- Anyone can propose a bill at any time.
- All proposals are reviewed equally, without bias.
- Proposals that improve the general welfare (according to the prediction market’s evaluation of the publicly known metric for the general welfare) will be adopted.
- The mechanism by which bills are reviewed is open to all.
- Anyone can investigate and present an argument that a bill will help or hurt the general welfare. The judges of that argument (the investors in the prediction market) will have a strong financial interest in reaching an unbiased and accurate conclusion. If the arguments have merit (and have not already been accounted for) the result will be a swift reevaluation of the bill.
- Anyone who wants a more careful review can subsidize deeper investigation, providing an incentive to investigate and potentially change the existing evaluation. Funding such a deeper review does not, however, bias the resulting review. This is a general property of prediction markets.
- The impact on the general welfare is assessed fairly and without bias.
- Any existing law can be amended or repealed with the same ease with which a new law can be proposed.
- Proposals to improve the mechanisms by which bills are reviewed and adopted can be reviewed and adopted by the same mechanism used to review and adopt bills, leading to a self-improving system.
- It’s obvious that everyone’s welfare is weighted equally, and that no special consideration, either favorable or unfavorable, is meted out to any individual or group, because the mechanisms underlying the DAO are transparent and open to inspection.
- Citizens are not required to exhibit great intelligence, deep understanding of the political system, or to penetrate deceptive campaign statements, for their interests to be properly weighed by the system. The interests of the dull and stupid are protected with as much vigor as those of the intelligent and involved.
- Groups that hate each other cannot directly vote for policies that would harm or even exterminate the other group.
- The only time this governance process would support “the tyranny of the majority” would be if oppression of some minority actually made the majority better off, and the majority was made sufficiently better off that it outweighed the resulting misery to the minority. Jailing Typhoid Mary might have been such a case. In the great majority of cases, however, this metric would result in keeping the peace between citizens by some method other than mass jailings, mass arrests, or civil war.
- Once the expected future deaths a given individual might cause exceeded 1, they would promptly be jailed (or otherwise confined). People would likely be confined well before reaching this point, particularly if confinement was not overly burdensome. While accurate forecasting of future murders would seem unlikely, if such a technology were feasible it would be developed and promptly used by this metric to confine people who were likely to kill someone. On the other hand, the proposed metric (a person’s death typically resulting in future individual welfare ratings of 0) would create an aversion to the death penalty.
- Warfare, if it involved deaths of citizens, would be avoided. If it involved deaths of non-citizens, it would be pursued vigorously if it produced benefits to citizens. In this latter case, the only thing preventing war would be the rational expectation that peace would be better for the collective welfare. This might well be the case, but drone warfare might be pursued in those cases that did not create undue outcry by the international community. Unless the proposed metric is extended to the entire human population, there is no substantial incentive not to kill or injure non-citizens, provided there is some advantage to be gained and little risk to citizens. The metric, as given and without further modifications, treats non-citizens as having no value. This, of course, creates an argument for extending the metric to the entire human species.
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