alt Hacker NewsIdeally we should remove the incentive all together. Limit it so Politicians can only buy index funds that don’t target any specific industry.
Fundamentally you can classify modern society into two groups: government and commercial citizenry.
The incentives of these two groups are misaligned and that is essentially the origin of all corruption.
The commercial citizen, his goal is to make money, compete and to do so by bending the rules and using any means possible.
The government, his goal is to be fair, to enforce and follow the rules, and to guard citizens.
When you combine these two groups the incentives collide. You get government officials who are supposed to be fair but instead they are incentivized by commercial interests so they make biased laws, take bribes and do all that shit.
To reduce corruption you really need to create societies made up of two different groups with two different sets of incentives.
Dictators are more immune to this effect because all of their commercial incentives are pretty much completely fulfilled as they own the whole country.
In a democracy the closest sort of thing I’ve seen to this is priesthood. Buddhism or becoming a monk is similar but these are not elevated leadership positions like priests.
Basically when you become a government official it should be like becoming a priest. You are removing yourself from commercial society. It changes everything. Your incentives are different and it even filters out all the bad actors.
Such a society can realistically exist. I think the unrealistic part is converting our current society into something like this.
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The goal should be to not produce homo economicus in the first place, not to figure out how to build a society out of them in the same way you build a trustless smart contract.
You can still play the market with index funds. For example if someone knew that Trump was about to announce new tariffs they would sell to dodge the brief market panic.
> Ideally we should remove the incentive all together. Limit it so Politicians can only buy index funds that don’t target any specific industry.
I'd go one step further: upon election you have to convert all equity assets to US bonds.
> The commercial citizen, his goal is to make money, compete and to do so by bending the rules and using any means possible.
This conception of "citizen" is even more depressing to me than Homo Economicus. There are values aside from wealth, and not everyone is a money grubbing sociopath.
The primary challenge I see is that at least in the US, government positions are often elected and termed, meaning there is no guarantee your cash flow from your government job will continue long-term. This is why you must continue to operate as a private citizen, with a government job.
The second potential issue is one of pay - the best of society can make far more in a commercial setting than in a government setting - barring corruption, of course.