1
00:00:00,620 --> 00:00:06,480
Optimocracy: The Evidence Machine On Wishonia, the Optimitron comes free with your first government.

2
00:00:07,460 --> 00:00:15,400
Its Optimal Budget Generator (O.B.G.) and Optimal Policy Generator (O.P.G.) check which policies work by looking at the

3
00:00:15,520 --> 00:00:21,240
ten thousand places that already tried them. Your species skipped this step and went straight to arguing.

4
00:00:21,800 --> 00:00:26,740
Incentive Alignment Bonds make saving lives and advancing careers the same sentence.

5
00:00:27,440 --> 00:00:33,380
One problem: how do you know which policies to recommend? The Only Two Numbers That Matter.

6
00:00:34,260 --> 00:00:39,180
Two numbers. Just two. Real after-tax median income growth.

7
00:00:39,960 --> 00:00:44,100
Did the person in the middle get richer this year? Not G.D.P.

8
00:00:44,100 --> 00:00:49,440
per capita, which looks great when three billionaires move into your city while everyone else's rent doubles.

9
00:00:50,380 --> 00:00:56,670
Median healthy life years. How many years can the person in the middle expect to live in good health?

10
00:00:57,540 --> 00:01:05,019
Not average life expectancy, which counts the billionaire who replaced his blood six times as canceling out someone who

11
00:01:05,019 --> 00:01:14,180
died at forty. Why these two? Because everything important your governments do eventually makes people richer or less dead,

12
00:01:14,520 --> 00:01:21,900
and if it doesn't do either, it wasn't important. Your government currently measures success by how much money it spends,

13
00:01:22,280 --> 00:01:26,080
which is like a restaurant measuring success by how much food it buys.

14
00:01:26,700 --> 00:01:29,940
You could buy a mountain of ingredients and poison everyone.

15
00:01:30,580 --> 00:01:38,880
By your current metrics, that's a good year. Your species engineered a pocket-sized device with sixteen billion transistors,

16
00:01:39,100 --> 00:01:42,840
mass spectrometry, and supply chains spanning forty-three countries.

17
00:01:43,580 --> 00:01:52,540
Then you built an algorithm that A B tests billions of user interactions, optimizing hundreds of signals in real time, so

18
00:01:52,540 --> 00:01:59,960
that device can show you the optimal twerking video. That is more empirical rigor than your species applies to allocating

19
00:01:59,960 --> 00:02:07,340
its federal budget. The federal budget decides who gets medicine, who gets clean water, and who gets bombed.

20
00:02:08,520 --> 00:02:14,000
Fifty-five million people die every year from diseases you already have treatments for.

21
00:02:14,740 --> 00:02:19,400
You optimized the twerking. You did not optimize the not-dying.

22
00:02:21,040 --> 00:02:27,780
Here's what makes these numbers useful beyond measurement: your species already agrees on both goals.

23
00:02:28,540 --> 00:02:36,360
Nobody campaigns on "make people poorer and sicker." But without a scoreboard, policy debates become tribal arguments about

24
00:02:36,360 --> 00:02:44,800
vibes. You forgot the question. You're not arguing about whether people should be healthier and richer; you're arguing about

25
00:02:44,800 --> 00:02:53,020
which policies achieve that, and nobody's checking. Once you check, most of the argument disappears, because it turns out

26
00:02:53,020 --> 00:02:59,580
the answer isn't left or right. It's in the data from the ten thousand places that already tried it.

27
00:03:01,320 --> 00:03:05,820
Now that you know what we're measuring, here's how badly your species is doing at it.

28
00:03:06,920 --> 00:03:14,320
The Price of Not Checking. The United States spends three hundred percentage points more of G.D.P.

29
00:03:14,360 --> 00:03:20,410
than Switzerland on government. Switzerland gets six point five more years of life expectancy.

30
00:03:21,180 --> 00:03:25,740
One of these countries is doing it wrong. On Wishonia, we would check which one.

31
00:03:26,140 --> 00:03:31,260
On Earth, you have a debate about it. The debate has been going on for fifty years.

32
00:03:31,860 --> 00:03:38,220
The Swiss are still winning. You're paying more and dying sooner, and your response is to have opinions about it.

33
00:03:38,860 --> 00:03:46,000
Documented U.S. governance waste totals four point nine trillion dollars (seventeen percent of G.D.P.).

34
00:03:46,740 --> 00:03:54,920
Globally, the opportunity cost of suboptimal policy reaches one hundred and one trillion dollars (eighty-seven point eight

35
00:03:54,920 --> 00:04:01,360
percent of G.D.P.), putting your civilization's governance efficiency at fifty-one point nine percent.

36
00:04:02,160 --> 00:04:05,680
Your species is running at roughly half its technological potential.

37
00:04:06,580 --> 00:04:13,360
Imagine building a car, then only turning on half the cylinders because the other half are controlled by a committee that

38
00:04:13,360 --> 00:04:17,160
meets once a year and disagrees about what "forward" means.

39
00:04:17,860 --> 00:04:21,700
(For the full accounting, see the Political Dysfunction Tax and U.S.

40
00:04:21,899 --> 00:04:29,940
Efficiency Audit.) Or consider the War on Drugs. Your species spends ninety billion dollars per year on it.

41
00:04:30,540 --> 00:04:37,100
When Nixon declared it in nineteen seventy-one, about six thousand Americans died annually from drug overdoses.

42
00:04:37,860 --> 00:04:43,500
After fifty years and over a trillion dollars, that number exceeded one hundred thousand.

43
00:04:44,200 --> 00:04:47,020
At no point did anyone check whether the policy was working.

44
00:04:48,200 --> 00:04:55,740
At no point did anyone stop funding it because it wasn't. On Wishonia, if you spend a trillion dollars on something and

45
00:04:55,740 --> 00:05:02,280
the problem gets eighteen times worse, you stop doing it. On Earth, you increase the budget.

46
00:05:03,480 --> 00:05:11,200
The Answer Key You Already Have. Your planet has roughly ten thousand jurisdictions making different policy choices.

47
00:05:12,020 --> 00:05:20,560
Kansas cut education funding; Minnesota increased it. Fifty states adopted different minimum wages over thirty years.

48
00:05:21,260 --> 00:05:29,140
Portugal decriminalized drugs; Singapore didn't. These are natural experiments, and the math can now figure out which policy

49
00:05:29,140 --> 00:05:33,420
caused which result, without needing anyone's permission to run an experiment.

50
00:05:34,020 --> 00:05:37,860
The experiment already happened. You just weren't paying attention.

51
00:05:38,760 --> 00:05:44,540
Same logic as your decentralized F.D.A.: watch what actually happens, then analyze the data.

52
00:05:45,240 --> 00:05:50,740
Your decentralized F.D.A. applies this to medicine. The Evidence Machine applies it to governance.

53
00:05:51,320 --> 00:05:55,460
Instead of "which drug works?" you're asking "which policy works?"

54
00:05:55,880 --> 00:06:00,760
Same question, higher body count. Why Knowing Isn't Enough.

55
00:06:01,380 --> 00:06:08,440
If you're thinking "just publish the results and politicians will do the right thing," I have some bad news about your species.

56
00:06:09,100 --> 00:06:14,020
The Copenhagen Consensus already publishes rigorous benefit-cost analyses.

57
00:06:14,920 --> 00:06:22,540
Childhood vaccination: one hundred and one to one returns. Pragmatic clinical trials: six hundred and thirty-seven to one.

58
00:06:23,150 --> 00:06:28,010
Agricultural subsidies: less than one to one. The answer key is public.

59
00:06:28,080 --> 00:06:36,000
It's been public for years. Your governments ignore it. You have the cheat sheet, and you're still failing the test on purpose.

60
00:06:36,460 --> 00:06:44,380
Why? Because information doesn't change incentives. A Princeton study analyzed one thousand seven hundred and seventy-nine

61
00:06:44,380 --> 00:06:50,840
policy decisions and found that average citizens have "little or no independent influence" on policy outcomes.

62
00:06:52,160 --> 00:06:55,100
Economic elites and organized interest groups drive policy.

63
00:06:55,720 --> 00:06:59,260
You already knew this (it's covered in Unrepresentative Democracy).

64
00:06:59,800 --> 00:07:03,480
The point here is that publishing better data doesn't fix the problem.

65
00:07:03,980 --> 00:07:07,240
Your politicians already know which programs produce value.

66
00:07:07,820 --> 00:07:14,600
They don't act because acting doesn't maximize getting votes, getting papers, or getting a nice job afterward selling access

67
00:07:14,600 --> 00:07:22,600
to their replacements. This is the gap between Incentive Alignment Bonds (which solve the incentive problem) and the Evidence

68
00:07:22,600 --> 00:07:28,220
Machine (which solves the knowledge problem). I.A.B.s make doing the right thing profitable.

69
00:07:28,860 --> 00:07:34,920
But they need to know what the right thing IS. That requires a measurement system nobody can corrupt.

70
00:07:35,740 --> 00:07:42,020
The Mechanism: Recommend, Track, Reward. The Evidence Machine does three things.

71
00:07:42,060 --> 00:07:48,280
That's it. Three things. Your species has difficulty with three things, so I'll use small words.

72
00:07:48,900 --> 00:07:52,420
(On Wishonia, we just call this the Optimitron. It's an appliance.

73
00:07:52,900 --> 00:07:56,920
You plug in policies, it tells you which ones work.). Recommend.

74
00:07:56,980 --> 00:08:03,520
The Optimitron has two settings. The Optimal Budget Generator answers "how much should you spend on what?"

75
00:08:04,080 --> 00:08:09,140
The Optimal Policy Generator answers "which laws should you enact, replace, or repeal?"

76
00:08:09,860 --> 00:08:16,500
Here's a sample of what the budget output looks like, applied to the United States: For pragmatic clinical trials, the current

77
00:08:16,500 --> 00:08:24,120
budget is zero point five billion dollars, the optimal budget is fifty billion dollars, for a gap of plus forty-nine point

78
00:08:24,120 --> 00:08:30,140
five billion dollars, based on evidence grade A from randomized controlled trials, or R.C.T.s.

79
00:08:30,880 --> 00:08:37,940
For vaccinations, the current budget is eight billion dollars, the optimal budget is thirty-five billion dollars, for a

80
00:08:37,940 --> 00:08:43,159
gap of plus twenty-seven billion dollars, based on evidence grade A from R.C.T.s.

81
00:08:43,919 --> 00:08:51,140
For military discretionary spending, the current budget is eight hundred and fifty billion dollars, the optimal budget is

82
00:08:51,140 --> 00:08:58,720
four hundred and fifty-nine billion dollars, for a gap of minus three hundred and ninety-one billion dollars, based on evidence

83
00:08:58,720 --> 00:09:06,680
grade C from benchmarks. For agricultural subsidies, the current budget is twenty-five billion dollars, the optimal budget

84
00:09:06,680 --> 00:09:14,260
is zero dollars, for a gap of minus twenty-five billion dollars, based on evidence grade A from welfare analysis.

85
00:09:14,780 --> 00:09:21,580
You are spending one hundred times less than optimal on figuring out which medicines work, and paying farmers twenty-five

86
00:09:21,580 --> 00:09:27,320
billion dollars a year to grow food nobody asked for. The Optimitron noticed.

87
00:09:27,860 --> 00:09:34,480
It also noticed you could cut three hundred and ninety-one billion dollars from the murder budget and still have the largest

88
00:09:34,480 --> 00:09:43,260
military on the planet. The policy generator then does the same thing law by law: enact this, repeal that, adjust the other

89
00:09:43,260 --> 00:09:48,960
thing. Every recommendation traceable to what actually happened when another jurisdiction tried it.

90
00:09:49,720 --> 00:09:58,090
No opinions. Just receipts. Track. When politicians vote, record whether they aligned with the evidence-based recommendation.

91
00:09:58,900 --> 00:10:04,480
Senator Smith: seventy-eight percent aligned. Senator Jones: thirty-four percent aligned.

92
00:10:04,480 --> 00:10:11,920
This information is public. Any citizen can check. On Wishonia, this is called "checking if the person you hired did the

93
00:10:11,920 --> 00:10:17,810
thing you hired them to do." Your species finds this concept revolutionary, which tells you everything.

94
00:10:18,660 --> 00:10:22,120
Politicians who ignore the evidence must do so on the record.

95
00:10:22,820 --> 00:10:31,020
Reward. The Incentive Alignment Bond, or I.A.B.-funded SuperPAC allocates campaign support proportional to alignment scores.

96
00:10:31,640 --> 00:10:35,480
Follow evidence, get funded. Ignore it, watch your opponent get funded.

97
00:10:36,020 --> 00:10:40,900
Same mechanism the N.R.A. perfected, but pointed at "not dying" instead of "more guns."

98
00:10:41,980 --> 00:10:48,880
This doesn't require government permission. The Evidence Machine operates as a permanent advisory layer outside government.

99
00:10:49,560 --> 00:10:56,680
Politicians still vote however they want. They can still ignore the evidence; it just costs them money now, which on Earth

100
00:10:56,680 --> 00:11:03,060
is apparently the only consequence that matters. The question isn't "will politicians give up power?"

101
00:11:03,340 --> 00:11:07,360
(they won't) but "can we make ignoring good advice unprofitable?"

102
00:11:08,060 --> 00:11:13,740
(yes; it's a fundraising challenge, not a revolution). Corruption, But Make It Difficult.

103
00:11:14,460 --> 00:11:18,980
"But won't someone corrupt the measurement system?" Yes. This is the right question.

104
00:11:19,420 --> 00:11:24,920
It's the only question that matters. Currently, your lobbying industry has thousands of capture points.

105
00:11:25,780 --> 00:11:32,690
Committee earmarks, agency decisions, regulatory rulings, budget amendments, riders on unrelated bills.

106
00:11:32,800 --> 00:11:41,340
Each one is cheap to influence. Your federal lobbyists spend four point four billion dollars per year with estimated one

107
00:11:41,340 --> 00:11:46,540
hundred to one returns. Your democracy is a vending machine, and the buttons are labeled.

108
00:11:47,440 --> 00:11:53,900
The Evidence Machine collapses all those capture points to a single target: the measurement methodology.

109
00:11:54,640 --> 00:12:02,020
Here's the heist: simultaneously bribe the Census Bureau, the Federal Reserve, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, academic

110
00:12:02,020 --> 00:12:07,260
institutions, AND decentralized citizen surveys. All without detection.

111
00:12:07,740 --> 00:12:14,820
All at the same time. All institutions with different governance structures, different funding sources, different methodologies,

112
00:12:15,080 --> 00:12:19,040
and different reasons to hate each other. This is not a corruption strategy.

113
00:12:19,500 --> 00:12:24,120
This is the plot of a movie where the criminals lose. Here's how it works in practice.

114
00:12:25,060 --> 00:12:32,520
Five independent sources measure median income growth: The Census Bureau American Community Survey reports plus two point

115
00:12:32,520 --> 00:12:38,420
one percent. The Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances reports plus two point three percent.

116
00:12:39,000 --> 00:12:44,080
The Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey reports plus one point nine percent.

117
00:12:44,680 --> 00:12:49,980
The University of Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics reports plus two point two percent.

118
00:12:50,660 --> 00:12:55,600
The Tax Foundation I.R.S. data analysis reports plus two point zero percent.

119
00:12:56,140 --> 00:13:03,020
Take the median: PLUS TWO POINT ONE PERCENT. If one source reports plus five point zero percent (because someone bribed

120
00:13:03,020 --> 00:13:07,940
them), the median throws it out automatically. No investigation needed.

121
00:13:07,980 --> 00:13:12,260
No whistleblower needed. No committee hearing. Math does the work.

122
00:13:13,180 --> 00:13:18,670
(An honest caveat: these five sources share some underlying data, so they're not perfectly independent.

123
00:13:19,500 --> 00:13:26,720
That's why there's a sixth source: decentralized citizen surveys, collected directly from millions of humans, sharing no

124
00:13:26,720 --> 00:13:32,840
methodology with the others. One person lying has approximately zero effect on the median.

125
00:13:32,940 --> 00:13:39,240
This is statistics, not voting.). Your species has spent centuries making corruption illegal.

126
00:13:39,720 --> 00:13:44,400
It hasn't worked, because laws are enforced by the same humans who are being bribed.

127
00:13:45,000 --> 00:13:49,000
On Wishonia, we tried something different: we made corruption impractical.

128
00:13:49,980 --> 00:13:56,050
There's a difference between "you shouldn't steal" and "the vault has five locks held by five people who hate each other."

129
00:13:56,480 --> 00:14:00,000
Your species tried door number one for three thousand years.

130
00:14:00,560 --> 00:14:06,540
We recommend door number two. This is also why it's different from every previous attempt at technocratic governance.

131
00:14:07,480 --> 00:14:10,940
Soviet central planning had one source of truth (the Politburo).

132
00:14:11,740 --> 00:14:18,280
Credit rating agencies had one source of truth (the agency paid by the people being rated, which is like letting students

133
00:14:18,280 --> 00:14:21,700
grade their own exams and then being surprised when everyone gets an A).

134
00:14:22,380 --> 00:14:27,870
Both were captured immediately, because corrupting one institution is a Tuesday.

135
00:14:28,020 --> 00:14:34,760
Corrupting five independent institutions simultaneously, without any of them noticing or telling anyone, is a conspiracy

136
00:14:34,760 --> 00:14:40,000
theory. The expensive kind that doesn't work. Why not fifty metrics?

137
00:14:40,580 --> 00:14:47,800
Because each additional target creates a new way to cheat, and your species needs no encouragement in that department.

138
00:14:48,140 --> 00:14:53,780
Markets figured this out: firms optimize profit, not two hundred sub-metrics.

139
00:14:53,880 --> 00:14:58,900
Two broad, hard-to-fake numbers are easier to audit than fifty narrow ones.

140
00:14:59,520 --> 00:15:07,460
And these particular numbers are very hard to fake. You can't fabricate purchasing power at scale without actually improving

141
00:15:07,460 --> 00:15:13,200
household economics. Mortality is binary (the most binary thing there is).

142
00:15:13,740 --> 00:15:18,260
You can't fake everyone being "less dead.". "But correlation isn't causation!"

143
00:15:19,360 --> 00:15:25,900
Yes. Thank you. Your species discovered this in the eighteen hundreds and has been using it as an excuse to ignore data

144
00:15:25,900 --> 00:15:32,010
ever since. The Optimitron doesn't just check whether policies and outcomes happened in the same room.

145
00:15:32,420 --> 00:15:39,840
It uses the fact that ten thousand jurisdictions adopted different policies at different times to isolate what actually

146
00:15:39,840 --> 00:15:48,080
caused what. (The boring details: the technical specification scores every causal claim against nine criteria, and if the

147
00:15:48,140 --> 00:15:53,560
timing is wrong, the score is automatically zero, no matter how pretty the correlation looks.).

148
00:15:54,420 --> 00:16:01,820
Putting It Together. The full loop: one percent Treaty funds it, I.A.B.s align incentives, the Evidence Machine identifies

149
00:16:01,820 --> 00:16:08,320
what works, and Wishocracy allocates the research funds. The Evidence Machine tells governments which policies work.

150
00:16:08,880 --> 00:16:14,240
Wishocracy tells the research fund where to aim. On Wishonia, this is called "an obvious system."

151
00:16:14,820 --> 00:16:20,920
On Earth, it required four chapters and a bibliography. And here's why the whole thing ratchets.

152
00:16:22,000 --> 00:16:29,100
Each treaty expansion creates more I.A.B. funding, which funds more evidence collection, which strengthens the case for

153
00:16:29,100 --> 00:16:33,660
further expansion. Evidence begets funding begets evidence.

154
00:16:34,460 --> 00:16:42,640
It's the same self-reinforcing loop as the Military Industrial Complex, except instead of manufacturing orphans, it manufactures

155
00:16:42,640 --> 00:16:50,980
data about how to stop manufacturing orphans. Now that you know how the Optimitron works (congratulations, on Wishonia this

156
00:16:50,980 --> 00:16:56,380
is taught to children), the next chapter shows you how eight billion people allocate the research funds.

157
00:16:57,340 --> 00:17:04,140
For the full technical specification, formal models, and threat analysis, see the Optimocracy academic paper.

158
00:17:05,040 --> 00:17:12,359
For the gory details on how the recommendation engine decides you're spending too much on corn and too little on not dying:

159
00:17:12,420 --> 00:17:21,339
the Optimal Budget Generator at O.B.G. dot war on disease dot org and the Optimal Policy Generator at O.P.G.

160
00:17:21,380 --> 00:17:22,980
dot war on disease dot org.