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The Challenge

Not all questions of governance can be resolved by mutually-acceptable agreement. There are hard choices to be made that require unavoidable winner/loser decisions. This challenge examines ways of improving political processes so that they are better able to make decisions based on generally-acceptable principles of fairness and sensible use of reliable technical assessments. While there are many possibilities, the goal is to promote systems that deliver on democracy's ideals of a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people." Problems that need to be overcome include:

• Conflicts of Interest – Obvious problems, that must somehow be prevented, arise when people charged with making a decision on behalf of the larger society have a personal stake in that decision which leads them to act in ways that favor their narrow, selfish interests over the larger, community interest. The extreme version of this is tyrany, when one leader, or a small group of people surrounding that leader make dictatorial decisions that benefit only them, at the cost of everyone else. But even well-established democracies suffer from this problem to a lesser degree as decision making authority gives people power, and the temptation to use that power to one's own benefit and others' detriment is always strong.
• Veto Group Syndrome – In general, it is much easier to block adoption of a new initiative than it is to secure adoption of a new idea. While proposals for change should be evaluated carefully and cautiously, effective mechanisms are needed to assure that proposals for change get the kind of fair hearing that is required if society is to successfully adapt to changing circumstances.
• Turf Battles -- Far too much governance is focused on the political maneuvering required to maintain and strengthen one's political position and far too little is devoted to figuring out how best to make decisions that serve the larger interest. Effective mechanisms are needed to diminish the importance of such turf battles, in democracies, as well as non-democratic systems of governance.
• The Dismal Theorem of Political Science -- One of the big challenges facing systems of governance is matching the skills required to reach positions of responsibility with the skills required once in those positions. The common failure to do this in democracies is what Kenneth Boulding called the dismal theorem of political science. He asserted that the skills that it takes to get elected (ability to communicate well, simplify problems, and propose appealing (but not necessarily feasible or effective solutions) and otherwise propogandizing the public are very different from the skills needed to effectively govern, which requires the careful assessment of data and competing interests and values, and the ability to weigh such complex and often contradictory information to come up with good decisions.