A very rough list of the political / economic questions on my mind at the moment

[chess]

I realise that most of the following is pretty far up the idealism curve / probably not actually relevant because nobody who matters is going to ask my opinion on it, but these are the things churning around in my head that I'm trying to research / figure out at the moment.

These are mostly notes to myself, but I would appreciate input on any of them too (especially if it is in the form of 'you should read X' rather than 'that is completely stupid why are you even thinking about it?').

Most important as it's actually a clear and present demand of many people:

* 'Ban Lobbying' potentially impacts a lot of 'good' charities / think-tanks / individuals who are dedicated to a cause. How do we distinguish between 'constituent who has a legitimate interest in an issue', 'genuine advice from experts' and 'paid-for lobbying'?

Things I want to prove / disprove in general, and ideally write a clear and simple explanation of, because I keep getting into arguments over them and am ill-informed:

* Returning to a gold standard / gold or some other solid actually useful commodity as a store of value - what terrible things does that do to the world economy?
* Debt-backed money - is it actually untenable or can appropriate regulations to avoid obfuscation of debt values save it? (If so, what are these?)
* Alternative bases for money - what are the characteristics of the 'forex standard'? what about People-Backed Money (somewhat similar to the Equal Money guys' idea, but with actual exchange rather than a system where prices can't be market-set because you don't actually receive anything - so why ask for money at all when you could earn more social capital by gifting it?) what money-sink tricks can you use to get around the 'inflation is bad, it steals my savings' bleating while still maintaining an incentive to keep the economy running rather than letting money stagnate?
* Why social capital / 'whuffie' only schemes are a Bad Plan (or are they?)
* What are the downsides of 'socialise basic needs, capitalism for luxuries'? How does that work in practice? What are the awkward edge effects which need to be controlled for? How do you do it without authoritarian measures / what level of authoritarian measures are acceptable?
* Is it possible to have a government without going down the icky routes of 'monopoly on force' or 'serious brainwashing program'?
* 'banking', up to and including credit default swaps and CDOs, is an inevitable evolution of the desire to trade - discuss
* What kind of things constitute 'artificial scarcity', and how can we remove these barriers to progress in the easiest fashion - or are they in fact doing a good thing even though they have undesirable side effects? (Related: how do we manage the transition between 'full employment everyone needs to do as much work as they can to produce mostly physical stuff' and 'technological unemployment, most people are out-competed by machines and need to find something else to do', especially the tricky middle stages where we still need some compulsory work?)
* Is it possible to have a government without going down the icky routes of 'monopoly on force' or 'serious brainwashing program'?
* What are the alternative modern government forms to 'representative democracy', how would you implement them and what are their pros and cons?

Comments

[daxx-61.livejournal.com]

"If they were capable of understanding it, they'd probably be practicing it instead of in politics."

That's a rather loaded statement. Are you saying that people who have chosen to specialise in a "non technical" set of domain skills and specialised knowledge aren't capable of picking up different skills? It reads like you're implying that if a person is capable of learning, say, engineering, they'd automatically consider that a more worthy career choice than economics. Because if you are saying that, I do take personal offense.

Let's remember that the people who rise to become and remain senior politicians are by-and-large extraordinarily smart and capable people. These are world-leaders in their field, and it's a very competitive field. The domain knowledge required to understand certain topics is not generally out of reach of these people if they wanted to acquire it - it's simply a matter of priorities.

[requiem-17-23.livejournal.com]

Sorry, that's not my intent at all and I can totally see how you got that from what I posted. Revised statement.

"I'm not convinced in the ability of every single person elected to a post that requires specialist information to be able to understand the information without an expert to interpret it for them and give advice. I'd find it hard to believe that someone would train as such an expert and then go into politics when they could be practicing professionally instead."

The point of the statement you quote was exactly to make the point that it was a matter of priorities, that very few people except people who do it for a living are capable of understanding it, for pretty much all 'it', and the opportunity cost of a career in politics is a career doing something else.

Also, I seem to have conflated 'technical' and 'complicated' in my head, and I'll remember that other people don't do that.

[daxx-61.livejournal.com]

Ah, in which case I agree with the thrust of what you're saying.

In an ideal world politicians would be more able to specialise. There's certainly some mileage in having different ministerial posts specialising in different issues and disciplines, but the problem is really that a specialised politician is less likely to get elected. I wonder if there's an effective way of providing sufficient incentives to politicans to become experts in another field, because that would certainly help.