I spoke with
, founder of RadicalXChange, author of Plurality and Radical Markets, and the lead of Microsoft’s Special Projects division where he founded the Plural Technology Collaboratory.Weyl talks a lot about how we can innovate democracy, not just throw it all out in favor of autocracy. In this Guest Lecture, we talk about his recent debate with Curtis Yarvin, whether corporations are autocracies or democracies, whether countries like Singapore are more or less democratic than the US, and how we can use technological advancements and borrow from models around the world to create something much better than representative democracy.
A few things we discussed:
Another guest lecturer for the Elysian, Salim Ismail, pointed out that the companies with more democratic choice and autonomy work better. For instance, Haier turned an 80,000-person company into 2,000 teams of 40 each. “Each team has a P&L target, elects their own leader, and—most radically—decides what they want to do,” he said. This is essentially creating small democracies rather than a large autocracy. We discuss how countries can borrow from companies.
Singapore may have less representative democracy than the United States or European countries, but they might have more democratic choice. They have one party that has remained the most popular party since the company was founded, but that one party has been known to consider the needs of the people through endless surveys and feedback loops. Here we discuss whether Singapore is more or less democratic than the US, and what we can borrow from their model.
Parag Khanna says that Singapore and Switzerland have the two most ideal forms of government in the world, and that both are considered “technocracies.” What he means by that is that the countries are informed by tons of data on the needs of the people, but leaders also have carte blanche to act on it. Singapore does this with their one party, and Switzerland does this with their seven-member council that rotates leadership every year for seven years.
On Singapore: “From passport checks and public toilets at the airport to banks and university administration buildings, Singapore is populated with touch-screen tablets asking you to rate the service you’ve received,” Khanna says. And, “the government actually pays attention to the results… Citizens comment vocally on everything from taxes to transportation to health care spending. If the national pension fund’s portfolio returns just 1 percent lower than expected, citizens start to howl.”
On Switzerland: “In a high-tech version of Switzerland’s referendum model, Singapore also launched a platform for online petitions called “GoPetition” and established a parliamentary committee to derive recommendations from them. In all of these cases, recommendations are acted on within months, not years or never.”
Of both: “A shift from government-knows-best to crowdsourcing”
In Plurality, Weyl uses Taiwan as an example of how this data can be collected through online platforms. But he separates it from the technocracy model and is even critical of it. Here he explains how Taiwan’s model differs from the Singapore/Switzerland models.
Weyl’s organization RadicalXChange considers some of the innovations we could make to democracy. “Broad Listening” was recently used for a political campaign in Japan, where the representative essentially crowdsources his campaign based on the wants and needs of his constituents. Participatory democracy platforms like Taiwan’s Polis platform collect and collate the responses of citizens. Quadratic voting provides alternatives to the one-person/one-vote model. During our lecture, he discusses all the case studies he finds interesting.
At the end, I ask a big question: If Weyl became the king of a small city-state for just one year and it would become a fully functioning democratically renovated city-state after that, what would he do?
I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did!
