Principal-Agent Problems and the Structure of Governance — LessWrong
This post on Best Of A Great Lot is a part of a series on the subject of designing a new form of governance. Each piece aims to stand alone, but fits together on the Table of Contents. Updates: This is the last in the prework section of articles about problems and difficulties, after this will come the core system descriptions. -b Every system fails. Some failures can be thought of as a tradeoff between consistency and flexibility, while others are unexpected features we discover once the system is widely used. Corporations hire armies of lawyers to think deeply about tax law, looking for loopholes. Political consultants examine election law for similar reasons. When lawyers find loopholes that aren't good for the citizenry at large, it's supposed to be government's job to change the law. But when the loophole or flaw isn't in the law, but in the structure of the government itself, fixing it becomes a much more interesting and difficult question. With the Constitution, the founders of