zlacker

I think the fundamental problem with the current political systems is that they combine two completely different things into one office that should really be separate. Namely what a politician promises to achieve and how they intent to achieve it.

This can cause the actual result of policies to be wildly different from the claimed intended outcome. We’ve seen plenty of examples of this in the past, e.g. claim that you want to make sure everyone will be better off by lowering taxes for the rich (trickle down economics), which of course had the exact opposite effect.

This can be completely malicious, i.e. claim that your proposed policy will have outcome X while knowing it will have outcome Y. It can also be due to flawed ideology, i.e. your policy is based on your idea how the world should work instead of how it actually does work. Or it can be sheer incompetence.

What I would like to see is a system where the goal and the method of achieving it are separated from each other: a democratic technocracy. In this system politicians would only set the intended outcomes, and their relative priorities (in cases where policies would affect different intended outcomes in opposite directions). Then, government workers would decide the policies that would result in the desired outcomes (based on science, evidence based methods, etc.) They would be normal unelected workers subject to performance reviews (did their policies result in the intended outcome) and positions should be completely merit-based.

That way politicians have to be honest about what they want to achieve, people have a clearer idea what they are actually voting for and there is a system in place that will try to achieve those outcomes based on what actually works.