the Wild West Republic and restrict who's allowed to immigrate. In short, I think it'd be difficult to maintain any differences between countries in the face of complete lack of border controls (open immigration, free trade, etc.), because any differences between them would be arbitraged away as soon as someone found a way to exploit them.

akadruid 16y ago

I think free movement between governing systems would do a lot to weed out some bad ones and make them all more competitive. Your big problem is of course geography - you couldn't, for example, allow tens of millions of badly governed people to migrate into a small country, as they would destroy what made it desirable. But if you could vote to put your physical area under the control of a more desirable government, that would be a great leveller. Imagine you lived in Darfur and you could vote for the Swedish government instead of your own. It'd be a bit of a pain for the succesful government to adjust to ruling a culturely, geographically, and economically different area, but in the longer run, well managed governments would probably benifit from the increased territory, population and diversity.