1. I forget if I posted this idea. JAG (the armed forces lawyers) should have an administrative and strategic law honors program through national guard/reserves, modeled on the Justice Department Honors program (I think the SEC and some other federal agencies have them too) so that our President bound have a prestige incentive to achieve some domain competence regarding the military on their way to running for President. An Obama or Clinton that rose through the national guard to become a Lt. Col. on their way to running for President would likely be a more competent President than one that didn't because they didn't want to get bogged down doing low level, intellectually boring, and unprestigious legal work.
2. I like the idea, modeled on the medical scientist training program, of a public administrative scientist training program. I think it was Virchow that said politics is medicine on a larger scale. It would focus on JD, Ph.D., MPA's. Also, I like the idea of elite schools formulating a standard 6 year JD, Ph.D. (Experimental Economics or Sociology, or Social Science Statistics or Applied Mathematics), MPA. It would go 1st year of law school, 1st year of MPA school, the full Ph.D., followed by a final year of the JD and MPA electives.
3. I think the technocratic archetype of the legislator, administrator, or judge, elected or not, is the experimental social scientist. What experimental social science labs today are doing with test populations of a few dozen, legislators are doing with populations of millions or more: they're just not being as rigorous or transparent about it. It's ideology clouding technocracy here. Thus I'd like to see some high caliber experimental social scientists get more involved in government. You can't be a respected experimental social scientist (or an empiricist of any type) and not have strong quantitative analysis skills, probably the equivalent to a masters in applied mathematics: or at least I hope not. I think that will eventually be a requirement for respected lawyers and administrators too (I note approvingly I believe the recent head of England's top intelligence agency has a masters in statistics, and there was a time when it seemed like you had to have been a former MIT graduate student in physics to be taken seriously as a prime minister candidate for Israel). Eventually the enterprises of administration, legislation, and jurisprudence should be transformed into rigorous social science experiments, administrative and regulatory laws should look more like journal publications than a hybrid of rough drafts of committee brainstorming sessions and corporate press releases.
4. I think our line of succession can be improved upon. It's not that rational that the Speaker of the House is 3rd in line (they could be strongly lacking administrative experience or broad public confidence). Instead I could see 2 alternatives: (1) after VP, next in line is state governors, in order of populousness of states, (2) the president spells out and runs on his own personally chosen line of succession, the way he runs on his vice president selection. Both are more likely to yield a line of succession that has more public confience, but I like (1) better because it's probably our next best demonstrated person to step up to the role of President (someone who is governing a very populous state).
5. I recall former Harvard President Rudenstine's paper supporting race based affirmative action. I think he was a mythmaker just like Steve Sailor or Charles Murray, but he was a more guilded one. I really want to get deep into the way racial myths have extraordinary power, and help demonstrates how the shaman still dominates even in our more technocratic society, when I get a chance. The effective weilder of racial mythology has a power over Americans not that different from how a tribal shaman could use a "magic" that the tribes members, and shared culture rival tribes could be psychologically susceptible enough to fall ill or die from that "magic". I'd like to deconstruct it and understand it -in part because I think that while it's great for the shamans, it's a net negative externality on us socially. People should be spending their time innovating solutions to our existential risk, not innovating racial mythology "magic spells" to secure status over each other and the rest of us.
Recent Comments