policy · elections · economics · clay shentrup
evidence-based arguments for electoral reform, land value taxation, marketarian economics, and charter cities. ideas that are obvious in hindsight and ignored in the present.
most political disagreement is a category error — conflating
empirical questions about mechanism efficiency with normative questions about
redistribution. separate those two things and most of the fighting disappears.
the rest is just fixing the voting system so the people in charge
aren't chosen by a broken algorithm.
01 / primary project
randomly selected citizen juries replace lay voters — not politicians. candidates still compete; a compelled jury deliberates, questions them directly, and votes using score voting.
02 / electoral reform
why plurality voting is a catastrophic mistake and how score-based methods measurably increase voter satisfaction. co-founded c.e.s. to advance this work.
03 / economics
separating mechanism efficiency from redistribution level. you can optimize the former without settling the ethics of the latter first.
04 / land & tax
georgist l.v.t. captures unearned rent, eliminates deadweight loss, and can fund u.b.i. without punishing productivity. the economists all agree.
— featured project
candidates still exist. what's replaced is the mass of uninformed lay voters casting ballots with minimal information, under the influence of money and a.i.-powered disinformation. instead, a randomly selected citizen jury — compelled to serve the way trial jurors are — spends weeks deliberating, questioning candidates directly, and voting using score voting.
the result is a system with near-perfect demographic alignment, structured resistance to money and manipulation, and decision quality that mass elections simply can't match. starting at the h.o.a. scale, because that's where you can actually implement something today.
www.electionbyjury.org →"voter satisfaction efficiency doesn't care about your feelings about i.r.v. it's a number."
software engineer, electoral reform advocate, policy obsessive.
co-founded the center for election science (c.e.s.) around 2010–11, which ran successful approval voting ballot initiatives in fargo, n.d. (64%) and st. louis, m.o. (68%).
current main project: election by jury — a framework for replacing lay voters with randomly selected citizen panels using score voting. pursuing h.o.a. implementations in portland as a starting point, alongside citizens' initiative review adoption in portland city government.
also writes about marketarian economics, georgist land taxation, charter cities, and the general project of fixing systems that are obviously broken.
— areas