Hi all,
A random idea I stumbled across recently: a kickstarter for lobbyists.
One of the deepest structural problems in our political system is that narrow groups with strong interests often win out over the common good.
Imagine a country of 1,000 people. A new policy is proposed that will benefit 990 people by $1, but will cost the remaining ten people $10. The net benefit to society is $990 - 10*$10 = $880, a clear win, but these sorts of policies often don't happen. That's because the ten people who are harmed are strongly incentivised to work together to lobby the government against the policy. It's much harder for the 990 people to coordinate, and each individual stands to gain only $1.
A typical example would be a corporation opposing regulation on pollution. If the regulation goes through, the shareholders of the corporation lose a lot, so will arrange a lobbying effort. The pollution causes a small harm to a much larger number of people, so is net harmful overall.
However, it's possible today that social media and crowd funding could alleviate this problem. You could use a platform like kickstarter to get each of the 990 people to pay $0.1 to fund a lobbyist to represent their interests, overwhelming the funds of the narrow interest group.
Lobbying in general seems to offer a lot of leverage. Typically only millions of dollars are spent on issues where amounts hundreds of times larger are at stake. And there have been academic studies finding the ROI on lobbying is high.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tullock_paradox
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-outsized-returns-from-lobbying/2011/10/10/gIQADSNEaL_blog.html
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9064
You could test this idea by running a couple of small campaigns on the side.
Any suggestions to add? Any ideas on how to make this happen?
Ben
This is sitting in my ideas book - the model I had in my mind was a subscription service rather like a trades union, except it was your personal shared interests it represented rather than the interests you shared through work. You'd put your policy preferences in a form, and then your money would go to those campaigns only. Like a plug and play thing. I'm unsure exactly how this is that different from existing campaigning groups.
Political conflict and its filtration into policy has many causal pathways, only a small dimension of which is captured by your scenario: a small minority significantly effected by policy X, and a large majority moderately effected by policy X, such that the minority has cause to exert a influence on policy X disproportionate to its membership. How would a crowd-sourced platform limit itself only to these cases? What would prevent it from becoming a forum for the pitting of distinct values or material interests against one another? Yet if you do pre-select campaigns in some way, what would distinguish the platform from existing mass-membership political campaign groups?
How is this kick-starter type idea different from orgaisations that try and get donations from specific or general campaigns on the back of swift opportunistic petitions online like Avaaz? Is it the audience and the quality of the work that would improve? Or is it literally that we're talking about technical-legal rather than political-mass lobbying?
I don't understand how this addresses the main problems:
1) Most people are rationally irrational about politics. They have no reason to become informed about the pollution. 2) What's to stop free-riding? Do you insist 100% sign-up from the 990? If so, none will ever get funded. If not, people can free-ride.
Also I am sceptical about the ethics of making it easier to engage in negative-sum games. I expect these would largely be to more efficiently fund the culture war.
These do look like concerns, but I'm a bit more optimistic than you.
On 1), this looks at its best on issues where they will personally benefit. People are normally better judges of things that affect them personally. And I believe it's fairly well established that this is exactly the kind of scenario where there are political failures in the current system.
On 2), it allows free-riding. This is a problem for it, and might turn out to be too big. On the other hand some crowdfunding successes have been in cases with obvious free-riding, so this may not kill it.
The culture war can already be funded quite effectively by donating to the appropriate political parties. I expect this wouldn't see much use in cases with sizable campaigns on both sides. However, I do think that lobbying in general is quite possibly negative sum. It might be that this proposal would be positive in the short term, but makes it harder to restrict lobbying later (maybe a good early use would be to lobby for more limits on lobbying??).