Welcome to my page. My name is Jennifer. Talk to me here or check out my contribs :-)
An Introduction edit
I've been involved with wikipedia for longer than I had this account but I got quite excited about a political possibility in the U.S. in 2006 and started this account so that those edits would all be coherently trackable by peer reviewers and so on. My enthusiasm has considerably waned but the account name remains.
In terms of political ideas that I think are both politically feasible and consequentailly good I'd put election reform at the top. Specifically I advocate Ranked Pairs Polling and the Comparison of Pairs of Outcomes by the Single Transferable Vote (which can be implemented to accomplish a Proportional representation version of Ranked Pairs) as the best way to tranform the underlying disfunctional dynamics of a variety of political processes. More generally I think it would much less embarassing for the U.S. if our political system satisfied some basic international voting standards... To this end I'm in favor of things like:
- Demonstrably secure, uniform balloting procedures (and machines).
- Legislating "the right to vote" as an inalienable human right.
- Non-partisan civil-service-based federal election oversight (currently it's controlled state-by-state by partisan officials, elected or appointed).
More generally (though I see no near term solution to this problem), I think modern democractic institutions significantly fail to govern countries well because they're heir to the free rider problem - everyeone benefits from it but there's no way to require people to help the government run well. I don't think most people even understand why this is bad and how it could be different so I suspect it will not change for the next 30 years or so. All I do on this issue is try to educate people about it and what I see as a potential solution:
I'd prefer to see government significantly privatized along the lines of Futarchy where voters expressed outcome preferences over "standards public indexes". The implementation details for "how to run the country to accomplish good things" would be decided by futures markets over the various indexes that make up the preference statements. If a governing proposal is predicted by the futures markets to sataisfies the voters preferences better than the status quo, it becomes law and is implemented. The Futarchy proposal doesn't include this extra bit... but I'd leave the generation of implementation proposals up to private parties, with financial compensation flowing to them as a precentage of the "measured marginal improvement of governance" that their proposal (if selected by the futures market) actually produces.
For myself, my preferences would look something like this:
- I want high global GDP.
- I want a high rate of entrepeneurship (that is, I think small businesses are an intrinsic good for the people involved in them, even if they aren't as economically efficient as larger older companies).
- I want a thriving and beautful global ecology.
- I want low levels of violence (war, crime, terrorism, etc... by my country or other entities).
- I want high "median citizen serotonin levels" (a stable physiological proxy for happiness).
- I want little use of mind altering drugs (indicating most people are happy with themselves and their environment and that the previous index can't be hacked by government medication programs).
- I want polls that report 'confidence in the direction of the country' (a good "catch-all" preference).
- I want high scores on internationally maintained "freedom indices".
Other Places I Have A JenniferForUnity Account edit
A plug for the Unity Wiki edit
This is related to the political thing I thought might be radically open to helping improve the governance of the country. I'm not so certain it's still a good idea, but I'm leaving the content here for now...
The Unity Movement is, roughly, the group of USians interested in Unity08. The big gripe is that politicians seem to be happier stroking America's factional identities with policies that recognize (or diss) various christian/queer/racial groups in ways that can't help but anger significant numbers of people. There are only so many "politician hours" in a year so these divisive issues inevitably take attention away from (1) a ballooning national debt and expanding government, (2) dying oceans (coral and fish stocks are collapsing), and (3) a looming energy shortage that's unprecedented in the history of human civilization. Basically, the US government seems to simply be failing to govern.
Some of our big values are Pragmatism, Civility, Inclusion, Compromise, and Transparency... but what really distinguishes us from "other political wikis" is that we're scheming up a net based political revolution in 2008 with an online presidential convention and alliances with professional politicians. If this sounds like something you'd be into, I'd really appreciate it if you would check out The Unity Wiki. There's a sister Unity Supporters Web Forum but here at Wikipedia what I'm really hoping to find are wiki people committed to a better world and willing to help edit a wiki to that end.
The Unity Movement is still small but shooting for exponential growth... early adopters are crucial and we really need you.
(The following people (other than me) have edited the Unity08 article and might be espcially interested in this: Jersey Devil, Sludge, Rehpotsirhc, Nat Krause, Wknight94, Daneanderson, Jtalledo, Grumpyyoungman01, Mineralè, Onemanbandbjm, and Appraiser.)