Starship Troopers and Contributor Voting Systems
When we contemplate contributor voting systems, we often think of weighted systems based on financial input—like the way a stock works: The more money a person puts into an organization, the more voting power they have. But . . . discussing such systems from said perspective would be boring, so let’s use a “fun” example: The Terran Federation from Starship Troopers.
In the fictional world of Starship Troopers, a world government exists, and while it is a democracy, it grants an equal vote to each contributor rather than to each stakeholder. While contributors have an equal vote, not all stakeholders do.
What does that mean, functionally? It means the only people who can vote are individuals who make a voluntary and significant sacrifice to the state. If you have only seen the movie,[[1]](#_ftn1) you may assume that this entails military service and would thus be restrictive, but in the book this is specifically addressed by allowing individuals to perform other kinds of equivalent public service (with the law specifically stating that a form of service must be available to every citizen regardless of physical or mental ability).
We regard this approach as being far superior to most nations’ instinctive stakeholder-based approaches. As is stated in the book, “Nothing of value is free.” The government of the Terran Federation was created under the philosophy that people will not value a vote that they did not win at significant personal cost. (Though we do think this system has a critical flaw, which we will discuss in the next chapter.)
It is difficult to find a more optimal adjustment when designing a governing system than restricting voting rights to contributors, yet contributor-based voting is virtually nonexistent these days. Why? Because in early democracies, this restriction was used to reinforce racial, gender-based, and class-based discrimination.
For example, voting in many areas has historically been restricted to only white, male landowners. Even when voting was presumably democratized, it was still covertly restricted by racist policies executed through barriers like “intelligence” tests designed to differentially prevent black populations from voting. It is vote restriction systems like these that leave a bad taste in leaders’ mouths but … frankly, this is to the detriment of the exploration of better voting systems.
Concerns about the hazards of contribution-based voting qualifications are not unfounded. Filtering systems can be used to consolidate power by any ideology currently in control of a government. When tests determine who can vote, the body writing/designing those tests can determine which party wins. Still, let’s not throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Low-risk systems can be created so long as additional voting requirements are made clear up front and are difficult to adjust.
We will use our own family foundation structure as an example of how voting rights adjustments can be used to create a family office structure that avoids many of the pitfalls of traditional family offices. (Note: We explore our family office model in more detail later in the book. Here we are just looking at voting rights restrictions.)
Our family office is run on a triumvirate model, with three individuals representing three different groups (whose votes are gained by different contributory criteria). The triumvirate elects a fourth individual, the Executor, to manage the office’s day-to-day operations.
- The Investor: Family office members electing the Investor representative get votes based on the amount of money they put back into the family office (similar to how an individual could own more voting shares of a public company). The person elected with these votes helps to ensure that part of the vote for the Executor is tied both to a societal measure of competence (one’s ability to acquire wealth) and genuine sacrifice for the family (as demonstrated by giving a portion of that wealth to the family office), while also ensuring that the office does not run out of money or spend it frivolously. Finally, this role will significantly reduce bribery and lobbying within the system, creating a “cheaper” way to buy influence.
- The Contributor: Family members electing the Contributor representative get votes equal to the number of kids they have—plus the number of new family members they bring in through other means (being a family member is about dedication to the family’s goals). This is like a stakeholder vote, but instead of focusing on current stakeholders without a care for the future of the family, it grants influence to those with an investment in the future of the family while simultaneously encouraging the family to grow.
- The Veteran: Only former Executors can vote (on a one-person-one-vote basis) for the Veteran representative. Imagine a branch of the US government that was made up of only former presidents. This role within the triumvirate encourages long-term thinking and enables the enactment of plans that could take decades to come to fruition—something that is very hard to enable within most governing structures.
Merely existing as a genetic relative does not grant one any votes per our family office model. This type of system may not be your cup of tea, but we personally think a governance structure that rewards people based on their genetic relation to someone else is both deeply troubling and doomed to fail. Not only is such a system borderline racist, but when a family is given privilege without personal sacrifice after a few generations, their moral core becomes erased. Not only do they not understand sacrifice on an individual level, but even the cultural memory of it is forgotten.
Finally—and this is something we have mentioned a few times—remember that by restricting who can vote, you can encourage certain behavior patterns and determine the core character of your governing unit.
In the case of our family:
- To ensure our family does not die out, we grant votes to those who bring in new members within one branch of our governance structure.
- As we want our family to retain wealth, we grant votes to those who bring in money through another branch.
- Because we want our family to maintain a long-term vision and enjoy stability, we grant votes to past leaders who have dedicated years of their lives to it.
This isn’t the only way to design a system like this; there are all sorts of ways incentives can be implemented. If you want your descendants to value education, you may only give votes to people based on academic achievement (peer-reviewed research, tenured positions, etc.). However, here you need to be careful to design timeless restrictions—who knows what the value of college will be in 50 years?
Alternatively, if you want your family to be charitable for many generations hence, you may grant votes to individuals who have reached some level of charity participation or involvement in their local community—though here one must be extremely careful, as we have seen these requirements regularly produce families in which only individuals who fail to get real, high-powered jobs involve themselves in the family business as they are the only ones who have time to invest in the level of charitable pursuit needed to gain influence with the family office, which they in turn use to support frivolous lifestyles, defeating the point of the restriction.
Personally, we have always had a predilection for experimenting more with coming-of-age ceremonies that involve a voluntary sacrifice to gain access to voting within a system. They are just so … cinematic. An interesting one to experiment with could be a mechanism for ensuring all the wealth a family member accumulates returns to the central family upon family members’ deaths through a usurious loan structure or something, as a pledge wouldn’t hold up legally.
How this might work: To join the family office or benefit from it in some way, an individual may be obligated to sign a contract that ensures their entire estate goes back to the family office upon their death. The family would make a ceremonial big deal out of this, as it would technically be the moment the individual fully and consciously joined the family as an adult. We explore these types of rituals more in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion. These types of rituals may become critical to family structures after the perfection of artificial womb technology, as they would incentivize people to reinvest in the factory or nursery that produced them.
Wards of the State
As much as we’re enamored by the creativity of the Terran Federation governing structure, it ultimately has one critical failure in its design. So far, we have divided government voting block types into stakeholders (individuals affected by a government, like people working at a company or living in a country), contributors (people who add to a government, like investors), and representatives (those elected by another group to represent them)—however, there is a fourth group that one must consider when setting up a governing structure: Wards of the state. Wards of the state are individuals who are in some way supported by a governing structure.
Wards of the state should never have a say in governing structure. For example, you should never make one of the groups voting on the head of a nonprofit its employees (and in the case of Starship Troopers you should not allow individuals to vote within the Terran Federation until after their military service is over and they are no longer financially supported by the state in any way).
Why are wards of the state so toxic when permitted to vote? Because wards of the state always have an incentive to allocate more resources to themselves. You can argue all day about whether they would act on that incentive, but it is an unimpeachable fact that the incentive exists. While one or two generations may resist the temptation, the gravity of the incentive existing creates inevitable corruption.
Wards of the state can generally be divided into three categories:
- Compensated Representatives: Representatives who are compensated for the time their representation takes (Congressmen, board members, etc.)
- Compensated Producers: Individuals who are given resources in exchange for services (soldiers, family office managers, etc.)
- Unproductive Wards: Individuals who are given resources despite providing nothing in return (trust fund kids, welfare recipients, etc.)
In an optimal system, none of these classes of individuals (or people related to them, dating them, etc.) should have a vote. There are, however, some arguments for giving the first two categories of wards a vote. For example, in the case of soldiers, if you are asking someone to put their life on the line for a state, it makes sense to both give them a vote and financially support them. In the case of compensated representatives, leaving them uncompensated increases the risk of corruption.
Let’s consider the case of compensated representatives. How might representative payment be handled optimally? We see two paths here:
- Create a separate system determining representative payment that is outside representatives’ spheres of influence. Essentially, you have a separate, unpaid representative body that determines how much the full-time body of representatives gets paid. When possible, this other body should be anonymous or crowdsourced to make them harder to bribe. One could, for example, select them through a system like sortition, in which people are randomly pulled from the population in a manner similar to jury formation.
- Remove the value of money to representatives altogether. In this case, to become a representative, one must make a lifelong vow of poverty (or at least lack of luxury). Some religious orders use systems like this and it is not super effective when you consider the types of buildings they often inhabit.
The key point here is that unproductive wards should never, never be given a vote in any governance system that supports them. It doesn’t matter if we’re discussing an heiress not having a vote in the management of her trust fund or someone currently on welfare having a vote that influences the oversight of that welfare. Any system that allows those non-contributory beneficiaries to vote will inevitably become corrupted as it allows factions to “buy” votes (i.e., by offering more resources to those who vote a certain way).
Flat vs. Proportional Voting Systems
While we have alluded to weighted voting systems a few times when describing systems in which people who have more shares have more impactful votes, we have yet to explore procedural voting. Procedural voting is when sometimes one “vote” takes precedence over another “vote” and other times it does not, depending on the context. This is most common in triumvirate governing systems and might be seen in something like a naval faction’s vote having more precedence when the subject of water-based military decisions is on the table.
Generally speaking, weighted systems are a bad idea unless they involve “costly signaling.” Costly signaling is a term used in biology to describe something that cannot be faked and has a real cost to the individual showing it. For example, a deep voice that can only be achieved by changing things that actually require more evolutionary fitness might be selected for as a way for an individual to quickly demonstrate their fitness but a deep voice that can be achieved “cheaply” through just changing the vocal cords will not.
In the case of weighted voting systems, costly signaling is needed to prevent individuals from gaming the system. When voting power can be boosted by maximizing a particular metric, the free market will find a way to price that metric and then exploit it. The simplest type of costly signaling for a proportional vote is just to denominate that vote in currency. The extent to which participants game the system can be reduced by measuring money spent as a proportion of overall personal wealth (meaning $100 spent by one individual may get them the same number of votes as $1,000,000 spent by another). Alternatively, voting power could be increased in proportion to something like years of military service.
One effective version of weighted voting that doesn’t use costly signaling is liquid democracy. This is a system similar to representational democracy in which the weight of one individual’s vote is determined by the number of other individuals that vote for them. Voting through liquid democracy, you might, for example, either vote directly for the next president or give someone else’s presidential vote more power. Liquid democracy can also become iterative, with the vote you give to someone else may in turn be given to yet another party.
While this sort of double liquid democracy may seem rare, in practice something functionally similar is what happens with investment firms. When I invest in one firm based on my trust in them, they can in turn invest in another firm who in turn can invest in another, with the amount of dollars each firm has representing their “voting power” in the economic ecosystem.
One could also argue that liquid democracy takes place in an informal manner in direct democracies. Joe Smith, may, for example, vote for whoever his union tells him to vote for, and the leaders of his union may in turn have determined what votes to recommend based on the recommendations of a Washington, D.C., insider who analyzed which candidates would be most likely to support their needs and agenda. In this case, Joe effectively passed his vote over to his union, which in turn passed it to the D.C. insider.
We will talk about this more in other sections as it is better thought of as a compromise between direct and representational democracy than a weighted vote system.