Optimocracy: The Evidence Machine On Wishonia, the Optimitron comes free with your first government.
Its Optimal Budget Generator (O.B.G.) and Optimal Policy Generator (O.P.G.) check which policies work by looking at the
ten thousand places that already tried them. Your species skipped this step and went straight to arguing.
Incentive Alignment Bonds make saving lives and advancing careers the same sentence.
One problem: how do you know which policies to recommend? The Only Two Numbers That Matter.
Two numbers. Just two. Real after-tax median income growth.
Did the person in the middle get richer this year? Not G.D.P.
per capita, which looks great when three billionaires move into your city while everyone else's rent doubles.
Median healthy life years. How many years can the person in the middle expect to live in good health?
Not average life expectancy, which counts the billionaire who replaced his blood six times as canceling out someone who
died at forty. Why these two? Because everything important your governments do eventually makes people richer or less dead,
and if it doesn't do either, it wasn't important. Your government currently measures success by how much money it spends,
which is like a restaurant measuring success by how much food it buys.
You could buy a mountain of ingredients and poison everyone.
By your current metrics, that's a good year. Your species engineered a pocket-sized device with sixteen billion transistors,
mass spectrometry, and supply chains spanning forty-three countries.
Then you built an algorithm that A B tests billions of user interactions, optimizing hundreds of signals in real time, so
that device can show you the optimal twerking video. That is more empirical rigor than your species applies to allocating
its federal budget. The federal budget decides who gets medicine, who gets clean water, and who gets bombed.
Fifty-five million people die every year from diseases you already have treatments for.
You optimized the twerking. You did not optimize the not-dying.
Here's what makes these numbers useful beyond measurement: your species already agrees on both goals.
Nobody campaigns on "make people poorer and sicker." But without a scoreboard, policy debates become tribal arguments about
vibes. You forgot the question. You're not arguing about whether people should be healthier and richer; you're arguing about
which policies achieve that, and nobody's checking. Once you check, most of the argument disappears, because it turns out
the answer isn't left or right. It's in the data from the ten thousand places that already tried it.
Now that you know what we're measuring, here's how badly your species is doing at it.
The Price of Not Checking. The United States spends three hundred percentage points more of G.D.P.
than Switzerland on government. Switzerland gets six point five more years of life expectancy.
One of these countries is doing it wrong. On Wishonia, we would check which one.
On Earth, you have a debate about it. The debate has been going on for fifty years.
The Swiss are still winning. You're paying more and dying sooner, and your response is to have opinions about it.
Documented U.S. governance waste totals four point nine trillion dollars (seventeen percent of G.D.P.).
Globally, the opportunity cost of suboptimal policy reaches one hundred and one trillion dollars (eighty-seven point eight
percent of G.D.P.), putting your civilization's governance efficiency at fifty-one point nine percent.
Your species is running at roughly half its technological potential.
Imagine building a car, then only turning on half the cylinders because the other half are controlled by a committee that
meets once a year and disagrees about what "forward" means.
(For the full accounting, see the Political Dysfunction Tax and U.S.
Efficiency Audit.) Or consider the War on Drugs. Your species spends ninety billion dollars per year on it.
When Nixon declared it in nineteen seventy-one, about six thousand Americans died annually from drug overdoses.
After fifty years and over a trillion dollars, that number exceeded one hundred thousand.
At no point did anyone check whether the policy was working.
At no point did anyone stop funding it because it wasn't. On Wishonia, if you spend a trillion dollars on something and
the problem gets eighteen times worse, you stop doing it. On Earth, you increase the budget.
The Answer Key You Already Have. Your planet has roughly ten thousand jurisdictions making different policy choices.
Kansas cut education funding; Minnesota increased it. Fifty states adopted different minimum wages over thirty years.
Portugal decriminalized drugs; Singapore didn't. These are natural experiments, and the math can now figure out which policy
caused which result, without needing anyone's permission to run an experiment.
The experiment already happened. You just weren't paying attention.
Same logic as your decentralized F.D.A.: watch what actually happens, then analyze the data.
Your decentralized F.D.A. applies this to medicine. The Evidence Machine applies it to governance.
Instead of "which drug works?" you're asking "which policy works?"
Same question, higher body count. Why Knowing Isn't Enough.
If you're thinking "just publish the results and politicians will do the right thing," I have some bad news about your species.
The Copenhagen Consensus already publishes rigorous benefit-cost analyses.
Childhood vaccination: one hundred and one to one returns. Pragmatic clinical trials: six hundred and thirty-seven to one.
Agricultural subsidies: less than one to one. The answer key is public.
It's been public for years. Your governments ignore it. You have the cheat sheet, and you're still failing the test on purpose.
Why? Because information doesn't change incentives. A Princeton study analyzed one thousand seven hundred and seventy-nine
policy decisions and found that average citizens have "little or no independent influence" on policy outcomes.
Economic elites and organized interest groups drive policy.
You already knew this (it's covered in Unrepresentative Democracy).
The point here is that publishing better data doesn't fix the problem.
Your politicians already know which programs produce value.
They don't act because acting doesn't maximize getting votes, getting papers, or getting a nice job afterward selling access
to their replacements. This is the gap between Incentive Alignment Bonds (which solve the incentive problem) and the Evidence
Machine (which solves the knowledge problem). I.A.B.s make doing the right thing profitable.
But they need to know what the right thing IS. That requires a measurement system nobody can corrupt.
The Mechanism: Recommend, Track, Reward. The Evidence Machine does three things.
That's it. Three things. Your species has difficulty with three things, so I'll use small words.
(On Wishonia, we just call this the Optimitron. It's an appliance.
You plug in policies, it tells you which ones work.). Recommend.
The Optimitron has two settings. The Optimal Budget Generator answers "how much should you spend on what?"
The Optimal Policy Generator answers "which laws should you enact, replace, or repeal?"
Here's a sample of what the budget output looks like, applied to the United States: For pragmatic clinical trials, the current
budget is zero point five billion dollars, the optimal budget is fifty billion dollars, for a gap of plus forty-nine point
five billion dollars, based on evidence grade A from randomized controlled trials, or R.C.T.s.
For vaccinations, the current budget is eight billion dollars, the optimal budget is thirty-five billion dollars, for a
gap of plus twenty-seven billion dollars, based on evidence grade A from R.C.T.s.
For military discretionary spending, the current budget is eight hundred and fifty billion dollars, the optimal budget is
four hundred and fifty-nine billion dollars, for a gap of minus three hundred and ninety-one billion dollars, based on evidence
grade C from benchmarks. For agricultural subsidies, the current budget is twenty-five billion dollars, the optimal budget
is zero dollars, for a gap of minus twenty-five billion dollars, based on evidence grade A from welfare analysis.
You are spending one hundred times less than optimal on figuring out which medicines work, and paying farmers twenty-five
billion dollars a year to grow food nobody asked for. The Optimitron noticed.
It also noticed you could cut three hundred and ninety-one billion dollars from the murder budget and still have the largest
military on the planet. The policy generator then does the same thing law by law: enact this, repeal that, adjust the other
thing. Every recommendation traceable to what actually happened when another jurisdiction tried it.
No opinions. Just receipts. Track. When politicians vote, record whether they aligned with the evidence-based recommendation.
Senator Smith: seventy-eight percent aligned. Senator Jones: thirty-four percent aligned.
This information is public. Any citizen can check. On Wishonia, this is called "checking if the person you hired did the
thing you hired them to do." Your species finds this concept revolutionary, which tells you everything.
Politicians who ignore the evidence must do so on the record.
Reward. The Incentive Alignment Bond, or I.A.B.-funded SuperPAC allocates campaign support proportional to alignment scores.
Follow evidence, get funded. Ignore it, watch your opponent get funded.
Same mechanism the N.R.A. perfected, but pointed at "not dying" instead of "more guns."
This doesn't require government permission. The Evidence Machine operates as a permanent advisory layer outside government.
Politicians still vote however they want. They can still ignore the evidence; it just costs them money now, which on Earth
is apparently the only consequence that matters. The question isn't "will politicians give up power?"
(they won't) but "can we make ignoring good advice unprofitable?"
(yes; it's a fundraising challenge, not a revolution). Corruption, But Make It Difficult.
"But won't someone corrupt the measurement system?" Yes. This is the right question.
It's the only question that matters. Currently, your lobbying industry has thousands of capture points.
Committee earmarks, agency decisions, regulatory rulings, budget amendments, riders on unrelated bills.
Each one is cheap to influence. Your federal lobbyists spend four point four billion dollars per year with estimated one
hundred to one returns. Your democracy is a vending machine, and the buttons are labeled.
The Evidence Machine collapses all those capture points to a single target: the measurement methodology.
Here's the heist: simultaneously bribe the Census Bureau, the Federal Reserve, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, academic
institutions, AND decentralized citizen surveys. All without detection.
All at the same time. All institutions with different governance structures, different funding sources, different methodologies,
and different reasons to hate each other. This is not a corruption strategy.
This is the plot of a movie where the criminals lose. Here's how it works in practice.
Five independent sources measure median income growth: The Census Bureau American Community Survey reports plus two point
one percent. The Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances reports plus two point three percent.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey reports plus one point nine percent.
The University of Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics reports plus two point two percent.
The Tax Foundation I.R.S. data analysis reports plus two point zero percent.
Take the median: PLUS TWO POINT ONE PERCENT. If one source reports plus five point zero percent (because someone bribed
them), the median throws it out automatically. No investigation needed.
No whistleblower needed. No committee hearing. Math does the work.
(An honest caveat: these five sources share some underlying data, so they're not perfectly independent.
That's why there's a sixth source: decentralized citizen surveys, collected directly from millions of humans, sharing no
methodology with the others. One person lying has approximately zero effect on the median.
This is statistics, not voting.). Your species has spent centuries making corruption illegal.
It hasn't worked, because laws are enforced by the same humans who are being bribed.
On Wishonia, we tried something different: we made corruption impractical.
There's a difference between "you shouldn't steal" and "the vault has five locks held by five people who hate each other."
Your species tried door number one for three thousand years.
We recommend door number two. This is also why it's different from every previous attempt at technocratic governance.
Soviet central planning had one source of truth (the Politburo).
Credit rating agencies had one source of truth (the agency paid by the people being rated, which is like letting students
grade their own exams and then being surprised when everyone gets an A).
Both were captured immediately, because corrupting one institution is a Tuesday.
Corrupting five independent institutions simultaneously, without any of them noticing or telling anyone, is a conspiracy
theory. The expensive kind that doesn't work. Why not fifty metrics?
Because each additional target creates a new way to cheat, and your species needs no encouragement in that department.
Markets figured this out: firms optimize profit, not two hundred sub-metrics.
Two broad, hard-to-fake numbers are easier to audit than fifty narrow ones.
And these particular numbers are very hard to fake. You can't fabricate purchasing power at scale without actually improving
household economics. Mortality is binary (the most binary thing there is).
You can't fake everyone being "less dead.". "But correlation isn't causation!"
Yes. Thank you. Your species discovered this in the eighteen hundreds and has been using it as an excuse to ignore data
ever since. The Optimitron doesn't just check whether policies and outcomes happened in the same room.
It uses the fact that ten thousand jurisdictions adopted different policies at different times to isolate what actually
caused what. (The boring details: the technical specification scores every causal claim against nine criteria, and if the
timing is wrong, the score is automatically zero, no matter how pretty the correlation looks.).
Putting It Together. The full loop: one percent Treaty funds it, I.A.B.s align incentives, the Evidence Machine identifies
what works, and Wishocracy allocates the research funds. The Evidence Machine tells governments which policies work.
Wishocracy tells the research fund where to aim. On Wishonia, this is called "an obvious system."
On Earth, it required four chapters and a bibliography. And here's why the whole thing ratchets.
Each treaty expansion creates more I.A.B. funding, which funds more evidence collection, which strengthens the case for
further expansion. Evidence begets funding begets evidence.
It's the same self-reinforcing loop as the Military Industrial Complex, except instead of manufacturing orphans, it manufactures
data about how to stop manufacturing orphans. Now that you know how the Optimitron works (congratulations, on Wishonia this
is taught to children), the next chapter shows you how eight billion people allocate the research funds.
For the full technical specification, formal models, and threat analysis, see the Optimocracy academic paper.
For the gory details on how the recommendation engine decides you're spending too much on corn and too little on not dying:
the Optimal Budget Generator at O.B.G. dot war on disease dot org and the Optimal Policy Generator at O.P.G.
dot war on disease dot org.