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Unrepresentative Democracy Your government spends six hundred and four times more on weapons than on testing which medicines

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work. You could elect five hundred and thirty-five Gandhis and within two years they'd be funding nuclear weapons programs,

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because the system requires it. Princeton studied one thousand, seven hundred and seventy-nine of your policy decisions

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and found that public opinion has the same effect on legislation as a houseplant.

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This chapter explains why you can't vote your way out, and why that's actually fine, because the solution was never better

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politicians. Correlation between public opinion and policy outcomes: zero percent.

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On Wishonia, decisions are made by whoever has the best evidence.

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On Earth, decisions are made by whoever has the most papers to give the people who survive a popularity contest held every

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four years among people who were too busy to research the contestants.

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You call this "democracy," which is Greek for "rule by the people," in the same way that "waterboarding" is about water.

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Your chance of deciding a presidential election is one in sixty million.

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You are more likely to die driving to the polls. The expected value of your vote: zero point zero zero zero three three

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eight dollars. The cost of casting it (time, transportation, parking, standing in line behind a man arguing about his I.D.,

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a woman who brought her dog, and a voting machine manufactured by a company that donates to one of the candidates): about

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fifty dollars. You lose money voting. This is called "civic duty," which means "a financial loss you perform in formal clothing.".

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Corporations spend four point four billion dollars annually on lobbying.

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Their math works fine. What Democracy Looks Like From Space.

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Princeton University analyzed one thousand seven hundred and seventy-nine policy decisions over twenty years.

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The correlation between what ordinary voters want and what actually becomes law: zero percent.

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Not "low." Not "disappointing." Zero. Your democracy correlates with your preferences the way a coin flip correlates with

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your breakfast. When economic elites want something, it happens seventy-eight percent of the time.

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When you want something, it happens thirty percent of the time, regardless of whether zero percent or one hundred percent

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of you want it. The line is flat. A graph of your political influence looks like an E.K.G.

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of a dead person. You have the same political influence as your houseplant.

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Less, actually. Your houseplant produces oxygen, which at least one congressman needs.

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Your institutions already know this. You have a "Department of Defense" that mainly attacks people.

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A "Department of Health" that has not yet produced any observable health.

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And a "Department of Justice" that... well. You named your planet dirt.

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Naming is not your strength. The Mathematics of Why Nobody Fixes Anything.

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Concentrated Benefits vs. Diffuse Costs. Sugar subsidies cost Americans three point five billion dollars per year.

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That's ten dollars per person. Will you take a day off work, drive to your capitol, and stand in a hallway to save ten dollars?

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No. Will sugar companies spend millions to keep their three point five billion dollars?

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Obviously. That's it. That is the entire explanation for why your government does what it does.

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One paragraph. Everything else in this chapter is details. The details are where the crime hides.

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On Wishonia, we call this "beige crime": theft so boring that nobody investigates it.

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Your best criminals discovered long ago that the boredom threshold of the average citizen is approximately ten dollars.

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Steal more than that from one person and they'll complain. Steal ten dollars from three hundred and thirty million people

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and you'll receive an industry award. The pattern repeats everywhere, like wallpaper in a prison: Pharma receives five hundred

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billion dollars in profits (concentrated), patients pay one thousand five hundred dollars each (diffuse), and the winner

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is pharma (obviously). Banks in two thousand and eight received a seven hundred billion dollar bailout (concentrated), taxpayers

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paid two thousand one hundred dollars each (diffuse), and the winner is banks (obviously).

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Sugar receives three point five billion dollars in subsidies (concentrated), you pay ten dollars (not worth a phone call),

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and the winner is sugar (obviously). The small group hires lobbyists.

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You hire nobody. This is called "representative democracy," which represents you in the same way a casino represents financial

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planning. The Death Spiral: How Two Choices Kill three hundred and thirty million Options.

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A human named James Surowiecki proved that crowds outperform experts under four conditions: diversity of opinion, independence

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of judgment, decentralization, and a good aggregation mechanism.

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On Wishonia, we learned this by watching fish. Your political scientists spent two hundred years and several revolutions

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to reach the same conclusion. The fish were faster. Your democracy has three of these conditions.

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It systematically destroys the most important one. A human named Charles Mackay described the result in eighteen forty-one:

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the wisdom of crowds becomes the madness of crowds. He was ignored, obviously.

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Independence means each person decides based on their own knowledge, not by watching everyone else.

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Your voting system annihilates this. You have three hundred and thirty million people.

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You choose between two of them, pre-selected by a process optimized for fundraising, name recognition, and not offending

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people who vote in primaries (which is approximately nine people per state, seven of whom are angry).

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Then you don't even vote for the one you like. You vote against the one you fear.

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This is called "strategic voting," which means your ballot doesn't measure what you want.

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It measures what you think other people will do. That is not independence.

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That is a herd. On Wishonia, we observed this same phenomenon in army ants.

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Army ants are nearly blind. They navigate by following pheromone trails laid by the ants ahead of them.

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When a foraging column gets separated from the main trail, the leading ants have nothing to follow, so they wander.

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But they're still laying pheromone as they walk. If the front of the column curves enough to cross its own trail, the leaders

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pick up that signal and follow it. The circle closes. Every ant is now both following and reinforcing the path that traps

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it. They march in a loop, sometimes hundreds of thousands strong, until they die of exhaustion.

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No individual ant is stupid. Each is following a perfectly rational rule: follow the strongest signal.

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The system is stupid. The circle emerges not from bad ants but from a structure where no ant can navigate independently.

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Your two-party system is a death spiral with bumper stickers.

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Pollsters tell you who's "electable." Media covers the two "real" candidates.

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Donors fund the two "viable" options. You vote for one of them because everyone else is voting for one of them because everyone

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else is voting for one of them. The best candidate out of three hundred and thirty million people could be standing right

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there, but if they're not wearing the right color tie, they're "throwing their vote away" (a phrase that only makes sense

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in a system designed to waste votes). The result: a nation of three hundred and thirty million, selecting from a talent

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pool of three hundred and thirty million, reliably produces a choice between two people that approximately nobody is enthusiastic

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about. On Wishonia, this would be classified as a math error.

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On Earth, it is classified as "freedom." Each ant follows the one ahead.

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The leader follows the last. They march in a circle until they die.

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Your two-party system works the same way, but the circle takes four years.

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(Clemzouzou sixty-nine, C.C. B.Y. S.A. four point zero). How Money Buys Your Government On most planets, giving someone

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papers so they'll do what you want is called "bribery." On Earth, it's called "campaign finance."

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The distinction matters, but not in the way you think. Campaign contributions don't directly buy how politicians vote.

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Only one in four studies even support that. The system is much more elegant than direct bribery.

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What money actually buys is which politicians exist in the first place: Ninety-five percent of House races since two thousand

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and four were won by whoever had more papers. The average winning House campaign costs two point seven nine million dollars

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(less than a nice apartment in Manhattan, and arguably less useful).

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The average winning Senate campaign costs twenty-six point five three million dollars (a senator costs more, presumably

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because there are fewer of them, like truffles). Why bribe a politician when you can manufacture one who already agrees

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with you? On Wishonia, we had a saying: "why train the dog when you can buy a dog that already sits?".

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For the ones already sitting, papers buy something more useful than votes: Access: Your call gets returned.

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Everyone else gets voicemail. (Voicemail is where democracy goes to die.).

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Agenda control: Your issue gets a hearing. Everyone else's gets a filing cabinet.

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Legislative language: The exact wording that creates the exact loopholes you need.

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Committee positions: Four hundred and fifty thousand dollars to party committees buys a seat where bills live or die.

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You don't buy the vote. You buy the voter, the agenda, and the room where the vote happens.

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Then the vote takes care of itself. This is like rigging a horse race by buying the horse, the jockey, the track, and the

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concept of racing. The Lobbying Return on Investment, or R.O.I.: Better Than Every Other Investment The most profitable

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investment on your planet is not stocks, real estate, or cryptocurrency.

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It's congressmen: Disease advocacy groups give one hundred million dollars in papers to lobbyists.

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They receive one point eight billion dollars in papers from the government.

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This represents a return of eighteen to one (one thousand seven hundred percent net).

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Your stock market returns about ten percent per year. Your congressmen return seventeen hundred percent.

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This is not a metaphor. These are the actual numbers. If your stockbroker offered you seventeen hundred percent, you'd call

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the police. When your congressman offers it, you call it "advocacy."

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The only reason more people don't invest in congressmen is that the minimum buy-in requires a trade association, which requires

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being rich (which is the entire point). The eighteen-to-one return means your disease funding is allocated by lobbying power,

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not by who's dying. Diseases with celebrity spokespeople and well-funded advocacy groups get research budgets.

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Diseases that kill quietly, in populations too poor or too young to organize, get nothing.

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If your disease can't hire a lobbying firm, it isn't a real disease.

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It's just dying, which doesn't have a PAC. Your Congressman: A Professional Fundraiser Who Occasionally Dabbles in Legislation.

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I studied how your elected representatives spend their time.

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I assumed they spent it representing. I was incorrect. How congressmen spend a ten-hour workday: They spend four to five

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hours calling rich people for papers. Committee hearings, floor votes, and meetings take four hours.

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Reading the laws they're about to vote on gets whatever's left (roughly one hour).

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The laws that need reading require six hours' worth of time.

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That last part is important. The one hundred and tenth Congress dealt with seven thousand, four hundred and forty-one bills

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totaling one hundred and twenty-five thousand pages. The House was in session two hundred and ninety-four days.

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That is four hundred and twenty-five pages per working day.

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At normal human reading speed, that takes six hours. They have one.

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They would need to read at six times normal speed. On Wishonia, we have a word for creatures that process information six

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times faster than their biology allows. The word is "lying."

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They do not read what they vote on. But it gets worse (on Earth, it always gets worse): they often do not write what they

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vote on, either. In twenty thirteen, the House passed a bill to weaken financial regulations.

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Of its eighty-five lines, seventy were written by Citigroup lobbyists.

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Two paragraphs were copied word for word; the only change was making two words plural.

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The bank wrote a law to deregulate itself, handed it to Congress, and Congress passed it.

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This is like letting the burglar write the building codes. (On your planet, this actually happened.

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I keep having to clarify this.). Over eight years, at least ten thousand bills copied from corporate templates were introduced

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in state legislatures. More than twenty-one hundred became law.

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Corporations draft the language, hand it to legislators, and legislators hit paste.

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On Wishonia, we have a word for a system where the person holding the stamp provides no function except the stamp.

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The word is "rubber." On Earth, the word is "representative."

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The Patriot Act: three hundred and forty-two pages, voted on forty-five minutes after release.

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That is seven point six pages per minute. The Affordable Care Act: two thousand seven hundred pages, described by the Speaker

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of the House as something "we have to pass to see what's in it".

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On Wishonia, if you approved a two thousand seven hundred-page document without reading it, you would not be allowed to

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operate heavy machinery. On Earth, these people operate nuclear weapons.

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(And they didn't read the manual for those either, presumably.).

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Congressional Committees: The Menu. Committees control which bills live or die.

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Both parties assign fundraising quotas for each seat: raise this many papers for the party, or lose your assignment.

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Don't hit your number? Your bills die, your amendments vanish, and your name goes on a literal "wall of shame".

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(This is real. I checked twice.). Here is the menu. It has prices, like a restaurant, except the food is legislation, the

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waiters had to buy their own sections, and the kitchen is run by whoever tips the most.

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The House Speaker must raise thirty-one million dollars for Democrats or twenty million dollars for Republicans, and in

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exchange controls the entire legislative agenda. A chair on Ways and Means or Appropriations costs one point eight million

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dollars and buys control over all tax law or the one point seven trillion dollar federal budget.

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Energy and Commerce, which controls healthcare, energy, and telecom, costs the same.

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A regular committee seat runs five hundred thousand to a million dollars.

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Even the basic entry fee for a freshly elected member is one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which is rent on a building

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you were elected to enter. This is why congressmen spend four hours a day fundraising.

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They're not campaigning. They're paying rent. The people writing your healthcare laws bought their positions from the industries

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those laws regulate. On your planet, this is called "the system working.".

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On Wishonia, this is called "the system.". Public Choice Theory (Or: The Nobel Prize for Cynicism).

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In nineteen eighty-six, a human named James Buchanan won what is technically not a Nobel Prize (see central banks chapter)

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in Economics for formally proving something that every organism on every planet already knew: HUMANS DO NOT BECOME BETTER

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HUMANS WHEN YOU GIVE THEM A GOVERNMENT I.D. BADGE. This is Public Choice Theory.

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Bureaucrats, politicians, and regulators are exactly as selfish as everyone else.

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The only difference is that when a corporation is greedy, you can stop buying its product.

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When a government agency is greedy, it can arrest you for not buying its product.

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(This is called "regulation," which means "mandatory purchase.").

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What Each Institution Actually Optimizes For. On Wishonia, we noticed a pattern: any organism that controls its own food

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supply eventually optimizes for feeding itself. The surprise is not that your institutions do this.

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The surprise is that you keep expecting them not to. Nobody in this system is incentivized to cure disease or end war.

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You could elect five hundred and thirty-five clones of your most idealistic human and within two years they'd be collecting

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papers from pharmaceutical companies, because the system requires it and the system does not care who you put inside it.

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It digests idealists the way a stomach digests food. The Misdiagnosis.

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Every political faction on your planet has diagnosed the same problem and prescribed a different wrong solution: I attended

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three of your political meetings. At the first, they said the government was too big.

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At the second, they said the government was too small. At the third, they said the government was exactly the right size

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but full of the wrong species. I left with the third group.

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They had better snacks, and also they were correct. The third group is called "Public Choice Theory."

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Their solution: design systems where selfish behavior accidentally produces good outcomes.

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On Wishonia, we went with this option four thousand, two hundred and ninety-seven years ago.

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It took us twelve minutes to agree. You've been arguing about the first two for several centuries.

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This is called "political philosophy," which is the art of being wrong about the same thing in increasingly sophisticated

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ways. Regulatory Capture: How the Burglar Trained the Guard Dog.

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You hired a guard dog. Someone fed it treats. Now it guards them.

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There are thirteen thousand, seven hundred registered lobbyists in Washington.

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"Lobbying" literally means standing in a lobby. Your corporations spend billions of papers a year paying people to stand

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in hallways. On Wishonia, people who stand in hallways are called "lost."

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On Earth, they're called "the most powerful people in your government."

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Half of them used to work in the government they're now lobbying, which on your planet is called "a career path" and on

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Wishonia is called "defecting." Corporations spend four point four billion dollars a year on this professional persuading.

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Divide that by five hundred and thirty-five members of Congress and you get over eight million dollars in professional persuasion

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surrounding each congressman, who earns less than a mid-level dentist.

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The mystery is not that they're influenced. The mystery is that any of them aren't.

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A court ruling called Citizens United made corporations "people" who can spend unlimited papers on elections through Super

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PACs (which are like normal PACs but super). Unlike you, a corporation cannot be imprisoned, embarrassed, or given cancer.

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It has all your rights and none of your problems. This is a good deal if you can get it.

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(You can't. You're a person.). Pharmaceutical companies write their own regulations.

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The Medicare Modernization Act banned the government from negotiating drug prices.

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This is why insulin that costs six dollars to make costs you three hundred dollars.

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A four thousand nine hundred percent markup. I checked with your illegal drug dealers, and even they find this excessive.

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The Self-Sustaining War Machine. The military-industrial complex distributes operations across forty-two states so that

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cutting any program threatens jobs in enough districts to make it politically impossible.

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Cutting a weapons program doesn't just lose a contract. It loses votes in forty-two states simultaneously.

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This is not an accident. Someone designed this. (Someone good at design, wasted on murder.).

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But the remarkable part is not that the war industry lobbies for budgets.

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It's that the war industry produces the threats that justify the budgets.

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I had to read this three times because I assumed I was misunderstanding your language: Step zero: Have no enemies.

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Step one: Build military bases abroad. Step two: Locals resist the foreign military bases (as you would).

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Step three: Resistance becomes terrorism. Step four: Terrorism justifies military budgets.

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Step five: Military budgets fund more bases abroad. Step six: Go to step one (forever).

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Robert Pape at the University of Chicago found that ninety-five percent of suicide terrorist attacks from nineteen eighty

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to two thousand and three were driven by foreign military occupation, not ideology.

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Half the attackers were atheists and Marxists who couldn't have found Mecca on a map.

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Your eight trillion dollar War on Terror took terrorist attacks from roughly one thousand per year to nearly seventeen thousand

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by twenty fourteen. You spent eight trillion dollars to increase the problem by one thousand six hundred percent.

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On Wishonia, this is called "watering the fire with gasoline."

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On Earth, this is called "defense policy.". Most industries merely buy favorable rules.

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The defense industry manufactures the emergencies that make the rules seem necessary.

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The Pentagon has never passed an audit. It cannot tell you where the last trillion dollars went.

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It is, however, very confident about needing the next one. Pharma employs three lobbyists for every member of Congress.

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The F.D.A. gets seventy-five percent of its drug review budget from the companies it regulates.

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That is like funding the police department with donations from the criminals.

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For a detailed examination of what this produces, see F.D.A.: Unsafe and Ineffective.

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The Ratchet. The ratchet only turns one way. After World War Two, the U.S.

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cut military spending by eighty-seven point six percent in two years.

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G.M. went from building bombers back to building Cadillacs.

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The economy boomed. It was the greatest period of broad-based prosperity in your country's history, and it happened immediately

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after you stopped spending papers on killing people. The military-industrial complex made sure that never happened again.

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In inflation-adjusted dollars, peacetime spending is now thirty point six times the pre-World War Two baseline: twenty-nine

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billion dollars in nineteen thirty-nine versus eight hundred and eighty-six billion dollars today, in constant dollars,

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with no world war to justify it. The tumor grew its own blood supply and then reclassified the growth as vital organs.

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The Equilibrium. Everything is working exactly as designed: Cures are a one-time payment.

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Treatments are recurring revenue. They fund treatments. Approving a bad drug ends careers.

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Delaying a good one ends lives, but not careers. They delay drugs.

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Everyone who decides things is winning. Everyone who's dying is not deciding things.

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The winners keep deciding. The system works perfectly. It is just optimized for the wrong species.

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On Wishonia, we noticed the same pattern six thousand years ago.

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The solution was not to elect better people. (We tried. They got eaten by the system in about twelve minutes.) The solution

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was to build a different system. The Solution They Don't Want You to Have.

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Lobbying is just one gear. The full cost of political dysfunction (military overspend, healthcare administration, regulatory

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friction, tax complexity, corporate welfare, and the rest) totals four point nine trillion dollars per year, or seventeen

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percent of G.D.P. A forensic audit identifies two point forty-five trillion dollars in recoverable papers per year if U.S.

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governance merely matched the average rich country. You don't need a revolution.

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You need a reallocation. Revolutions require guns. Reallocations require spreadsheets.

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You are surprisingly bad at both. But nobody fights to recover it.

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Same pattern as this entire chapter: each corporation gains one hundred million dollars (worth hiring a thousand lobbyists).

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Each citizen loses thousands (not worth a phone call). The losses are too spread out to organize around.

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The gains are too concentrated to give up. But what if curing disease was more profitable than treating it?

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What if peace paid better than war? What if you could point the same corruption machine at something useful?

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That's what a one percent treaty does. It redirects the papers.

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But redirecting papers into a system run by the same committees and lobbyists just creates a new pile for the same parasites

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to feed on. You need two more things. Incentive Alignment Bonds turn the bribery machine against itself.

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Politicians who vote for the treaty get reelection papers and cushy post-office careers.

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Politicians who vote against it watch that same money go to their opponents.

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You don't fight the corruption. You outbid it. Same machine.

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Same greed. Different output. Wishocracy replaces the committees that lobbyists capture.

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Instead of five hundred and thirty-five congressmen deciding which diseases get funded (based on who bought them dinner),

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eight billion people make pairwise comparisons, and an algorithm allocates the budget.

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No committee chairs. No fundraising quotas. No lobbyist can bribe eight billion random voters, and the only way to try is

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to offer them something they actually want (which is the system working correctly, for once).

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The plan is to give the bribers more money than the other bribers are giving them, and then replace the thing they were

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bribing with an equation. On Wishonia, this took twelve minutes.

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On Earth, it will probably take longer, because you will want to argue about it first.