There's a new type of government that comes after democracy.
What if there was a way to structure a government where people wrote their own laws directly, without having to elect and pay a group of officials to do it? That would be cheaper, would it not? The process of creating a law could be gamified to make it less chaotic and avoid the pitfalls of populism.
Choose Goals Not Solutions
It seems that worst inefficiencies in government must come from
- High tensions around choosing solutions to problems before the outcome of those solutions is fully understood
- There is no simple and automatic way to remove policies which do not perform well
It seems like what's needed is a good testing framework for split testing measuring the results of different policy solutions.
Politicians in any legislative system bicker over potential solutions without having a built in system for testing those solutions.
There should be a system to hypothesize, implement many policies on a small scale, test the results, and then implement the best solution on a broad scale.
Political discussion should not be allowed into the second half of this process. Politicians should be allowed to be creative, and it should be reasonably easy to choose the metrics by which a policy should be measured, and forward the policy idea on to be tested in a small area -- by making it law for a subset of the population for a testing period. After the testing period, the continued existence of the policy should depend solely on its ability to solve a problem in a quantitatively better way.
In current political systems, best in breed solutions to policy problems can easily get shelved, or not broadly enough applied, because the goals and metrics were not agreed upon in advance, and the solutions were not systematically split tested to see which actually performs the best and creates the best outcomes for all.
It's a mistake to allow politicians to directly choose policy solutions which can be broadly and permanently applied with no testing criteria. If citizens of a state chose which metrics were to be improved, I think it would be much more constructive and consensus on the long term improvement of a state would be easier to achieve.
For instance, say if a country was aiming at creating policies that raised the GDP, balanced the budget, lowered unemployment, increased the quality of roads, lowering the cost of infrastructure.
Once the goals are agreed upon, you can prevent infighting by applying all proposed policy solutions in different test districts. Then there would be an agreed upon timeline after which the pool of policies could be assessed to see which one improved the target metrics the most. At this point, the winning policies are propagated throughout all the other districts.