The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Daniel Mezick. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Dan Mezick. He’s been coaching executives and teams since 2006. He’s a Scrum at Scale trainer, and he’s an expert on business agility. He’s also the author of three books on organizational change. And as usual, the blog links to those books on the episode page at JimRuttShow.com. Welcome back, Dan.
Daniel: Glad to be here, James. Thanks for having me.
Jim: Yeah, it’s good to have you back. You’ve been on the show a few times, most recently in episode 151, where we talked about ritual and hierarchy. Today, we’re gonna talk about games and governance. This should be interesting.
Daniel: I believe it’s a very deep and wide topic that’ll really be of great interest to your listeners, Jim.
Jim: Let’s start off by what you mean by games. Right? Your games and governance. What the hell? Isn’t governance a serious thing? Isn’t games a frivolous thing? Tell me why we wanna talk about games and governance.
Daniel: Yeah. Well, if you look up games, you’re gonna find like seven noun definitions and five verb definitions. So the whole topic of game is not really buttoned down. It’s not really clear. We have very imprecise language about what gaming is. But there’s a book from a woman named Jane McGonigal called “Reality is Broken.” It’s quite a long book, but the most interesting part of that book to me is page 22, where she defines the four properties of a good game. And the first property is all games have goals. The second property is all games have rules. The third property is all games have a way of tracking your progress. And the fourth property is opt-in participation, consent of the governed, if you will. So I think she did humanity a great service, Jim, when she defined for everyone, everywhere, all kinds of games. She defined a definition that applies – it’s concise, and it applies to all games. So if we look at what she did there, we could look at this meeting as a game. We could look at any meeting as a game. We could look at every interaction as a game in the most classical McGonigal-defined sense of that term. And when we look at, like, the Constitution, I see it as an infinite, mutable game about civilization. Right? So it’s a large-scale game definition, the U.S. Constitution. So if we really look at it, we can see that it’s all about who decides what. So what we’re really getting down to in the Constitution is who has authority to decide, and in what cases, and in what domains, and under what circumstances. Right? So this is really, really super interesting. And, you know, in the last episode, we talked about how Dunbar’s numbered groups handle this issue of authority to decide. It’s in the book “Hierarchy in the Forest.” Right?
Jim: And it’s always the key to question this decision. Right? Who decides what under what circumstances? Now let me go back a little bit though, because you did give us one of your definitions that a game is opt-in. And you know, that kind of gets us back to the Enlightenment, social contract theory. And yet people always point out that in reality, if you’re born in the country, you haven’t really opted into the Constitution. It kind of something that you have to take or leave where you have to explicitly exit if you don’t wanna play by those rules. Maybe you could address that just a little bit.
Daniel: Now that’s fair. Let’s look at the ideals and then the practicality. Right? So the ideal is, and they talk about this when they use the term “consent of the governed.” The ideal is that people are not under compulsion in the way that they’re governed, and they are in fact choosing to submit to that form of governance and the way that authority is distributed in that schema. Now, of course, someone born naturally in the country can’t decide anything. First of all, they’re too young. And secondly, if they’re born into it, they’re subject to the rules. Right? So this is the practical end of it.
But the ideal is that human beings don’t like to be pushed around, and you can’t get anything done with people that are unwilling. So this whole idea of willingly submitting to the rules of the game is a very interesting topic. For example, if you think of the game of poker – there’s rules in poker, right? And basically, we’re trying to deceive our other opponents into handing us their money. Yet we all agree to the rules, so there’s membership in the rules. There’s camaraderie in the shared agreement about what the hell we’re doing at this table with these cards. And this is a really important part of being human – having a sense of membership and belonging. When we all submit to the same set of rules, there’s belonging in those rules, there’s membership. We have something shared, something common, there’s a basis for a culture.
Jim: On the other hand, and I think this is interesting, let’s find this analogy of the game. If the players operating the game are cheating or not operating in good faith in the interests of everybody, you have the right to flip the game over and say, fuck the game. Right? And so, this is basically the power of revolution. The people can at any time rise up and throw out any government that they have. Now it’s difficult and dangerous, but it’s been done countless times through history. So I think that’s a way to kind of at least backdoor in consent of the governed that, in extremis, if we think the game has deviated too far from our interests, we can just flip the game board over and hang all the motherfuckers and start a new game.
Daniel: Yeah. And what we need is a society that’s going to be high functioning needs to have a foundation of trust. So when trust breaks down, civilization breaks down, and this is exactly what you’re talking about.
Jim: And, of course, that’s what’s happening now. If you look at the measurements of social trust, they’re at all-time lows in the United States and in most other Western countries.
Daniel: Yes. So we have to get back to good games. Games as described in the McGonigal book on page 22 with those four properties. When we talk about the Constitution as a game, we’re really talking about how it describes a schema of what we might call authority distribution or an authority distribution schema. A lot of times when we talk about hierarchy in the separation of powers and so forth, hierarchy gets a bad rap because it’s short for authority hierarchy. But there’s lots of other hierarchies in the world, so I’m kind of going off on a little side trip here on the word hierarchy. The word hierarchy is very loosely thrown about without any kind of qualifier in front of it when in fact 99% of the time people are talking about authority distribution hierarchy.
For me, I’m offended by this because the language is very, very imprecise, and the topic is super, super important. Would you want a lawyer who’s arguing your case in court to be using imprecise language like this? Or how about the surgeon that’s about to operate on you? Do you want him just throwing terms loosely about with respect to the operation he’s about to perform on you? We need precise language to describe and discuss these systems, Jim. The systems of governance at any level of scope are more properly referenced as authority distribution schema. These can be formal and informal. The Constitution is of the formal type.
Jim: Gotcha. And it’s interesting you mentioned hierarchies – hierarchies of authority. One of the cool things about the U.S. Constitution is it’s not a hierarchy. It’s not a monarch who then has princes who then has dukes, etcetera. It’s an interesting and odd balance of power system, thought through by some of the early Enlightenment thinkers, pre-Enlightenment thinkers, and then was really thought through and written down by James Madison and some of the other founders where we have three coequal branches, at least in theory of government, and a very complicated scheme of who can do what with whose approval, who can veto whom, etcetera.
Daniel: Yes. One interesting fact to note about this is that it’s a triad. What’s really interesting about triad social structure is that it’s highly unstable, because two can gang up on one and run the show. And the Founding Fathers had to know this. They baked it in that way. So I believe, this is my own personal theory about it, that when any one branch gets outside its range of authority, the other two can just kind of gang up on it.
Jim: Now, interestingly, when it comes to design of businesses, I’ve always preferred a triarchy. Three founders, if you had come in later company, you know, a CEO and two EVPs who are acting more or less as peers. And one of the reasons I like the triarchy is people we often have dyadic communications screw ups – anybody married knows that, right? Two people could have communications problems. But if you have that third route, you can basically continue communications flowing even if individuals have dyadic problems. I wonder how that applies to our three branches of government. They can ally with each other and switch alliances, though they typically don’t ally, which is kind of interesting. Anyway, it’s a bit of an aside, but I just thought it interesting to point out that quite formally, the constitutional scheme of government is not hierarchical overall, even though components of it.
Daniel: Are hierarchical. True. Concerning the triad, if we look at it at different levels of scope, the first organization you have membership is your family, right? And there is a triad between the two parents and the child. And, of course, the parents gang up on the child and get the child to submit to their authority, hopefully, before they’re three years old so they don’t get out of hand later when they’re 15. But this whole idea of the triad is super interesting. And there’s a fellow named Dave Logan who wrote a book called Tribal Leadership, where he actually described how to use triads in business, where he described how even though it’s an informal structure, if the three people are aligned on values, it can be an extremely powerful way for all three people to advance their mutual and self interests. Book Tribal Leadership from Dave Logan. It’s a very interesting book.
Jim: Yep. Check that out. That actually sounds quite interesting and something that might resonate with me. So let’s think about, especially in the context of our political system, what do we actually mean by the term authority? And what is it? What is its purpose? You know, how is it defined? What are its limits? What are its constraints, which aren’t quite the same as limits, etcetera?
Daniel: Yes. So the best definition I have for authority comes from the group relations community. There’s a worldwide community that studies leadership and authority in groups, and they say that authority is a conferred right to do specific work. Now some of that work might be deciding, and deciding for the group is some of the most important work that we could do, right? So there’s all kinds of different work. One of them is deciding, and, of course, that’s the really super impactful work that affects the most people. But they say it’s a conferred right to do specific work. That’s how they define it. How does that land with you?
Jim: Yeah. Maybe. But define granted to whom by whom, right? One of the things I often talk about in our Game B work is the difference between position-based authority and role-based authority.
Daniel: Yes. Another way of saying, I believe, what you just said would be the formal versus the informal.
Jim: Well, not necessarily. Either could be formal or informal. When I think of a position-based authority, it’s like, I’m the vice president of sales, therefore I tell the salespeople what to do, versus one could have a more dynamic form of authority delegation where, hey, we’re trying to sell IBM and Mary is expert on the ins and outs of IBM. So let her lead the charge on selling IBM. Well, next week, we’re trying to sell General Motors and Bob is the expert on the culture and the people of General Motors. And so you don’t really have boxes of authority. You rather have roles which people rotate in and out of as appropriate.
Daniel: Yep. I hear you. Let’s go back to your discussion of the fellow who was the VP of sales, right? When you called him the VP of sales, that’s actually his formal role.
Jim: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And but in the other case, there’s a role of VP of sales today for topic X, right?
Daniel: Right. But that’s different. That’s an informal role that’s dynamic and emergent and is happening in real time, right?
Jim: It could be formal. It could literally have the drawing of the box. And then the because let’s say there’s a daily election for who’s in the box, right?
Daniel: Oh, yeah. Sure. Of course. Yeah.
Jim: You know, a lot of our thinking is channelized by these traditional rigid hierarchies – the Catholic Church, the US Army, American major corporations in the 1950s, etc. And I think it’s very important that people realize that those hierarchical forms weren’t brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses. These are things that have evolved for various reasons. And we tend to be over-channelized when we think about hierarchy.
Daniel: Yeah, but that box that you just described was the box where the current person who has the conferred right to decide is sitting, or the person who has broad influence over the decision – they might not make it, but they have a high degree of influence. You know, that box that you described can be occupied by anyone in any formal role at any time.
Jim: Yeah. And the role can be modified in real time also. Right? Like I say, if you had a parametric box with X, which is, I’m a Vice President of Sales today for topic X. Right? One could design a box of that sort, which does not feel like the kind of boxes we’re used to.
Daniel: Yes. But notice how we’re talking about boxes. We’re talking about containers. Right? We’re talking about boundaries. Right? Bounded containment of what? We’re talking about authority. I like it – it’s because it is literally a kind of social substance. Right? So one thing about this decider-for-a-day model that you’re talking about is that the people that are most fit to lead at any given point will have that right conferred upon them in an informal system. In a formal system, you know, we have to deal with compliance around firing people, around removing them from their office, and all this kind of stuff. So the informal authority distribution moves like a thousand times faster than the formal system, which makes it actually superior in some ways and in some places.
Jim: Yeah. Though, its lack of transparency can be an issue. Right?
Daniel: That’s correct. That’s correct. And this brings me to the topic of the essay by Jo Freeman, the 1970s essay called “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” where first-generation feminist groups got together and decided, yeah, we have to have governance, we have to make decisions, but we don’t wanna act like the patriarchy. So we’re not gonna have a hierarchy. Right? And she writes an essay about how that was a complete disaster. And she at the end advises that explicit structures of authority distribution that are transparent and open to everyone to see are a requirement of a high-functioning organization.
Jim: Yeah, I think that is true. That there’s more problems that happen from having the mechanisms be opaque, than even having them wrong, but transparent. Because at least if they’re transparent, they can be criticized and modified. If they’re in the dark and they’re opaque and there’s some hidden guru behind the scenes pulling all the strings, there’s nothing you can do about it.
Daniel: That’s right. That’s right. And she talks in the essay about how new members have an uneasy sense of not knowing what’s going on. Because there’s a hidden hierarchy that’s formed by the emergence of elites who are the in-group and the wider group as a whole.
Jim: You’re discussing the cafeteria in junior high school.
Daniel: Right. Right. Exactly. But, you know, to ground all this – authority distribution systems are games with goals, with rules, with progress tracking, and with levels of opt-in participation. Right? So the US Constitution describes a scaled, mutable, infinite game of type republic. Right? That’s what this thing is. So if we view it as a game, we can start to analyze it with more clarity and precision, right, around the goals, around the rules, around the progress tracking.
Jim: Let’s talk about – this part of our audience will know this, some part of it won’t – the distinction of an infinite game.
Daniel: Yeah. So an infinite game is a game that has no defined or formal ending. It’s designed to go on forever. A finite game like, you know, a baseball game or a football game, they end somehow. So football games end when the clock runs out. Baseball games end when the nine innings are up or they go to overtime and there’s a one run difference. Right? But they end. Infinite games go on theoretically forever, and there’s nothing in the Constitution that says that it would ever end, that the system for example, a Congress. Congress is designed to never actually end. We just go to the hundred and twentieth Congress, and that’s it. And then the hundred and twenty-first, hundred and twenty-second. So there was a book about this topic by a guy named James Carse, “Finite and Infinite Games.” I was kinda disappointed in that book, Jim, because he did not talk about the concept of the mutable game, which when I Google it, I don’t really see very much written about this at all. But if we look at the US Constitution, we can see that it is a mutable game. There are several mechanisms for proposing and ratifying amendments.
Jim: And not just amendments. And this is why I think, you know, the Madisonian hardware’s it’s called the operating system is so cool. There is mutability all up and down the damn thing. Think about legislation, right? Legislation is itself a mutable system. We add a new law, we amend the new law, we sunset a law, we replace an old law with a new law. It’s constantly a series of micro mutations. Then, for better and for worse, Congress has more and more delegated rulemaking authority to the executive. So the executive has a whole process of administrative lawmaking, right? And those things are enforceable as law or very close to law. And those are happening at a different timescale, more rapidly in some ways, more slowly than others than the legislative game and also with a lot less transparency. And then of course, we get to the deep operating system levels, which are the amendments to the game itself.
Daniel: Right. So this is a super interesting topic that doesn’t nearly get enough play. So there’s a fellow named Peter Suber, who is a Harvard-related philosopher, and he wrote a paper called “The Paradox of Self-Amendment.” And I’ve included this link, and all these references are included in the links that I sent you, Jim, so we can get them to the listeners. But Peter Suber’s paper, “The Paradox of Self-Amendment,” you know, discusses the topic of the rules around rule changes and how the rules around rule changes can themselves be changed in a mutable game. And he actually invented a practical example of this. It’s a game called Nomic. It’s a game where a move is a rule change. So it brings this into a really sharp focus. This whole idea that we are all engaging in mutable games like all the time. So for example, Jim, how long have you been married?
Jim: Be forty-four years, next month.
Daniel: Alright. And you knew, you met your wife sometime before that. Right?
Jim: About five years before that.
Daniel: And when you started out, you know, you were playing one kind of game. Let’s call it “hello.” Right? And then we move to “coffee” or not, and then, like, dinner or not. And then, like, you know, the whole game of romance is a mutable game. Right? So this should be, you know, very evident to anybody who’s had experience with romance that these games are mutable. Right? And they’re mutable at small scale between a man and a woman, and they’re also mutable at epic civilization level scale as we see in the Constitution, Jim.
Jim: One of the things that I often point out when we think about social system design is what is the viscosity, the rate at which rules can change? Right? If you could change the Constitution every time, let’s say, the current inhabitant of the White House decides to change the Constitution, you’re in a very, very different kind of viscosity than the kind of quite elaborate and intentionally slow-moving and difficult machinery that’s actually cooked into the Constitution.
Daniel: I wanna defer this discussion to some of your proposals around constitutional amendments because a couple of them that you shared with me speak directly to this topic. Right? I’m really eager to get into that stuff. So summing up a little bit here, before we get into part two where we get right into the Constitution, I think that we would be wise as thinking people to think a lot more about gaming in the most classical sense in the McGonigal-defined sense of those four properties: goals, rules, progress tracking, and opt-in participation. And then looking at our governance systems as a certain type of game, we could call an authority distribution game or an authority distribution schema. Then we would have more precise language to discuss what’s actually going on. And if we use the definition that the group relations people use, that authority is a conferred right to do specific work, now we can really start to do better things with design.
There’s a fellow named Jay Forrester who came out of MIT, who was a brilliant guy, and he actually invented system dynamics modeling and stocks and flows and that discipline in that method of mapping complex systems. And he had some very interesting things to say in his paper called “Designing the Future,” which was a transcript of a speech that he gave in Seville, Spain, in I believe 1997. And in that paper, he described how people are substantially sensitive to their surroundings. And what he was talking about was the rules of the game, the incentives. Right? Sometimes they’re perverse incentives, but the incentives that we build into our social systems have everything to do with the quality of life for the people in those systems. So we talk about Game B, Game A. Yeah, the design actually matters. And he actually talked about how he believed in 1997 that there would be a new kind of job called the social systems designer, who would actually build a social schema for specific purposes, right? This is a topic that I think its time has come.
Jim: That’s an interesting idea. And, you know, of course, we have that in corporations called organizational design people, right? At a more micro level. Mostly a lot of the stuff they come up with is absolute horseshit though. If you’ve ever lived in a corporation, the last thing you want is a visit from the OD department.
Daniel: Right, right, right, right. So yeah, organizational development, it’s not – that’s the OD community is org development, and, you know, of course, these are authority distribution schema. This is exactly what they are. Right? They can be networked. They could be hierarchies. They could be other structures. At the end of the day, what they’re actually structuring is the distribution of decision rights.
Jim: All right, let’s come back to this game concept again. One of the parts of your definition, which I wonder how applicable it is to thinking about a nation state operating system as a game, is you need some way of seeing progress or measuring how you’re doing, etcetera. That’s one thing that’s kind of missing from the US government in some absolute sense. There’s no read off that says the country is doing better. The country is doing worse.
Daniel: First of all, most progress is tracked by time and by task. Right? So if we’re in a meeting, we’re checking off agenda items on the board, those are the task list. So we’re experiencing it that way. And then we can look at the clock time and compare it to where we are in the remaining agenda to have a sense of how quickly we have to go. If we go to a sporting event, we can go to the Jumbotron and look there to see what the progress deal is. Right? If we look at the United States, we do have Congresses that are numbered. Right? We’re currently in the 119th. And there is also the State of the Union address, which serves this purpose, loosely defined. But people need a sense of progress in movement toward a goal to experience well-being.
And I think this is part of the reason why good games are so much fun to play, Jim, is because the progress tracking is there. So if we look, for example, at games that are built for online play, they bake a lot of progress tracking into those games, because that’s what keeps people playing. If you’re playing a game where you can’t experience the progress, it’s just plain not fun to play. Meetings that don’t have progress tracking mechanisms are straight up boring. Right? And it’s the same thing here in our civilization.
So, you know, we have periodic elections. Right? We have the midterm elections, and we have the presidential election every four years, senators every six years. We’re tracking progress through that and also through the growth of our economy, the growth of our population, the quality of life through various measures. Right? But what’s the goal of the U.S. Constitution? If it’s a game, what’s the goal? I would say the goal of the U.S. Constitution is the well-being and the thriving of the people that agree to be subject to it, Jim.
Jim: Let me read the preamble of the U.S. Constitution. How about that? “We, the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Daniel: You know, Jim, as you’re reading that and even now, I’ve kind of got tingly and got goosebumps around this. Right? A good game has a clear goal. And that’s a very clear set of goals laid out right up front. Here’s what we’re doing here. Right? So there’s no questions. The first property is satisfied.
Jim: Well, maybe not. Right? How do you measure these things? Right? How do you measure justice? Right? Domestic tranquility may be closer, crime rate, something like that. Provide for the common defense. We haven’t been invaded recently. I guess we’re doing pretty well there. Of course, the famous one that was essentially the loophole to allow Congress to do anything, promote the general welfare. Right? How do you score those things?
Daniel: Well, this is a practical matter and a practical problem. Right? And this is a problem that’s not unique to this particular topic, but is common to many situations. Right? So for example, if we bring in new ways of working into an organization, and the organization has great numbers around profit, volume, EBITDA, and other measures like that, can we attribute that increased business performance solely to the process change? Probably not. So how do we measure the impact of the process change? It’s gonna be a combination of hard and soft measures, because there’s no other way to do it. There’s too much covariance, Jim, in the outcome. Right? So I’m using the business case to kind of give a more tangible example. Your question, how do we measure it, is a perennial question that, I think any group of people under a social schema, have to struggle with.
Jim: You know, I would point out that in terms of our current system, one might say that we have a false maximizing measure, which is who wins the election, right? The actual way that the operating system works is paid off in terms of did you lose ground or did you gain ground in the election? And that might be very dangerous.
Daniel: Might be actually a bad organizational design. You know, I’m kind of concerned about this two-party system we have in this country because the founding fathers had a lot of foresight when they built the schema. Right? But they didn’t say anything about this two-party system emerging, and that’s exactly what happened, right? So this is something I want to come back to later on in this conversation, but I’m personally disappointed that we ended up with a two-party system because it just becomes binary and has polarity and everything.
Jim: Yeah. There’s a bunch we’ll talk about some in our amendments. So what else do we want to talk about before we get to our proposed amendments to the system?
Daniel: The last thing I want to discuss is that just like these goals, rules, and progress tracking and opt-in in a well-formed game, there’s also this supporting stuff. There’s roles, artifacts, rules, which are part of the wider game structure, and events. For example, Jim, say you walk into a meeting and you don’t know any of the people and you just kind of know the company, and you’re a guest observing things. If you can identify the roles, the rules, the artifacts, and the events inside the system, you can pretty much figure out what’s going on really, really fast. So one way to look at the Constitution is through this lens of what are the defined roles? What are the artifacts that support the processes? What are the rules that bind everything together? And what are some of the events? So the roles, artifacts, rules, and events, if you look through that lens, you can see things that were harder to see before. And that’s something I want to reference when we get into the Constitution.
Jim: Alright. Let’s then hop into part two. This is a structure Daniel suggested, where we’re now gonna each propose adjustments to the Constitution. Let’s look at it from a process perspective. Maybe we want to take turns so that we don’t use up all the time on one of our lists.
Daniel: That’s good. I want to start with one of yours, though, if that’s okay.
Jim: Okay.
Daniel: Alright. So you say that to pass a bill, you want 60% of both houses to vote yes. And for repeal, you want 50% plus one of both houses. Did I get that right?
Jim: That actually made it to my list. Right? It made it to my list of 10. Which is essentially a viscosity adjustment. But we’re passing laws by 51 vote, which are not consensus laws. So people’s trust in the integrity and good faith of legislature has gone down. If we had to have a 60% vote for everything, it will require much more compromise between this highly polarized polity that we have. And I also love the asymmetry between enacting and repeal. That in this way, we will clear the underbrush more rapidly than we’re adding to it.
Daniel: You know, when I read this from you, it occurred to me, you know, I’ve had a belief for a long time that passing a motion is easier than repeal. Right? Like, once that thing gets passed, it’s really hard to amend it. And what you’ve done here is you’ve kind of flipped that around.
Jim: Yeah. At least change the balance between the two, not by changing the difficulty in amending, but instead changing the difficulty in an…
Daniel: Yeah. I like that because it will create more horse trading, more listening, more compromise, more negotiation. So I like that.
Alright, so here’s something that I’m pretty sick and tired of, and that is the annual budget process. If you think of the annual budget process, there’s 12 categories of appropriations: Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, Commerce, Justice, Defense, Water, Energy, Finance, Homeland Security, Labor, Interior Topics, the Legislative Branch, Military Construction. I mean, it’s a huge undertaking.
And then we have what we call these continuing resolutions. So what we do when we budget is we budget annually. It’s an episode or an event, but I think we need to do some load balancing here, Jim. I think the budgeting process needs to be happening across the whole calendar. Right now, we have it as one big episode, and then you vote on the whole thing up or down. And if we can’t get agreement on up or down voting, then we pass a continuing resolution called the CR, which is a kind of shit show.
What I would like to see is an amendment that has Congress work on the budget all year in these 12 categories, so that everyone has a chance to read the bill and actually make an informed choice about what to do. I think the budget thing is broken. And in general, you’ll see that my topics are pointing to the fact that Congress in its design, in its constitutional design, is no longer fit for purpose, Jim. It did not anticipate a civilization of over 300 million people. I’d like to see the way the budgeting is handled, load balanced across the whole year instead of one episodic event that’s up or down.
Jim: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting. Now, I’ve often suggested a different reform with a totally different valence, which is if all 12 appropriation bills aren’t passed by September 30 prior to the start of the fiscal year, then Congress is dissolved and no current Congress critter may run for federal office for the next five years. Put the pressure on them to the max to pass something. And you and I are both business guys. What would the board say about a management team that didn’t have their budget in place on January 1? You know, they’d fire the motherfuckers.
Daniel: They’d throw them out. Exactly.
Jim: Throw the bums out. And so I think that I would have a constitutional – got all 12 must be enacted by the start of the fiscal year or you’re all fired. That would change the dynamic something fierce.
Daniel: Yeah. And you could keep it at 12 categories, and you could address the categories one per month in this manner and then apply your rule, and then we’d have something. But I’d really like to see a conversation spawned by your podcast and by your listeners around this topic of the budget because it’s obviously a broken thing.
Jim: We’ve been on continuing resolutions for about 90% of the time since 2008.
Daniel: Yes. Yes. Now, one thing – one concern I have is the unintended consequences of rule changes. Absolutely. So the Founding Fathers, for example, did an excellent job with foresight, but they couldn’t have foreseen everything. Now, when we design a game, like say you’re like Electronic Arts or one of these game companies, they can’t test the game until it’s completely built. So there’s tremendous expense in building a game. So what they do is they make those games addictive, right? So they can get their return on all that investment of building out that game. But going back to the Founding Fathers, they could not have foreseen what’s happening here. And you know, I first heard about the term perverse incentives when you had Daniel Schmachtenberger on. And I went and I looked that up, and I found some examples where, you know, the Indian government wanted to reduce the number of rats. So they started paying for rat tails.
Jim: Oh, yes. That’s a famous story. Yeah. Let’s tell that story.
Daniel: Right? So what people started doing is cultivating rats. Right? So they could harvest the tails and get paid. Right? So the exact opposite of what the intent was – the intent was to reduce the rat population. They got the exact opposite. They got an expansion of the rat population.
Jim: That is true. Like, let’s just think about that for a second. So for instance, this “kick them all out bums” perspective might cause a perverse effect, but it might not be perverse, which is that, let’s say one party is in a minority, but the polling shows it’s more popular now than it was at the last election. It could stonewall the budgetary process to force the clearing out of Congress at a whole new election. Now I will say that the fact that under my proposal the Congress critters themselves are banned for five years would be a pretty big deterrent from that happening. But it could be an unexpected or unanticipated hack on the system.
Daniel: So, this is super interesting. We’re talking about amendments to an authority distribution schema at the level of civilization, right? We’re talking about amending the Constitution. Now there is a mechanism that you and I both know called Article Five, which bypasses Congress and allows the states to call a convention that can ratify amendments. Right?
Jim: Well, not quite. I’m a nerd on the Constitution, so I don’t have to look this shit up. I know it. Article Five has two different methods for doing amending the Constitution. One is Congress can propose an amendment by two-thirds vote of both houses. The president is not involved, and then it requires the ratification of the legislatures of three-quarters of the states. The second method is one that has never been used, but two-thirds of the states can pass a memorial asking for a constitutional convention, which would then invoke a constitutional convention, can propose one or more amendments, each of which needs to be approved by three-quarters of the state legislatures.
Daniel: Yes. So I want to talk about this for a minute. If we look at the history of Article Five, we find that the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified in 1913. It was driven by nearly 31 state applications for a convention around this senatorial elections topic. So here, Congress was forced to act by the Article Five people. Right? In 1985, the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act also was spurred by 30 to 32 state applications for a balanced budget amendment. Again, Congress was nudged into acting so that the Article Five convention didn’t have to take place. And then in the third instance in 2011, the Budget Control Act indirectly addressing fiscal concerns, as balanced budget amendment applications grew to 29 states by 2016. So in three instances – 1913, 1985, and 2011 – Article Five rabble rousers prompted Congress to act. So Article Five seems to be actually working in an indirect way by authorizing basically pressure on Congress to go out in an alternative way that doesn’t include them. What do you think?
Jim: Yep. I think that’s the truth. That’s certainly that dynamic exists. Now I would kick that upstairs and ask the viscosity question. Are those numbers set at the right place for the rate of change that we want? In reality, we haven’t had a substantive amendment since, shit, long time, raised the voting age to 18 or something. That wasn’t very substantive. All the rest have been minor tweaks. Maybe we should lower the threshold, maybe the, you know, 60% in Congress and two-thirds in the state legislatures and two and 60% of the legislatures to call a convention. What do you think about that?
Daniel: This goes right back to Peter Suber, who has addressed this question in his essay, “The Paradox of Self-Amendment.” What we’re talking about is amending the rules about amending the rules.
Jim: Yep. And so if you take the lens of viscosity and say, is the right viscosity for the affordance of changing the rules themselves? And think about that as a design principle.
Daniel: I haven’t heard that discussion at all. That is a super interesting topic and how we calibrate the maximum rate of change that could be possible through the… or the desirable rate of change.
Jim: Don’t have to worry about the maximum because that would be the exploit that, but also what rate of change are we targeting? And I’d suggest to your point about the fact that we’re now in this two-party gridlock system, and there’s no way to get out of it other than a constitutional amendment, which would be very, very difficult. If we had a constitutional amendment mechanism that was easier, we might be able to escape from that trap.
Daniel: Yes. And I have to believe that the founding fathers could see this one. They saw… they knew it was gonna coalesce and boil down to a two-party system.
Jim: No. They did not. It’s a classic…
Daniel: But how could they miss that, Jim?
Jim: Because I’ll tell you why. Because there hadn’t been a large-scale democratic republic since Athens, basically. And they had no track record. And game theory hadn’t been invented yet. Game theory would have told you what would have happened with our current design. But if you read the thing, they did not see it happening, but it happened almost instantly as soon as the Constitution was in place. The Constitution went into effect in 1790 and by 1795 or so, the precursors of a two-party system were already in place.
In fact, that’ll clip ahead to one of my other proposals, which is one to address exactly that – this lock-in of a two-party system. And particularly it’s made even worse by the fact that in most states, states have closed primaries that only their own members vote in to nominate their candidates. The result is the most engaged and active members of each party, which are generally the most extreme, vote in these primaries. The two parties nominate relatively extreme candidates, and then they’re put up in a pick-one final two election mechanism. And you know how many times in our lives we’ve held our nose and voted for the lesser of two evils? The answer is way more than half the time.
There’s a very interesting proposal – we actually talked about it on my podcast with Katherine Gehl, back in EP 219. Her organization is proposing this, and I’ve adopted it and said this is a really good thing. Rather than having partisan primaries, do what they do in Alaska – have what they’re called jungle primaries, where all the candidates run together from all the parties, non-parties, non-partisan startup parties, whatever. And the top five (I think in Alaska’s case it’s top four, but Katherine makes a good case it should be top five) then proceed to a final election that’s done by ranked choice voting rather than just pick one. Ranked choice voting is very cool – you can vote for as many as you want. You don’t have to vote for them all, but in a specific order. And then there’s an algorithm by which those votes are processed. Typically, the way it works is the person who gets the least votes is kicked out of the count, and then the people who voted for them first, their second choice vote gets allocated across the other people. You do that recursively until you end up with one person with a majority. There’s a thing called Arrow’s theorem that proves you can never have a totally fair mechanism for elections, but this is about as close as the people who’ve thought about these things get. And if we enacted that at the constitutional amendment level for all federal offices, I believe we’d have a quite dramatic change for the better.
Daniel: I love that, and I wish you would get someone on the pod who was an expert in voting schema, like ranked choice, liquid democracy, delegated voting systems.
Jim: Yeah, I know such a guy. I know one of the leading authorities on the mathematics of voting systems. I would love to listen to that guy. I’d love to see if he’s still – he’s quite a bit older than two old farts like us, so he may have gone on to the promised land of mathematicians.
Daniel: First of all, I would like your listeners to know there’s a book called “Homo Ludens” (L-U-D-E-N-S) by a guy named Johan Huizinga. It’s in the list of references where he talks about man, the game-playing animal. It’s a very, very interesting book that goes to the heart of what we’re talking about. And then the second thing I want to say is that Fred Trump built apartments for returning GIs, and he was getting paid by the US government to build these things. And in the rules, he could be paid by the square foot, he could be paid by the unit. So Fred Trump read the rules very, very carefully and figured out that if he made lots of small units, he could make tons more money. And what they did was they dragged him into Congress to discuss his “excess profits.” And what Congress said was, “We never intended for these small three-room houses to be built. What is this?” And Fred Trump had a very telling quote where he said, “Well, if that’s what you wanted, you should have got someone who knew what they were doing to make the rules.” So this goes to the heart of what we’re talking about, and sometimes there’s unintended consequences with the rules we make like your “throw the bums out” amendment.
Jim: Yep. There’s always possibilities. Well, in the last minute, I’m gonna throw out two of mine, two of my favorite ones. I’ll do it really quick. One is the grandmother’s council, which would be a third house of the legislature. There would be a hundred grandmothers elected. They have to be certified grandmothers, two from each state, and only the council of grandmothers could declare war or increase the debt ceiling. That’s the only powers they have, and only they can do it.
Daniel: You know, this is very interesting because, when we went over the book “Hierarchy in the Forest,” you know, the two big decisions were where do we go to migrate, and are we going to war?
Jim: Exactly. And who better to have a deep view about whether a war is really worth fighting than the grandmothers, because their grandkids have to go to war. But on the other hand, their society has to be protected. And the same for debt. Debt is burdening their grandchildren with a weight around their neck. So those, the grandmother’s council, then the other one, this is the most important one of all. This is the thing that actually got me interested in social reform, is money in politics. Money is actually useful in politics because it’s a continuous variable and it’s continually subdividable down to 1¢, basically. So it’s very fluid. It flows in time and in amount. And so the idea of getting money out of politics is actually a bad idea. But what’s totally bad about money in politics is, you know, a demented drug user like Elon Musk can put in $290,000,000 and a young working family can’t put up anything, right, or very little. And so here’s how you get the best of both worlds. You have a new kind of money called political money. Every citizen gets a certain amount, let’s say, on the order of $200 a year, and blue then what I call it blue money. I just imagine that it’s blue in some sense. Blue money can only be converted to green money, i.e. money that you can spend, by legally registered political organizations. And whether that’s to run people in office or to lobby or to do advocacy on political issues or legislation, those things have to be registered, and they have to be only funded by blue money. So we still have the fluidity in both time and amount that money in politics has, but it makes everybody’s monetary vote equal. So we have the best of both worlds, the good parts that comes from money in politics, and get rid of the absurd asymmetries that we currently have.
Daniel: This is a very interesting idea, and it brings up the whole aspiration of social system design and like the Game B example of that is that people are substantially sensitive to their surroundings like Forrester said, and that means the rules. So is it possible? And this is my question, you know, kind of in closing to wrap this up. Is it possible to, through good game design, to game virtue?
Jim: If we were angels, we wouldn’t need laws.
Daniel: Yes.
Jim: I think so. I do believe that the two are somewhat orthogonal. Yes, we want better virtues, but the fact that we’re not all virtuous and never will be is the reason we actually have to have constitutions in government. No government needed for angels, but we’re not angels and never will be.
Daniel: Beautiful, Jim.
Jim: Alright. It’s a good conversation. I wish we’d gotten our act together and got on the road earlier, but it was fun. And I look forward to us publishing it and hearing what people have to say.
Daniel: Thank you very much for having me on, Jim. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Jim: Look forward to chatting with you again. Audio production and editing by Andrew Blevins Productions. Music by Tom Mueller at modernspacemusic.com.