How to change the world a lot with a little: Government Watch

The essential ideas herein were independently developed by me and Nicholas Gruen, who have since had some conversations on the subject. I mention him to give him full credit, but no blame should be assigned to him for any error or foolishness in the specifics of what I outline. If you dislike something I say, do not assume he endorses it. In particular, the name I assign— Government Watch— is just what I call it

An apology for a necessary evil

In the following piece, I will sound like a salesman. I hate that, but some things are so important they’ve got to be sold. I have such a proposal.

I write about a lot of proposals here, but this one is almost unique in how little money and power it would take. It would cost a few tens of millions to run for several years. I believe— and I don’t say this lightly — that it could be the most effective available way to spend money. There’s a small (<1%) but real chance it could be as consequential as, for example, the storming of the Bastille.

Why not politics?

A methodological question. When it comes to philanthropy, why not politics? Many effective altruists and other thoughtful givers will think it’s obvious that politics is a bad cause area for two reasons, but I reject both.

1. Involvement in politics is already over-saturated. Firstly, even if true this is largely irrelevant to us because we’re suggesting a wholly different tack. Secondly, and perhaps shockingly politics— at least on the spending side— is nowhere near saturated. Around about 25 billion dollars every four years is spent on US politics. The US economy alone in that period is worth >120 trillion and elections have a substantial effect on the economy. The effects of American leadership on other countries are difficult to quantify but doubtless enormous. Most important, when health policy, wars, and possibly global war and/or nuclear war are factored in the stakes are, in expectation, surely at least 10s of millions of lives. Then, of course, there is the influence of American politics on existential risk.

2. Involvement in politics will force EA to pick sides, reducing its broad appeal. We can nullify this objection by improving the quality of politics without picking sides in the context of philanthropy. Easier said than done, but doable.

Now, let me make my pitch for a political charity.

The general idea of sortition

Electoral democracy has all sorts of problems, but having everyone discuss and debate every political issue isn’t feasible and would waste oceans of precious human life (time). Sortition tries to get the best elements of both. Sortition means selecting officials or representatives by chance— a random sample of the population they are to represent.

The best argument for sortition is a five-minute conversation with the average politician.

It’s not that politicians are bad necessarily (but a lot are) it’s more that they’re so incredibly differen— so abstracted from the lives of ordinary people.

They’re different for many reasons. They’re different in virtue of the strange qualities they were born with, different in virtue of the strange deeds they had to do to get their positions, and different in virtue of the strange company they now keep.

Although the public is generally beneficent, interaction with the public makes politicians worse. This is because politicians are not trying to sell ideas to the public at their best. They’re trying to sell to a public paying one-thousandth of the attention they are— so, as we all have seen with our own eyes, politics becomes nasty, brutish, and interminable. Laid over this, the dynamics of inter and intra-party competition do not improve matters. In general, we might speak of,

The paradox of Democracy: Anyone representative of the people’s values would likely have a great deal of trouble winning an election to represent the people.

Whether or not sortition would work to run a country is an open question, but it does function well enough as a source of reasoned commentary and criticism. There have been various experiments with sortition— mostly creating bodies to advise the government, often on a specific topic. These experiments are generally thought to have been enormously successful. Perhaps surprisingly, people do not dig in but are able to come to a wide-ranging consensus— typically humane, rational, and comprehensive. Most participants learn a great deal. Many leave lifelong advocates of sortition. Few have negative experiences.

Our specific proposal

Our idea is a twist on sortition. Generally speaking, sortition bodies are convened for a fixed period to deal with a specific issue and are often attached to the government—whether as an official organ or an experiment. Our aim is to create:

A permanent body chosen by sortition from the general population, tasked with commenting on political events, decisions, and public matters as it sees fit, wholly independent of government and administered by an NGO.

We haven’t settled on a name yet, so for the moment I’ll use my old name for it: Government Watch.

We think this will work better and differently from previous experiments in sortition. Previous experiments relied on temporary bodies chosen to ‘work on’ a specific issue. Because the body we propose will be able to comment on any political matter and because it will have a continuous existence (with an ever-changing membership), it will be able to keep a running commentary on state actions.

There are some permanent political oversight bodies governed by sortition, mostly in Europe. It is hard to get information about them in English and they have all been, as best I can tell, attached to government and very local. Municipal government experiments in German Belgium and in Paris with permanent sortition councils are welcome, but unlike our proposal, they are organs of the state. An independent body has two advantages- the reputational value of separateness from the official political process, and the ability to begin and continue without government permission.

It is certainly an advantage that in comforting ways, the road is well traveled. While we think its new elements are plausible and exciting, our project is built on a core method that has been subject to hundreds of successful trials. We know it works for the participants. We know that they find the deliberation invigorating, are able to reach surprisingly wide-ranging consensus, learn a lot, and almost inevitably come away enthused. We know that the opinions developed are usually complex, reasoned, and not at all just a restatement of pre-reflective, pre-deliberative views.

But while existing trials have had success, what is needed is enough success to make the process self-perpetuating. We need to bring the idea of sortition so far forward into consciousness that people begin to look for it and demand it.

We think Government Watch will work because it meets real and felt needs. People are aware that they are being manipulated with complexity, sensationalism and outright dishonesty. Issues are often difficult, and even when they’re not, bad actors have an interest in making them feel difficult. The public has a sense— often accurate— that many of the people who know more about political questions than they do have very alien values and goals. I’m not talking about some hypothetical rube here, I’m talking of myself as much as anyone. I know I feel this way about a ton of issues (e.g. industrial policy, energy grid security). We all want to know what we’d think if we had time to dig into the issues and talk about them.

In the ideal case, Government Watch would become a lighthouse for everyone who isn’t involved in politics, and who wants to know what they and their peers might think if they had the time to learn about and discuss the issues in great depth. As Government Watch continues to run for a few years, we hope it will snowball in visibility, becoming an important part of old and new media discourse about politics. The statements by Government Watch might even be an important news source in themselves for some. We also hope it will inspire other local, state, and international experiments with similar sortition strategies.

Analogies

Is sortition just issue polling? No, because:

1. It gives participants a chance to think, learn, and talk before voting.

2. Issue polling presents us with fixed options and aggregates us into numbers, rather than allowing us to phrase our own response— it thus ignores the real complexity of opinion. The rich terrain of thought is reduced to a 1D elevation graph.

3. A statement written by a group to represent their feelings can have far more nuance, persuasiveness, and pathos than a polling result.

A better analogy is the perfected protest. I believe in normal protests and attend them regularly, I’ve even organized a few. However, there are several criticisms that politicians haul out whenever there’s a protest they don’t like: 1. protests are self-selecting for those who support a cause. 2. Protests are not deliberative and may not represent informed opinion. 3. Protests are not accessible to everyone— those who work often cannot protest. 4. Protests only attract those who already have unusually strong views. 5. Protests say they are about persuading, but do little of the sort. In some sense, I see Government Watch as responding to all these criticisms. The statement of such a body is like a protest without the features of a protest that are hauled out to discount them. Of course, as I discuss below, people will still discount Government Watch, but a strategy doesn’t have to be foolproof and omnipotent to be worth trying.

Risk management

Like other mini-publics, the Government Watch would have to have access to expert testimony as desired to work. It would need, as far as possible, the capacity to select its own sources of testimony. I see the expert testimony process— the selection and approach to the experts— as a key point that needs to be gotten just right, or else real and apprehended biases will result.

The primary risk to the effectiveness of our proposed NGO is the development of a perception that the body is not truly neutral— that either the selection of participants or the facilitation of the process is unfair. Absolute precision, both fairness and the appearance of fairness would be required, since players of all sorts would be seeking to delegitimate every decision they disagreed with. I myself am shot through with strong political views (and while I don’t want to speak for him, I imagine Nicholas would agree in his own case). These problems will have to be approached with fairness and equity.

Ideally, I would like to see experiments with Government Watch conducted in multiple places simultaneously with multiple different parameters and completely different leadership teams. If our plan is a viable model, it would be tragic for it to fail because of a small issue in the way it's set up. Whether or not the luxury of multiple seed pods is feasible, I am unsure.

Trying to change the world is a dice roll, always. Fortunately, Government Watch can succeed at lesser and greater levels. The moonshot— what I and Gruen hope for and genuinely believe is a real possibility— is the situation described above where the body we create is constantly in the news giving the public information about what they would likely come to believe if they had the opportunity to deliberate. But lesser, and still significant triumphs are possible.

I’m not a fool, so I don’t think people who disagree will accept the deliberations of the jury without complaint. Every rationalization under the sun to dismiss Government Watch will be entertained, starting with just ignoring it, but political action doesn’t need to be omnipotent to be worthwhile, but that doesn’t mean it can’t accomplish something. Of course, politicians are still going to do their best to ignore Government Watch, except when it suits them. Of course, much of the public won’t care, and people will find ways to deny, prevaricate, ignore, and so on. However, if even a few hundred thousand voters paid attention to it, given the many trillion dollar stakes of US politics that would weigh— on any reasonable Fermi estimate— far more than its modest cost. And if, say, 10 million voters or so paid attention to it, the world could be wholly transformed.

Learning from the experts and the public

The role of expertise is endlessly litigated in politics, and it probably does not help that almost all engagements between experts and the public are heavily mediated by politicians, the media, or both. We should value an opportunity for experts and the public to engage directly.

What I am imagining is not a didactic one-way flow of information from the experts to the public. In many areas, from public health to economics and various other parts of the social sciences, experts have developed idiosyncratic values that are disconnected from the public. These judgments may reflect the institutional roles and accidents of disciplinary history more than good sense reflections on disciplinary knowledge. An invitation to dialogue could be mutually beneficial. There is also an opportunity for ideas that are widely loved within specific disciplines (e.g. Pigouvian taxes) but that are considered “too hard” to explain compellingly to gain public champions.

Cost and mechanics

Back-of-the-coaster calculations suggest it could be run at 12 million dollars a year, covering:

1. A stipend for 120 participants equal to forty hours at the median hourly wage per week.

2. A small publicity, facilitative, and administrative team

3. Venue hire

Remarkably cheap. In terms of the facilitators, I would suggest targeting for recruitment multiple people who have run and/or helped facilitate citizens’ assemblies previously.

Naturally, a body like I’ve described is going to vary a bit based on the luck of which 120 people happen to be sitting on it, and thus opinions on close questions might be unstable. My proposal for dealing with this— implement a supermajority requirement for passing motions. Two-thirds (80 out of 120) seems like a natural bar— and will serve to give the decisions stability. If 80/120 members support a proposal, I can’t guarantee that 80/120 will support it next time, but I can very nearly guarantee that >60 will.

The idea can also be scaled larger. With more participants, the assembly could be split to focus on multiple subjects. Perhaps a meta-assembly could pick which topics to tackle, and subsets from the meta-assembly picked to tackle each. At some point this would be necessary as the pace of political events and the range of topics would not allow a single assembly— also needing time to learn and discuss— to comment on all matters they would ideally like to.

It is often and probably falsely said that Harold Macmillan, when asked what the main issue facing the government was, said “Events dear boy, events”. In our period, perhaps even more so, politics is defined by events — a continuous stream of happenings, scandals, etc. Even as events pour out, little seems to change. To be as useful and relevant as possible, Government Watch would have to engage with and comment on events and their colorful protagonists. There are dangers here, and doubtless, not everything would go to plan, but I do not think everything has to go to plan.

Some issues where Government Watch could do a lot of good

Polarization

I find existing attempts to solve polarisation shallow. They largely start from the premise that there is a range of conventional, acceptable opinions in the middle represented by old media gatekeepers whose positions are— by hypothesis “reasonable” and hence candidates for being right. The better approach to polarisation is, I think, much more radical. Perhaps polarisation happened because something had already gone deeply wrong.

Our proposal may offer the beginning of a way past polarisation that does not amount to thumping the table and asserting the views of the establishment.

PEPFAR

Recently the Trump Administration canceled PEPFAR, and the best estimates have it that many thousands have already died.

Much of the debate around PEPFAR has centered on suppositions about how the public does and doesn’t want its money spent. Sometimes there’s even an appeal to what we might call a fiduciary theory of government. Just like the board of a company has an obligation to maximize profits and not pay attention to soft-ethical issues, politicians shouldn’t give a damn about anything that isn’t to the narrow benefit of their own people.

Perhaps we should ask the people then.

Polling is not enough. When asked, ordinary people say they think the government should spend 10% of its budget on foreign aid, and estimate that it currently spends 25%. In truth, it spends about 1%. Into a debate fundamentally about what the government owes its citizens and the world- about the moral consequences of government (in)action thus far fought primarily with bluster- the informed voice of the people sounds like a welcome addition.

AI policy

The public cares about AI and would like to know more about AI, and above all, deserves input into debates about AI— from existential risk to deepfakes. There have already been some experiments on combining sortition with discussion of AI issues. Connecting this to a national platform, and ensuring an ongoing venue for such discussions both seem worthwhile to me.

The mad, the bad, and the sad

One exciting use of citizen’s juries is calling out policies that everyone paying attention knows are faithlessly made, but are hoisted on the public through ignorance and inertia.

An obvious example is the tax complexity lobby. The tax complexity lobby is exactly what it sounds like- a loose alliance, most prominently including TurboTax, which lobbies to make taxes difficult for a number of reasons: 1. so as to make it easier to sell tax software and services, and in the case of some of the more ideological members of this cabal 2. to make taxes more repugnant to the general population so as to increase support for their preferred approaches to tax policy.

In cases like this of obviously bad faith actions the involvement of Government Watch may be useful indeed. Yes, the result is predictable but there is power in members of the public collectively writing a statement explaining to other members of the public that certain individuals accept money in order to make their taxes harder. It is one thing for a journalist, presumably with their own agenda to write on it— and many have, but the public speaking to the public on it might have a special power.

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