Choosing Studios or Policy Plus 2022 Books
your Saturday roundup
I enjoyed my time off reading, cooking and hanging with family. I hope you had some time to rest at year end.
Professionally, I focus on creating social benefit startups. In my Saturday morning emails I share what I’m learning and thinking. Topics range from better living and parenting to business and philosophy.
Choosing a Venture Studio. Steve Blank, godfather of Lean Startup, endorses venture studios for many founders in a Harvard Business Review piece. At Purpose Built we published a blog post on why it pays to work with a venture studio. The post includes a Monte Carlo model built on Guesstimate that lets you build your own scenario.
Notable Books of 2022. I got a few requests for year end book recommendations. The evergreen list from Venture Patterns includes my founder book recommendations. Here are books that stood out from my 2022 reading:
How to Live - personal philosophy
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - novel
Ideaflow - creativity in business and as skill
Beginners Guide to to the End - practical guide to end of life
End of the World is Just the Beginning - future forecasting
How Minds Change - nonfiction on techniques
Wilmington Lie - US history
The Networked State - a proposal for what comes next after the nation state
Wolf at the Door - a proposal for Federal policy that is good politics
The Next Civil War - scenarios for how a new American civil could war plays out
Better Forms of Democracy? In the US we focus on transparent representative government. But should we always have both?
Not Representative. Greek democracy had random lots for selection of political officials. You don’t have to go that far to bring citizens into government. According to the book The Good Ancestor, many countries are implementing citizen councils. Think of it like a jury with a random group of citizens brought together to deliberate about a particular topic. They have access to information and expertise. And given time to discuss without partisan pressures. More academic info on deliberative democracy here. Or listen to a related story about random lot elections from Malcom Gladwell.
Not Transparent. What if the secret to Congress passing effective laws is less attention? It provides space to make political bargains. “The core of the Secret Congress theory is that on highly salient issues, lawmaking is dominated by the question of which party controls which chambers and by how slim their majorities are. Under these circumstances, polarization is high and compromise is rare. Congress is prone to gridlock, and when solutions pass, they pass on a near party line.”
Until next week,
Miles
Good points! I think rank choice is great. n-districts is intriguing although I have studied it less.
Random lots has some appeal. Buckley said it well as regards our elites: “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.”
For what it's worth (not much!), rather than reduce transparency I prefer solutions that strike at the heart of polarization. Rank choice voting has some appeal, though I am sympathetic to those who argue that it may be too confusing. A simpler method that I particularly like for choosing representatives would involve merging n-districts and then electing the top n. This should (for a relatively low value of n) lead to reduced polarization and a better representation of the true breakdown of the voting population. Of course n cannot get too large or we sacrifice the benefit of local representation (i.e. it becomes more like a state-wide election).