BBC news article asks for proposals for better forms of government

A recent BBC news article asks for new ideas for "open government":

A DIY guide to becoming an MP and a database of the connections between the powerful could soon be created online. The two ideas are among those being considered by MySociety - a charitable group that helps construct civic tools.
It is looking for ideas for new ideas to enhance its existing sites, entirely new projects or ways to spread the word about the digital democracy group. Previous competitions have produced a site that automated and logged Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.
Statistics from the Ministry of Justice suggest that the FOI site, WhatDoTheyKnow, is behind 8.5% of the requests received by central government departments. MySociety also set up the WriteToThem website that helps people get in touch with their MP.
Similar requests for proposals were run in 2003 and 2006 and this time, said MySociety founder Tom Steinberg, it was looking for one big idea to develop. "The next step will be on a different scale from what we have built before," said Mr Steinberg, "something that might have an order of magnitude more impact or more users."

I think that someone should submit decision markets AKA futarchy as an idea. Decision markets are an idea from the economist Robin Hanson:

Democracy seems better than autocracy (i.e., kings and dictators), but it still has problems. There are today vast differences in wealth among nations, and we can not attribute most of these differences to either natural resources or human abilities. Instead, much of the difference seems to be that the poor nations (many of which are democracies) are those that more often adopted dumb policies, policies which hurt most everyone in the nation. And even rich nations frequently adopt such policies.
These policies are not just dumb in retrospect; typically there were people who understood a lot about such policies and who had good reasons to disapprove of them beforehand. It seems hard to imagine such policies being adopted nearly as often if everyone knew what such "experts" knew about their consequences. Thus familiar forms of government seem to frequently fail by ignoring the advice of relevant experts (i.e., people who know relevant things).


"Futarchy" is an as yet untried form of government intended to address such problems. In futarchy, democracy would continue to say what we want, but betting markets would now say how to get it. That is, elected representatives would formally define and manage an after-the-fact measurement of national welfare, while market speculators would say which policies they expect to raise national welfare. The basic rule of government would be:

When a betting market clearly estimates that a proposed policy would increase expected national welfare, that proposal becomes law

.

Getting a fundamentally new form of government that is in a different league to democracy working would drastically improve our lives - if succesful. For transhumanists, getting futarchy or something like it working ought to be a very high priority, because better decisionmaking will naturally favor Transhumanist technologies like life-extension, mind uploadin and safe superintelligence. This is an area where I think a small group can have a massive impact if, and only if, they play their cards right.