Goals · 3

Managing trust

Goal: manage trust: who carries out what is wanted, and who gets which resources.

Draft. This article puts earlier texts of this site into the new order of goals and observations. It has not been reworked yet and awaits the author's review.

Voting and money each try to do two jobs at once. They are meant to find out what is wanted (see Finding out what we want: voting and consequence and Finding out what we want: money as a signal). At the same time they manage trust: who carries out what is wanted, and who gets how many resources. A vote chooses who decides; money decides who can act.

Secret voting and markets give influence without power. Secret voting hides people's circumstances and removes any direct consequence of their choice. The market pays for the past and is spread over countless hands, so it resists direct change. In both, each person has a little influence, and nobody has the power to change what is done.

We distrust people, yet build systems that trust blindly. We believe people can't be trusted, and then hand all decisions to a few, once every few years, without asking again.

Laws without consequence, or without understanding of the problem, do not work.

Ownership and sharing can exist side by side; trust decides which fits.

Open. Who is trusted to turn a society's values into action, and to say what the current problem is?

Open. If what is wanted were found out by voting, how would it reach the actions that money pays for after a payment? A note on it: money pays for actions, and most people can do actions, so the flow of money can be spread over many people.