Princeton University Press had just published a new paperback edition of my book, Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance Through Technology. It argues for using the tools given by our new computational technology to help democracy adapt to our accelerating rate of social change.
The basic insight of the book should be congenial to friends of the classical liberal tradition in political thought. It is to deploy decentralized mechanisms that modern technology makes possible to improve self-government. For instance, the internet greatly facilitates betting pools, called information or prediction markets, which permit people to bet on the occurrence of future events. Such markets already gauge election results more accurately than polls. If legalized and modestly subsidized, they could also foretell many policy results better than politicians or experts alone. We could then better predict the consequences of changes in educational policy on educational outcomes or a stimulus program on economic growth. In short, such markets would provide a visible hand to help guide policy results. Unfortunately, while such markets are a public good, our government now impedes them at every turn.
The internet today also encourages dispersed media like blogs to intensify confrontations about contending policy claims.
Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance Through Technology (John O. McGinnis)