I’m not sure about from an economics perspective but after some consideration it made me realize we’re missing critical feedback mechanisms on the wish for change track. It’s not possible to know if something we’re voting on is technically feasible or if it has been implemented after approval. The fellowship should have the ability to vote to veto any on-going wfc or approved wfc. Assuming a wfc is approved and not veto’d it should go into a work queue and receive another status update once it has been implemented.
I don’t actually know if anything from the WFC has ever been implemented.
I don’t see any connection between plutocracy and poor governance.
You’re right to blame poor governance, but why would you assume that a plutocrat votes worse than the average voter?
Anyone who sees an opportunity to get any form of handout, or participate in one, is equally prone to the temptation of extracting maximum amount of personal utility from spending (wasteful or other).
It may be easier to do for large holders, but anyone is incentivized to extract as much as they can - from large holders down over single-node validators to individual “community organizers” and everyone in between.
This system combines the worst characteristics of central banking and systematically and inherently corrupt organization such as the UN or EU.
Gradually cutting all spending until it’s just a dozen servers for most essential services is the way to go. But it won’t happen because who’s going to vote for that when they’re either very content with present situation and their “positioning” within it, or too clueless to understand that some “free”, handouts-funded service they “need” multiplied across many voters equals this situation.
One doesn’t have to be a plutocrat to like free stuff. Non-plutocrat voters could probably block most spending, but like in those organizations I mentioned above, why would they? 100 DOT in direct or indirect handouts is still much better than 0 DOT.
According to Gustave Le Bon and William McDougall, when individuals coalesce into a psychological crowd their individual consciousness and rational personality vanish and become something like a collective being or hive mind. That under this collective state individuals lose their capacity for complex / rational thinking and become suggestible, emotional and impulsive.
The thing that plutocracy, I thought, would solve was that those higher up on the economic ladder would have had to meet a minimum of criteria to be in that position. That generally, those individuals would be more intelligent, more rational, and generally but not always better at decision making. That just made these individuals lightning rods for anyone who wanted large voters to see things their way (waggle dancing). With so many people attempting to sway your opinion it becomes impossible to debias and make rational decisions. What I hoped I would see is more focus on long term profit rather than short term gain. We got the exact opposite. As I said earlier, I still believe that the distributions played a pivotal role here and that changes to the initial distributions may have yielded a different outcome.
The largest majority of holders – never participated.
What my current hypothesis is, is that poor governance is inevitable as long as the crowd exists. Because as long as funding is involved with no dominant central vision, plan or culture pre-established, you end up with one or more in-groups, one or more out-groups and marginalized individuals/groups. In-group preference means that things will be overlooked, ignored, etc while out-group receives the lion share of criticism. (A battle of culture and vision)
That’s why the incentives need to align with the desired outcomes. Like I said above, token holders do not really care who gets funded for what. They care about thing that we dare not mention go up. If we can figure out what success looks like, build mechanisms for data logging/collection, and fund based on hard metrics (outcomes) – things will look a lot different. I’m not quite sure what those metrics look like right now or how any of it would work. I have some ideas but not really sure what’s possible or desirable. Silo the people to get rid of the crowds and let them build out their own vision of what polkadot looks like in smaller clusters.
