Seeking Unbiased Game Host
Alex Tabarrok recently proposed:
A game show, So You Think You Can Be President? … [with] at least three segments.
Coase it Out: Presidential candidates have 12 hours to get a bitterly divorcing couple to divide their assets in a mutually agreeable manner. …
Game Theory: Candidates compete in a game of Diplomacy. I would also include several ringers …
Spot the Fraud: … candidates are provided with an economic scenario (mortgage defaults are up, hedge funds are crashing, liquidity is tight). Three experts propose plans. The candidate must choose one of the plans. After the candidate chooses, the true identities of the "experts" are revealed. One is a trucker, another a scuba diver instructor and the last a distinguished economist.
I fear the public would not respect candidates willing to play such a game; it might tarnish their presidential image. Worse, I fear our society is too polarized to choose a neutral host to run such a game. Hosting such games would require many detailed judgment calls, calls which a secretly-partisan host could use to favor one side or the other.
If a politically partisan group proposed a particular host, the other sides would suspect that group of being secretly partisan toward the group who proposed it. So the host would have to be proposed by a major respected non-partisan group – but who could that be? And even if the host started out non-partisan, partisans would lobby it any way they could, and it would be very hard for it to remain non-partisan.
This raises the question: what groups in our society are trusted to be non-partisan, and would we trust them to remain so if they had such a position of power? What would it take for a group to create a believable long-term reputation for being strictly non-partisan, even under very high stakes? If a group could achieve this, would we make use of it?
Alas the economics profession is not such a group. While we can be reasonably objective when the stakes are low, we seem to sell out to the highest bidder when the stakes rise, such as in legal testimony.
Added: In general it seems reliably non-partisan and unbiased advisors could help us in many ways, such as to resolve family and business disputes. But in fact we make little use of such advisors. Is this because they are so rare, or because we really don’t want unbiased advice?
As for the person who described the League of Women Voters being as unbiased, you may be confusing their tax status as a non-partisan group, with a commitment to avoid taking sides on political issues. They certainly do give active support to their chosen political causes, and those causes are decidedly leftist.
While they don't go out of their way to advertise themselves as a lobbying groub, they're fairly open about their politics, as seen in the section below, from http://findarticles.com/p/a...
After studying and debating issues, the League develops consensus positions which we then actively work to support through grass-roots lobbying."
Barbara Stuhler, a 50-year LWV member and author of a forthcoming documentary on the League to be published next year, is candid about it: "People associated with more-conservative groups or causes will not be comfortable in the League of Women Voters. As with any organization, you are going to find like-minded people, people with like-minded attitudes concerning the appropriate role of government in society."
Whatever the reasons, the partisanship of the LWV is so established that the best example then-president Becky Cain could come up with in 1996 when asked whether the LWV had ever "boosted a GOP policy" was that they backed President Nixon's establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA -- 30 years ago!
This problem can be restated as a special case of Yudkowksy's Coherent Extrapolated Volition. Essentially, you want a system that will:1. Allow voters to judge candidates who are smarter and more powerful then they themselves are, with the hope of:2. Identifying those who will act in the combined interests of the voters as a whole, (whatever that means), so that:3. The chosen canidate can be given immense power, with the hope that the previous condition will still hold.
Good luck with that.