> but I have a feeling we're already off-the-rails

Hey Daniel, sorry, I wasn’t trying to seem too annoyed/aggressive. I understand that you’re a well meaning guy, and your blog is just a platform for throwing ideas around, etc.

In general, though, as you say, design principles (and gripes about how flawed all the people in the society who disagree about this or that) are a dime a dozen. This kind of glib “I’ve worked in a variety of social organizations and so the people working on things in some entirely different set of social organizations that I’m not actively engaged in must be doing it wrong, and here’s how they should organize things the way I like to” is a very natural impulse, and probably can’t be helped. I’ve heard arguments from the same direction from construction workers, teachers, businessmen, career civil servants, bankers, etc.

At the same time, statements like yours – at least the way the tone came across to me – seem presumptuous. In particular “tech guys are the philosophers of the modern world” (paraphrased, you seem to have removed the sentence) is awfully dismissive of several hundred years of professional political theorists. Sweeping statements like “You can't form a governmental system based on altruism” are so oversimplified that they either involve a tricky bait-and-switch with a hedge built into the “based on” part, or else are just wrong. Altruism is a large and essential component of the functioning of any human society or institution. Of course, there are other motivations and interactions to consider as well.

Anyway, I think we can agree on: citizens should study history, should learn the theoretical underpinnings of their governments, should consider the consequences of specific institutional design, and should engage in the political process.

As for the legacy we leave future generations: I absolutely agree we should aim to leave the society better in the future than it is today. As a state we should restructure the tax system to redirect resources from locked-down corporate holdings and inheritances (taxing wealth in preference to income, at least relative to today) toward long-term public infrastructure; should hopefully in the construction process encourage young people to become civil engineers &c.; should radically cut wasteful military adventurism and should directly employ people to do military support jobs rather than overspending on poorly overseen private military contractors; should probably bring back some kind of compulsory public service both to get public advantage from young healthy enthusiastic people and to make sure our whole society is actually invested in military actions; should treat municipal/state bonds as investments and should use them for projects with long-term benefits rather than just routine governmental functions, which instead should be paid for with taxes; should even more heavily subsidize basic scientific research, especially in energy; should stop so heavily subsidizing fossil fuels; should work to promote industries which produce real things rather than those designed to skim off the top of financial transactions and should re-regulate the latter to prevent their current abuses; should work to reorganize the healthcare system to improve preventative care and better prioritize expenditures; should work to improve public education, in particular by respecting and paying teachers enough that smart ambitious young people will want to make a career of it, instead of trying to break teachers unions and turn teaching into a high-turnover unskilled job; should work to reduce the current massive underemployment (for one thing, by imprisoning fewer poor brown people on minor drug charges), so that huge amounts of manpower don’t go to waste; should adjust our immigration policies to make the US a more welcoming place, both to attract highly skilled ambitious people, and to respect the humanity and dignity of the people we import to do unskilled labor; etc.

Sadly, social reform of any kind is really really hard. Actually doing it requires sustained engagement and a lot of energy. A whole lot of folks are trying really hard to work at each of these issues. As programmers, there are great extra ways to help them – above and beyond just engaging and organizing and lobbying – by building communications and data analysis tools, for instance.