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Seasteading: Competitive Governments on the Ocean
Author(s) -
Friedman Patri,
Taylor Brad
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
kyklos
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.766
H-Index - 58
eISSN - 1467-6435
pISSN - 0023-5962
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-6435.2012.00535.x
Subject(s) - competition (biology) , incentive , order (exchange) , politics , economics , human settlement , technological change , economic system , business , economic policy , market economy , industrial organization , public economics , political science , macroeconomics , finance , history , ecology , archaeology , law , biology
Summary We argue that those advocating the reform of current political systems in order to promote jurisdictional competition are in a catch‐22: jurisdictional competition has the potential to improve policy, but reforms to increase competition must be enacted by currently uncompetitive governments. If such governments could be relied upon to enact such reforms, they would likely not be necessary. Since existing governments are resistant to change, we argue that the only way to overcome the deep problem of reform is by focusing on the bare‐metal layer of society – the technological environment in which governments are embedded. Developing the technology to create settlements in international waters, which we refer to as seasteading, changes the technological environment rather than attempting to push against the incentives of existing political systems. As such, it sidesteps the problem of reform and is more likely than more conventional approaches to significantly alter the policy equilibrium.