This is the FIFTH essay in a series.
The first part of this essay, "The Problem", recapitulates a lot of the introductory material in the first four essays. I hope that, by reading the first four essays, this material does not strike you as being completely "out of the blue". The first details of my proposal appear in the second part, "The Soution".
The next essay, which may not be published tomorrow, in order to give people time to digest and comment on this major essay, will discuss more details of inter-legislative interactions.
Distributed Government Part 1 - Legislature
PART ONE: THE PROBLEM
1. The Need for a Political "Division of Labor"
Whereas it is perfectly acceptable, if not mandatory, for skilled workmen or engineers or scientists to say "that area is outside my expertise", voters in America's 21st century democracy never acknowledge any limits upon their right to an opinion - no matter how uninformed, not to mention manipulated, it might be. We have accepted the "division of labor" in our economics, but we seem to have banned it from our politics.
America desperately needs a "division of labor" among both voters and legislatures, in order to rescue our moribund form of democracy from, respectively, the paralyzing cognitive overload that has marginalized individuals, and the hijacking of our under-manned legislatures by corporate lobbyists. Division of labor does not mean logging onto ten political websites or blogs and tossing in your (usually uninformed) two cents worth about the hot topic of the last five minutes.
2. Democracy 1.0 Does Not Scale
The decline of democracy in America (call it "Democracy 1.0") over the last fifty years has come about due to technology and to the increased societal complexity and huge (by historical standards) populations made possible by technology.
Democracy 1.0 posits that each citizen is supposedly capable of informing himself on all important issues. But, everyone knows this is nonsense, so we pretend that today's politicians "represent" us as faithfully as an 18th century Member of Parliament represented the handful of nobles who ran his borough. In reality, today's politicians are a "homunculus" - a little man inside our democracy's brain that does the thinking and tells us what the answer is. Once a representative democracy has been reduced to homuncular behavior by media conglomeration, issue bundling (cf. Sec 4.1 below), and by the drastic increase in complexity required to manage a mixed, global economy, it is only a matter of time before that homunculus will be captured by the most powerful elements of the society. This is exactly what has happened in the U.S.
The situation is not completely a matter of corruption, although there is certainly an immense amount of that present. The capture of homuncular representatives by corporate lobbyists arises from an inadequate organization of governmental information processing. Since the structure of checks and balances, committees, party discipline, etc. was codified over two hundred years ago, it is not surprising that it is inadequate to the 21st century situation.
In fact, as the size of a Congressional district has grown to almost a million voters and campaign costs have risen into the tens of millions, citizens have been effectively disenfranchised - because their representatives respond only to the legalized bribery of campaign contributions. The frustration caused by this disenfranchisement makes voters easy targets for anti-democratic ballot initiatives. Each day, fewer Americans understand that "one vote, once" is not democracy - even with the Patriot Act and the Iraq War Resolution as radioactively-glowing examples of this mistake.
Today- in an era of 500-page Congressional omnibus bills and 10,000 page tax codes, with 80,000 lobbyists dispensing hundreds of millions of dollars of PAC money, and a billion dollars of attack ads run every election year - the conventional narrative of Democracy 1.0 is a complete fantasy.
The recognition of this fantasy, experienced as incompetent or corrupt government, is a legitimate and profoundly moving personal experience. However, the energy from this experience has been hijacked by a massive propaganda campaign to bring back the Middle Ages in all its Inquisitorial squalor. This campaign has conned those voters less inclined to critical thinking into rejecting rationality and complexity in government. Some people have seen through the fantasy and have been strong enough to resist the anti-Enlightenment jihad roaring through our country. They have a more realistic understanding of how our country is run by this homunculus - a narrow elite of media gatekeepers and corporate placemen. That understanding recognizes our government for what it is: one lobbyist, one vote.
3. Recognizing the Problem is the Beginning of the Solution
"...a representative for every thirty thousand inhabitants will render the latter both a safe and competent guardian of the interests which will be confided to it."
....James Madison, The Federalist Papers, Number 56.
"The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand, but each state shall have at least one Representative."
........The Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 2
The American version of "Democracy 1.0" was created after thorough historical research by some of the best political minds of the Enlightenment, unencumbered by the need to kowtow to an established aristocracy. The Federalist Papers lay out the thinking behind the Constitution, while the Constitution itself is as compact and to the point as a piece of computer code. Both documents agree on the need to get the size of the district of representation correct. Too small and it can be taken over by some cabal; too big and it becomes nothing more than an emotion-driven mob.
This fundamental rule of district size was never brought into law, due to political maneuvering at the very beginning of our country. The politicians who killed this law knew full well what they were doing; but the typical voter did not see the scaling problem or, more likely, did not know how to deal with it. So they let it continue, like a person slowly gaining weight. Unfortunately, our democracy is now morbidly obese and about to expire. So, we require some drastic surgery in order to survive.
This essay is hardly the first to point to the "30k problem". All sides of the rational political spectrum have identified it, and have proposed to enlarge our assembly. (One website that is a good introduction to the problem is: http://www.thirty-thousand.org And there is where the thinking stops, because enlarging the assembly was known to be unworkable already by the Founders.
"In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates; every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob."
....James Madison, The Federalist Papers, Number 55.
None of these rational political actors, to my knowledge, seems to have considered restructuring our legislative branch! We see various "hacks" being considered to restore fair representation, such as the proposal that large states voluntarily break themselves into several smaller ones in order to equalize the representation in the Senate. None of these proposals disturbs the status quo. Everyone seems to hold the arbitrary form of a bicameral legislative branch to be untouchable, sacred. The main point of this particular essay is to give an example of how the legislative branch of the national government could be reorganized to facilitate a political division of labor that can revive genuine representative democracy.
4. A Large Number of Representatives is not a Technical Issue. It is an Organizational Issue.
A quick calculation shows we currently would need ( ~215 M eligible voters / 30,000 voters per representative = ) ~7,200 representatives to meet the requirement in the Constitution. Of course, if these were organized as a single legislative body, we would have mob chaos. But, look at Congress today. There are on the order of 20,000 Congressional staff members - the people who really do the committee and sub-committee work. The Congress is a slow-moving bureaucratic machine, not a chaotic mob. There is organization, and it succeeds in producing legislation. The fact that this legislation serves only corporate interests does not negate the fact that Congress works for the people who control it.
Part of the reason corporations control Congress is that most voters do not have direct access to the critical, but obscure, Congressional staff who do the real bureaucratic work. Corporations, on the other hand, have a revolving door deal with the Congress; and all the staff members are anxious to please their real constituents, who just happen to be their future employers. (Talk about conflict of interest!) Meanwhile, the interface presented to the voter is the horrible, pseudo-celebrity "bundle" of the candidate. If, instead, the voters could interface directly to the staff, the ratio would be ~10,000 voters per staff member! Plus, the limited responsibilities of the individual staff members would make it clear who was responsible for what, and avoid the shell game of "politics is the art of compromise" that is often used to dodge voter pressure. And, most importantly, these political footsoldiers would no longer be obscure staff members, but would now be representatives accountable to voters - long before they are ready to exit via the revolving door.
4.1 Candidate Bundling and Gerrymandering Obscure Genuine National Issues
Rearranging the voter interface exposes a critical fact: most national issues have nothing to do with a particular state or district - excepting "pork", which is the graft that prevents people from seeing this critical fact. Most people care more about their issues than they care about the personality of some candidate (i.e., a self-aggrandizing hairdo spewed from the endless pipeline of the political polling and consultancy industry, or some millionaire who wants to play government with the taxpayers' money). But, the current American system of voting for national politicians on a local and bundled basis frustrates issue-oriented voters; and it is issues that drive politics. No wonder that voter cynicism is at an all-time high.
4.1.1 The downside of winner-take-all voting
On top of candidate bundling, the United States is saddled with a "winner-take-all" voting system, which is much less representative than the "proportional representation" systems used at the national level in other first-world democracies. Winner-take-all systems are well-known to be wide open to gerrymandering, which has been taken to new lows by Tom Delay and the GOP during the Bush administration. Together, candidate bundling and winner-take-all gerrymandering reduce national politics to two parties that cater to their extremes and win at the gerrymandered margins. It is often repeated that, due to the gerrymander, less than 10% of Congressional seats are seriously likely to change hands in any election.
Representatives in gerrymandered districts are sheltered from small (and often, large) changes in voter sentiment. Often, the party that has been gerrymandered "out" puts up a sacrificial candidate or no candidate at all. This contributes strongly to the feeling that "my vote doesn't count" and to the dismal voter turnout statistics in America. It causes voters to over-focus on presidential candidates, where the gerrymander is reduced (but not eliminated - the Electoral College is still a gerrymander that over-represents small states). This mis-focus reduces voter vigilance to various kinds of "stealth" candidates at the Congressional level.
4.1.2 The downside of candidate bundling
Bundling many issues into one candidate allows legislators, once elected, to sandbag one or more individual issues on key votes, and bury this betrayal in an overall "good" voting record. In fact, this scripted farce is now so sophisticated that legislators take turns pretending to "buck" their party on votes that are sure things, in order to show their "independence" and "character". This is job security by loyalty obscurity. It is because of bundling that the idea of solving the 30k problem by increasing the number of legislators seems like pouring gasoline on the fire. It would make sell-outs on important votes so easy to hide that all semblance of representation would vanish.
The candidate bundle implicitly includes a large staff (~20,000 staff / ~500 reps = ~40 staff/rep). This immediately raises the candidate to a position of authority vis-a-vis the voter. How many voters are in charge of a staff of forty? This implicit authority gives voters the social cue "not to disturb" the important personage with their petty concerns. That is, it sets up a master/servant dynamic in exactly the opposite direction of the truth: the candidate should defer to the voters, not the other way around. Furthermore, the only reason the candidate needs this huge staff is because so many issues have been bundled onto his plate that he can't possibly be expert in all of them; instead, he manages a staff of experts. Talk about circular justification! Representative as office manager was not what the writers of the Constitution experienced or expected.
Bundling also contributes to cognitive overload in voters. With the vaporization of meaningful party platforms (and, courtesy of Joe Lieberman, the vaporization of meaningful party affiliation), voters are asked to calculate, for each candidate, the relative importance of all issues. For example, I would like to vote for candidate X's strong stance in favor of a balanced budget; but he will vote for concealed handguns. At some point, the time and mental resources needed to become expert on multiple issues exceeds those available to the voter and he becomes some flavor of "single-issue" voter. Candidate bundling, then, inserts the roundly condemned process of "logrolling" (i.e., trading off totally unrelated issues) into the legislative process long before the legislature has even convened.
The current, totally arbitrary system of Congressional committee assignments adds even more counterproductive bundling to the candidate's personal baggage. Over time, legislators accumulate seniority (i.e., power and influence) on committees, to which they were at first arbitrarily assigned when they had no seniority. This randomly acquired seniority adds more irrelevant dimensions to the voter's problem of choosing a candidate.
To summarize, candidate bundling is an idiotic sort of marketplace where a few entitled guys sell all kinds of products, instead of a rational marketplace where a lot of people specialize in selling only products they know. In this idiots' marketplace, all these different goods are jumbled in the same heap and can only be extracted with a lot of haggling and "help" from the representative (a.k.a., middleman). Whereas in the rational marketplace, the goods are easy to find and negotiations are straightforward because the goods are separated by type and the negotiations are unbundled and direct, i.e., buyer-to-seller (voter-to-elected-official).
(Technical aside: From a complexity theory point of view, bundling increases the dimensionality of the choice problem; and it is well-known that the solutions to high-dimensional problems are often inferior "local minima". In fact, many complexity theorists argue that even the global minima of high-dimensional problems are inferior, and that the only way to proceed is to reduce the dimensionality of the problem by "decoupling" the dimensions. This solution is actually taught in business schools under the name of "patching".)
PART TWO: THE SOLUTION
5. Solving the 30k Problem by Specializing
As mentioned above, in spite of candidate bundling, most voters wind up choosing based on only one, or a few, issues. In fact, this behavior makes a lot of sense. It is exactly how corporations behave. Each company has issues important to it. That company's or industry's lobbyists are only interested in legislation that bears on those issues. So, the telephone companies don't care about mineral rights on Federal lands, and the mining companies don't care about long-distance competition. The corporations are reducing the dimensionality of their problem. Collectively, they solve the multi-dimensional optimization problem of getting the Congress to maximize the sum of corporate satisfaction by "patching" their lobbying efforts according to industry issues, and, by focussing those efforts on the relevant Congressional staffers.
Currently, it is impossible for individual voters to play this game. But, single-issue voters have created corporate-like lobbying efforts in the form of "interest groups", such as the Environmental Defense Fund, or the Christian Coalition, or Americans for Tax Justice. That is, voters who are really committed to a cause and paying attention to how to get things done in politics are already "patching".
But, if corporations and interest groups (i.e., the bulk of political movers and shakers) are already circumventing the high-dimensionality caused by candidate bundling and gerrymandering, why don't we just be honest and get rid of these two impediments to fair representation? Why? Because the status quo does not want fair representation. Its clear to any thinking person that corporations are getting what they want from the system. (They are literally writing the laws these days.) They have no incentive to change the system. It falls to us, the disenfranchised, unrepresented voters to bootstrap a new system that can eventually displace or tame the "failed state" that is Corporate Democracy 1.0.
6. The Internet and the Dis-intermediation of Politics
"Due to deep changes in technology, demographics, business, the economy, and the world, we are entering a new age where people participate in the economy government like never before. This new participation has reached a tipping point where new forms of mass collaboration are changing how goods and services laws and regulations are invented, produced, marketed, and distributed on a global basis...
....Most people were confined to relatively limited economic political roles, whether as passive consumers of mass-produced products candidates or employees civil servants trapped deep within organizational bureaucracies where the boss told them what to do...In all, too many people were bypassed in the circulation of knowledge, power, and capital, and thus participated at the economy's government's margin."
....D. Tapscott, A. Williams, "Wikinomics - How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything" ....(strikeouts mine!)
So far, this essay has been providing background and motivation. Finally, we have come to the proposal itself. Six years ago, few would have seen the urgency in this proposal. But, six years ago, the Bush administration, and its rubber stamps in Congress and the courts, had not thoroughly trashed almost every aspect of our Constitution. So, people weren't ready to face up to the fact that we needed to create a new one.
But today, we have seen that the Internet provided the only means of organizing political opposition, and of disseminating the honest news needed to run a real democracy, in the face of corporate-dominated media and a spineless Democratic Party. We have seen the power of the Internet to combine individual contributions to provide national-level funding (e.g., $50 M for Howard Dean in a few months.) In short, we have seen the power of the Net to "dis-intermediate" (a big, important, 'Wired magazine' word) the conventional political middlemen. And, those middlemen are now terrified.
So, point number one is that the Internet can easily support 7,000 or 70,000 forums for electing individual staff-level legislators, provided only that the resulting legislatures (plural is very important) are properly organized. I will come back to how to organize multiple legislatures later. How the reorganized legislatures relate to the Executive Branch will be considered in a separate essay, later.
7. Elected Bureaucracy: Specialized Voters Elect Specialized(staff-less) Legislators
NOTE: Just as in 1920, when we changed the law from appointing Senators to electing Senators, we can do the same for legislative staff. No big deal, Constitutionally.
Having decided to implement direct election of Congressional staff, we must confront the issue of how to organize such a large legislature. This issue has, to date, blocked any consideration of a larger number of elected officials.
The solution to the problem is to turn the "limited rationality" of voters into part of the solution, instead of part of the problem. We need to get voters to agree to formally limit their voting rights to a few, self-chosen specialized topics. At the same time, we redefine the meaning of "representative" to allow direct election of Congressional staff-level representatives who are, likewise, limited to legislating only on specialized topics. That is, we elect what has hitherto been "the unelected bureacrats". The price for this is that we, the electorate, are ourselves forced to specialize. (Note: I am grateful to the blogger "redeye" for taking my earlier proposal seriously enough to invent the term "elected bureaucracy".)
"Wait", you will probably say. "I am giving up my right to vote on all those other issues! I am being disenfranchised." But if you have read this essay from the beginning, you must admit that we are already disenfranchised. So what are we losing? In today's complex era, the right to vote on every issue is a monkey trap. Besides, many voters today are already single-issue voters. Very few track as many as five issues seriously. Why not formalize the information-overload situation that is the de facto reality? Why not acknowledge that everything-to-everything connectivity doesn't work as a model of neural information processing? Information overload wasn't even a concept three hundred years ago, when Democracy 1.0 was being booted.
What we need to make this work is that these various specializations can be connected together into a coherent governmental information processing algorithm. That is, we need a new theory of government based on 21st century knowledge of self-organizing learning systems, just as the 17th century system of checks and balances was based on the best philosophical knowledge of that day.
8. A Numerically Imprecise Outline of Specialized Legislatures
Political scientists and social psychologists recognize that groups larger than a few hundred people are unwieldy. Therefore, we need to divide our roughly 10,000 legislators into groups of about 100 people. This gives us about one hundred specialized legislatures.
These specializations are to be continually adapted on a multi-year basis, sort of like the census. (A good place to start is the existing Congressional sub-committee specializations.) Voters sign up to vote in, somewhere between three and ten specializations only. Then, we need to reorganize the elections so that (at least at the lowest level of legislatures) Congress-men specialize in one of the specializations. (The rough numbers for all of this are in the Appendix below.) Specialized citizens vote for specialized Congressmen, just like the corporations do today. Citizens could change their specializations whenever there is an election. So could Congressmen. But both would lose some seniority if they did so.
There will probably need to be some mechanics to prevent everyone from specializing in the currently hot topic. (Although, there are enough military/intelligence/veterans and budget sub-committees that it might not be an issue.) Overall, it makes sense if a trucker specializes in transportation legislation, and a telecommunications engineer specializes in telecommunications legislation. This problem could be solved by a seniority and quota system for voters - something akin to the seniority system for committee appointments in Congress. Each voter submits a rank-ordered list of requests. Software randomly picks among the all lists, in decreasing order of rank and voter "seniority". Also, the hot topics problem may decrease as people realize they have more relative influence in less-popular groups. Some may opt for enfranchisement above relevance, just as some scientists work on obscure but safe topics rather than get involved in the high-risk, high-reward hot topics like cancer research.
It is most important to emphasize that the representative assemblies (i.e., legislatures) of these specializations would be voted for on the national level.This kind of voting, with a 5% or 10% cutoff to get a representative, is quite common in all advanced country democracies except the US. It is called proportional representation (PR). Of course, it will be trivial to object to PR on the grounds that it "destroys community". However, since life in nomadic, cocooned, heavily suburbanized America has long since destroyed community, this is a moot point. People would probably welcome the opportunity to connect with like minded people - wherever they are located.
PR works something like the brain, which suppresses low-amplitude signals, but allows medium amplitude signals to co-exist and cross-stimulate. Each specialization would get its own formally moderated, internet bulletin board. Legislation would be required by law to be displayed for all to see for a certain amount of time prior to Congressional debate and voting. This period allows specialized citizens to organize and have their say via the same network, perhaps even actually voting. The time allocated to accomplish work is a critical factor in closing feedback loops effectively. It will be discussed at length in a later essay.
Notice that Democracy 2.0 is not a simple-minded electronic townhall, or the digitization of the current dysfunctional bureaucracy. Those two models are (based on my limited googling) the only concepts of "e-government" that people have. Probably because corporations don't want citizens to realize that any idea that e-commerce can use, e-government can too. It is historically surprising that, over the last thirty years, corporate activism has out-organized political activism, with horrible results for our democracy. (Of course, corporations have never had as much money to spend and as many politically manipulative tools on which to spend it as in the last thirty years.) The good news is that we can cherry-pick proven ideas out of what corporations have already done, the same way the radical right has "re-purposed" the entire 1960s "government is the enemy" rhetoric of the radical left.
Democracy 2.0 is not a mindless, unfocussed, feels-good-to-get-that-off-my-chest gripe session. The participants are all specialists. There is a formalism or algorithm. Information is displayed and acted upon in some kind of set of bulletin boards, where it may also be cross-posted to related bulletin boards.
8.1 The Benefits of Specialization
Specialization cures the arbitrary bundling of political issues, because a representative's area of power is clearly circumscribed. It also eliminates arbitrary committee assignments because representatives choose which legislature to run for themselves.
Notice that I said the specialized representatives are voted for nationally. This makes perfect sense. The federal government is concerned with abstract matters of regulation. The issues of how to arrange the details of your locality should be handled in local legislatures, just as with the states and cities today.
Another good feature of national, proportional representation is that it is much harder to intimidate or silence a distributed, nationwide constituency either, by moving factories out of the state or cutting off government pork. Proportional representation also gives activists a place of un-challengable legitimacy to meet and communicate.
To return power closer to the citizen, we need to decentralize as much as possible; but, destroying federal oversight without destroying multinational corporate power would result in local corporate feudalism. So, can we decentralize without disarming? Today, nationwide mass media destroys the intermediate layers of calculation necessary for citizens not to be cut out of the governmental process, while corporations destroy the small businesses and communities that used to be the environmental niches for citizen activism. That is, while corporations have implemented there own version of political disintermediation, the current situation for citizens is effective disenfranchisment, not disintermediation.
8.1.1 Specialized Legislatures
Specialized legislatures, elected by national proportional representation and mediated via the Internet, would begin the process of decentralization. Suppose we have one hundred specialized legislatures. There are fifty states (not a bad number from an organizational point of view; but not cast in concrete); so the national government could convene two physical legislatures in each state. If done sensibly, the legislature for an industry or an issue would be placed in a part of the country most impacted by that industry or problem. For example, you might put the specialized legislature for "mining & environment" in Denver; while you might put "urban development" in New York City. This immediately gives many more people the opportunity to physically interact with their representatives. It puts the representatives out in the real world, instead of inside the beltway. It breaks up the giant Viking longboat that K Street has become for lobbying raids on the Treasury.
Creating large numbers of specialized legislators can prevent corporate control simply because the cost of lobbying fifty times the number of representatives and funding fifty times as many campaigns at the current level would bankrupt them. That is, there would be one hundred different sets of very specific issues (one for each legislature) in an election cycle. The simple-minded, one-size-fits-all "mom, apple pie, and minister" versus "atheist, vegetarian, child- molester" campaign ads would need to be re-worked for each legislature, at great expense and with dubious effectiveness. What difference does it really make if a man is for gay marriage if his legislative authority is limited to mining issues?
9. CLOSING THOUGHTS
I tried to focus this essay on the single concept of specialization. That is, the idea that we need to create a large number of different pieces making up a more complicated, but more effective form of government. This is Smithian "division of labor" in the political world. The next essay will describe exactly how these legislatures connect together and relate to the other branches of government. Separation of Powers was a far-sighted concept that is still at the heart of a sustainable democracy. It must be restored. Just because I did not have time to mention the other branches does not mean I intend to ignore them. The same is true for local governments.
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APPENDIX: A NUMEROLOGY OF SPECIALIZATION
In order to give any quantitative insight into how specialization might be feasible, it is necessary to give a preview of the organization of specialized legislatures. That organization will be motivated in detail in the next essay. For now, I will not be addressing these details, other than to expose them.
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It is a historical fact that the British administered India with very few men, organized into a very flat hierarchy of no more than three levels. Neuroscience so far can only roughly trace the wiring diagram of the brain, but it also tells us that cells inside any given cortical region are organized into a flat hierarchy, and that there is massive communication between brain regions via white matter.
Since the vision system is the most studied, it will be used as an example. Basically, the brain areas for vision form a feedforward hierarchy. The lower parts of the hierarchy do the simple analysis - this is a line, that is a circle. The next level up creates objects, and separates figure from ground - it produces what the Gestalt psychologists understood seventy years ago. Higher than that, and you get object tracking. At each level, the spatial resolution goes down and the level of abstraction goes up.
What is newly understood is that this is not just a feedforward hierarchy. It is also a feedback hierarchy. For example, have you ever looked at a trick picture or an optical illusion? You can focus your attention and force your brain to see the image in a completely different way. Basically, the higher levels are laying down a template and telling the lower levels: connect these lines, ignore that feature, this goes in front of that. When all the levels are in equilibrium, we have a stable picture of the world. This is the science that drives the model proposed below.
A.1 Sizing the hierarchy
Let's examine the current "levels" of governmental information processing. If we sum up the number of Representatives, Senators, and Cabinet Officers, we have: 435 + 100 + 15 = 550. They are divided into levels as follows:
........435/550 = 79.0% are Representatives (Level 0 for my purposes)
........100/550 = 18.2% are Senators (Level 1)
..........15/550 = 2.7% are Cabinet Officers (Level 2)
This is roughly a "power of four" pyramid, a data structure quite common in image processing, and other computer disciplines.
Suppose I have 10 cabinet deparments and two layers of four-fold pyramidal legislatures under each department. If each legislature has 100 members, then the total number of legislatures is: 160 + 40 + 10 = 210 legislatures; and the total number of legislators is: 210 x 100 = 21,000. The distribution of the levels of this rationally designed pyramid are:
........16,000/21,000 = 76% sub-committe staff (Level 0)
..........4,000/21,000 = 19% committee staff (Level 1)
..........1,000/21,000 = 4.76% cabinet level staff (Level 2)
Notice that 21,000 is roughly the current number of Congressional staff, and that the current and proposed staff levels are within a few percentage points of each other, across the board!
Notice that the 40 Level 1 legislatures corresponds roughly to the 20 + 17 = 37 current committees of the House and Senate. But also note that the House and Senate committees are largely duplicate in function .
Notice that the 160 Level 0 legislatures corresponds roughly to the 96 + 71 = 167 sub-committees of the House and Senate, again with massive duplication.
The number of 21,000 total elected officials needs to be explained. In the essay, we estimated
........ ~210 M eligible voters / 30,000 voters per representative = ~7,000 representatives
So, the numbers here give each voter one vote in each of THREE specialized legislatures. That is, there are 100 open seats in each legislature. Each voter gets to cast each vote for one particular candidate in one of his three chosen specialties. Because of the 'seniority' system described in the essay, there are 30,000 votes cast for each of 100 seats, or 3 million votes cast per legislature. We have 210 legislatures, so 630 million votes are cast. This is 3 x 210 million eligible voters. The numbers add up correctly.
Whereas each citizen gets to vote only in a few specialized legislatures, he does get to cast a vote for more cabinet members than legislators. For example, if he gets to cast three legislative votes, he might get to cast five cabinet member votes. Once again, including cabinet members in the vote is another dis-intermediation - another victory for open government. Today, a lot of Cabinet Secretaries are nothing but the incompetent and venal political or ideological cronies of the elected President.
A.2 The implications of electing cabinet officers
Generating a reasonable "flat hierarchy" that does not pyramid all the way up to a single executive officer has led us to elect cabinet officials. This will definitely create situations that have historically not existed in the U.S. However, these kinds of situations are an everyday occurrence in parliamentary democracies; they are called "forming a coalition.
We have ten independently elected Cabinet Secretaries. At this level, Democracy 2.0 proposes that those Secretaries should play by parliamentary rules and "form a government" by electing one of their number the actual and true "president". When a coalition is formed and a president selected, he resigns his cabinet position and appoints his successor. Then he occupies the office of President.
Only, he is more like prime minister. The highest level of the legislature (i.e., the 1,000 Level 2 representatives) would have "votes of confidence" so that presidents that are awful can be removed immediately. Yet, the people doing the removing are elected. The cabinet secretaries and legislators would have removal by impeachment and/or censure, just like the U.S. today.
If a lowest level legislature concerns itself with one task, like a subcommittee today, a second level legislature would coordinate tasks of related subcommittees, and work out the division of budget allocations between them. A top level legislature is doing the executive work of a cabinet department. It is setting policy, etc.
Based on the brain hierarchy, it can be deduced that lower level legislatures do more of the scut work. Most importantly, they compute the budget. One of the things neuroscientists say about the lowest level of the hierarchy is that, because it has the highest spatial resolution, it is the "blackboard" that all the hierarchy uses to write down and expand the entire comprehension. In Democracy 2.0, the budget resolution process gets done only at Level 0. The placement of this important function at the lowest level provides the budgetary "blackboard" that binds together all the other legislative functions. So, Democracy 2.0 doesn't have a hierarchy just to avoid unicamerality. It has a hierarchy to divide complex tasks into simpler ones - to unbundle and to dis-intermediate.
There are rules about being elected to these hierarchical legislatures. Except at startup of this Constitutional government, you can't jump in from nowhere and become cabinet secretary. First you have to be elected to a Level 0 (bottom) legislature for X terms. Then you have to be elected to Level 1 legislature, etc. This means no more dilletantes, celebrities, and rich boys running for president on a whim. They gotta work their way up, like everyone else.
A.2.1 The relationship of legislatures
We have talked about intra-legislature hierarchies, but what about inter-legislature communication. Today, when new legislation is introduced, unelected staff of the Congress, called "parliamentarians" decide to which committee or committees a bill is referred. There is a long history of precedent that the parliamentarians must obey in deciding upon referrals. Bills can be sent to multiple committees, either in serial or in parallel. All this is at the discretion of these powerful unelected officials, but they are bound by very strong precedents.
As a result of a long history, committees obtain long-standing jurisdictions over certain parts of the law, and have long-standing correspondences with other committees. These interactions form the basis for a different kind of system of checks and balances.
Complexity theory teaches that, to contain complexity, the dimensionality of bundles should be kept to roughly three. More than this can be accommodated, but only if the extra dimensions have nothing more than veto power.
The idea, to be fleshed out in the next essay, is for the network of legislative interactions to be formalized into a network. The inputs to a given legislature from networked legislatures form checks and balances upon its interests.
A.3 What is left for the Executive Branch?
What rights and duties does the President have vis-a-vis the elected cabinet secretaries?
To use a neuroscience term, the President directs the "spotlight of consciousness". There are several options for how to do that:
........1) He might be given power to introduce legislation in Level 2 legislatures?
........2) Cabinet secs might need to get his permission to introduce legislation?
At this point, Democracy 2.0 is mostly concerned with reviving a decayed Legislative Branch, and repelling the over-reach of the Executive Branch and corporations. Historically, dictatorial executives have caused much more trouble than weak executives. The United States has a strong executive. Gerrymandering and candidate bundling must be removed to restore control to the citizenry. It is inevitable that new structures must be set up to contain the power of the Executive and to keep him accountable to the citizenry.
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NOTES:
Technical groups tend to have only a few thousand people per specialty. Even large technical groups like chemists break down into forty "division", each with sub-specialties. You can gather all the experts in the world on a specialized topic in an auditorium that seats two thousand people.