[via: Cato]

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The Hired Gun Mechanism “We present and experimentally test a mechanism that provides a simple, natural, low cost, and realistic solution to the problem of compliance with socially determined efficient actions, such as contributing to a public good. We note that small self-governing organizations often place enforcement in the hands of an appointed leader–the department chair, the building superintendent, the team captain. This hired gun, we show, need only punish the least compliant group member, and then only punish this person enough so that the person would have rather been the second least compliant. We show experimentally this mechanism, despite having very small penalties out of equilibrium, reaches the full compliance equilibrium almost instantly.” http://www.nber.org/papers/w17032.pdf

Gun For Hire: Does Delegated Enforcement Crowd out Peer Punishment in Giving to Public Goods? “This paper compares two methods to encourage socially optimal provision of a public good. We compare the efficacy of vigilante justice, as represented by peer-to-peer punishment, to delegated policing, as represented by the “hired gun” mechanism, to deter free riding and improve group welfare. The “hired gun” mechanism (Andreoni and Gee, 2011) is an example of a low cost device that promotes complete compliances and minimal enforcement as the unique Nash equilibrium. We find that subjects are willing to pay to hire a delegated policing mechanism over 70% of the time, and that this mechanism increases welfare between 15% to 40%. Moreover, the lion’s share of the welfare gain comes because the hired gun crowds out vigilante peer-to-peer punishments.” http://www.nber.org/papers/w17033.pdf

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Russia’s Crime of the Century – How crooked officials pulled off a massive scam, spent millions on Dubai real estate, and killed my partner when he tried to expose them. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/20/russia_s_crime_of_the_century?page=full

Cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2479865

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Download a free version of Policy and Choice – on the impact of behavioral economics on government tax and spending policies. The authors take a stream of research which had highlighted particular ‘nudges’ and turn it into a comprehensive framework for thinking about policy in a more realistic world where psychology is incorporated into economic decisionmaking. http://www.brookings.edu/press/Books/2011/policyandchoice.aspx

Cf. http://www.amazon.com/Policy-Choice-Finance-Behavioral-Economics/dp/0815704984/

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“How should libertarians frame government?
(a) as a criminal enterprise; or
(b) as a service provider that does a bad job, largely because it is a monopoly, with too many restrictions on entry and exit [...]” http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/04/two_questions_f_1.html

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How states can amend US Constitution to limit government

1/3: http://goldwaterinstitute.org/article/5007

2/3: http://goldwaterinstitute.org/article/5353

3/3: ?

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“[...] The world needs more people seriously engaged with improving the lot of activists who make use of the net (that is, all activists). We need to have a serious debate about tactics such as the Distributed Denial of Service – flooding computers with bogus requests so that they can’t be reached – which some have compared to sit-in demonstrations. As someone who’s been arrested at sit-ins, I think this is just wrong. A sit-in derives its efficacy not from merely blocking the door to some objectionable place, but from the public willingness to stand before your neighbours and risk arrest and bodily harm in service of a moral cause, which is itself a force for moral suasion. As a tactic, DDoS has more in common with filling a business’s locks with super glue, or cutting its phone lines – risky, to be sure, but closer to vandalism and thus less apt to convince your neighbours to look sympathetically on your cause.

We need to fix the mobile internet, which – thanks to closed networks and devices – is more amenable to surveillance and control than the fixed-line variety. We need to fight the move – driven by entertainment companies and IT giants such as Apple and Microsoft – to design devices to work covertly and without the consent of their owners in the name of protecting copyright.

We need to pay heed to Jonathan Zittrain (another scholar whom Morozov both dismisses and then later inadvertently agrees vigorously with), whose The Future of the Internet warns that the increase in crime, sleaze and fraud on the net will cause user fatigue and make people more willing to accept locked-down devices and networks that can be used to control, as well as protect them.

We need all of this, and a serious critique and roadmap for the future of net activism, because the world’s oppressive regimes (including supposedly free governments in the west) are availing themselves of new technology at speed, and the only way for activism to be effective in that environment is to use the same tools.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/25/net-activism-delusion

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• Cost-effective and Cost-Justified: Consistent with law, Agencies must consider costs and benefits and choose the least burdensome path.

• Transparent: The regulatory process must be transparent and include public participation, with an opportunity for the public to comment.

• Coordinated and Simplified: Agencies must attempt to coordinate, simplify, and harmonize regulations to reduce costs and promote certainty for businesses and the public.

• Flexible: Agencies must consider approaches that maintain freedom of choice and flexibility, including disclosure of relevant information to the public.

• Science-driven: Regulations must be guided by objective scientific evidence.

• Necessary and Up-to-Date: Existing regulations must be reviewed to determine that they are still necessary and crafted effectively to solve current problems. If they are outdated, they must be changed or repealed.

Cf. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/18/improving-regulation-and-regulatory-review-executive-order

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Chodorov, 1947: Taxation is Robbery: https://fee.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Taxation-is-Robbery1.pdf

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Respect:)

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“Open is better than closed.
Transparent is better than opaque.
Simple is better than complex.
Accessible is better than inaccessible.
Sharing is better than hoarding.
Linked is more useful than isolated.
Fine grained is preferable to aggregated.
(Although there are legitimate privacy and security limitations.)
Optimise for machine readability — they can translate for humans.
Barriers prevent worthwhile things from happening.
“Flawed, but out there” is a million times better than “perfect, but unattainable”.
Opening data up to thousands of eyes makes the data better.
Iterate in response to demand.
There is no one true feed for all eternity — people need to maintain this stuff.”

http://sciblogs.co.nz/seeing-data/2010/10/12/the-zen-of-open-data/

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“[...] consider: passion about pacifism. There have been times, when the world was divided into sides fighting vicious and deadly wars, that some folks took the side of stopping the fights. They took the natural passion of fighting an enemy and channeled it into fighting the fighters. I’d like to get folks to similarly see the wasteful pointlessness of today’s political battles. Today we induce millions of people to make up mostly-random political opinions on hundreds of diverse complex policy topics they hardly understand, split into warring factions based on shared opinions, and then fight vicious political battles over which factions get to make the government implement their random opinions. I’d rather folks focused on generating meta-political-opinions, not about particular policies like wars or bank bailouts, but about what political processes best choose effective policies.

[...] nations where citizens can effectively control their government by just specifying a national welfare function, and tweaking it a bit periodically, should be higher status than nations where ordinary citizens must continually form opinions on the effectiveness of hundreds of rapidly changing policies.”

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/05/fight-the-fighters.html

Cf. http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/futarchy

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Google reveals government data requests and censorship: For the first time Google has released details about how often countries around the world ask it to hand over user data or to censor information.

http://www.google.com/governmentrequests

http://www.google.com/governmentrequests/faq.html

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/04/20/197254/Google-Enumerates-Government-Requests

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Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs – “This short “manifesto” describes a new form of government. In “futarchy,” we would vote on values, but bet on beliefs. Elected representatives would formally define and manage an after-the-fact measurement of national welfare, while market speculators would say which policies they expect to raise national welfare.” Hanson,2000 http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html Cf.: http://hanson.gmu.edu/ideafutures.html

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