That is a worry. It would have to be super transparent. Originally I proposed a straightforward algorithm for deciding: to use Erdos numbers with Ron Conway as the seed. I took this out because I thought it was better not to go into this level of detail in the essay, but I'd advocate using something like this to decide who was a startup investor.
It's the investors who'd be ranked by Ronco numbers, not the visa applicants. And even there it wouldn't be based on anyone knowing anyone. If you invest in a startup that Ron Conway later invests in, you have a Ronco number of 1, whether he likes it or not.
The point is you don't get to control the algorithm. When I interned in the Massachusetts State House, I sat through a meeting discussing the algorithm that decides how much state money each local school district receives. Now I'm sure you or I could come up with a quite elegant algorithm. But the actual algorithm was a complex beast that no staffer at the meeting could begin to understand. It was the evolved product of years of power struggles.
In politics, the organized faction always trumps the general interest. Say Faction A is 1% of the population. The faction wants to preserve a barrier to entry that costs every voter $100 and nets each faction member $10,000. The members of Faction A will be single issue voters over the barrier to entry. But to the rest of the public, the issue is lost in the noise. Average Joe does not even realize how much the barrier to entry costs him, because no interest group will fund ads to tell him. Thus the politician always supports the faction in order to prevent the 2% swing. ( I've spent time in both the state house and Congress, and this is exactly how the decision making process works).
The life cycle of any government policy ends up being the following:
1) Program is created to benefit the public good
2) The program inevitably directly benefits a small group - employees of the agency, contractors, etc.
3) The beneficiaries become dependent on the program. They organize in order to protect themselves politically.
4) In any policy battle where the interests of the beneficiaries collide with the public interest, the beneficiaries generally win.
5) As the beneficiaries win battles over time, the program ends up serving the beneficiaries at the expense of the public.
This is basically the life cycle of every program that has ever come out of Washington. The once mighty NASA now only exists to provide employment to NASA engineers. The school system exists mainly to provide employment to teachers. The AMA exists to erect barrier to entries to the medical profession. Etc, etc.
Your algorithm proposal is amusing because it is basically the same solution to the problem of corruption/factions that the progressives tried during the 20th century. The idea was that "scientific policy" based on algorithms and formulas, designed by academics and civil servants, could replace control by politicians. Needless to say, it was a miserable failure. A classic example of policy via algorithm is the creation of Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization's who used algorithms to dictate which loans regulated funds were allowed to invest in. It did not take too long for Wall St. to figure out a way to structure the riskiest loans imaginable in ways that would pass through the algorithm. The rating agencies are a high profile example, but there are hundreds of other similar failures. In practice "scientific public policy" ends up being the worst of both worlds. It combines the downsides of algorithms (lack of intervening personal judgment when the algorithm gets gamed) with the downsides of politics (corruption/factional power struggles).
Thanks for this. Your reply reminds me of a thread I read on the arocket list, discussing the rationale behind the new Ares program.
The most interesting thing about it, to me, was that the engineers from the private sector just couldn't seem to understand the political constraints that the government managers work under.
I've only ever worked at small to medium-sized private-sector software companies. It's fascinating to get a look into public institutions and the way civil-servants make decisions.
As a hacker, there's a real danger of only considering engineering constraints, and dismissing organizational or political constraints on a problem or program. I often see bright techies make suggestions that are just naive from a political or organizational perspective. Suggesting a plan that would work great "if only the government weren't so clueless or corrupt" is no plan at all, if you actually have to work with the government.
This is not a direct criticism of pg's essay. I think he's on to a cool idea.
The discussions I've had on similar topics in the past, though, have been really eye-opening. I may be hot-shit technically, and able to hold my own in a meeting, but there's this whole other world of bureaucracy that I must admit I know almost nothing about.
P.S. I found the NIH parts of Darwin's Radio fascinating. The book doesn't have much action. In fact, a lot of the character interaction is between government scientists, and happens in meetings. Nonetheless, I felt as though it gave me an insight into this other world. It was fascinating.
Visas are issued by the government. All my criticisms still apply, even if the government delegates the decision to the investors.
And no, it works terribly for universities ( or rather, it works great for the universities, terribly for the public). For example, the number of medical schools in the country has actual gone from 162 in 1906, to 129 today, despite a three-fold increase in population. The artificial barrier to entry created by accreditation constricts the supply of medical schools, resulting in higher tuition and higher medical costs.
Or consider law schools. The cheapest law school in Massachusetts costs 38K per year for tuition. If you wanted to create new a law school as a startup, think you could create one just as good for much cheaper? I bet you could. It's not like law schools need expensive equipment. But you're not allowed to, thanks to accreditation laws.
Accreditation started off innocently enough - it was just a good housekeeping seal of approval. But then the professional organizations managed to make it illegal to practice at all without a degree from the accredited institution. The bar associations lobbied for laws that made it impossible to practice law if you simply studied on your own and passed the bar, or if you went through a correspondence course. In 2008, Abe Lincoln is out of luck. Now he has to take on 150K of debt in order to practice law.
History shows the slow is indeed slippery. What if your startup accreditation body follows the path the law schools, and in 30 years ends up lobbying Congress to ban all non-accredited startups?
The corruptness of the university accreditation system only makes the threshold unnecessarily high. If that happened with startup investors, it would still be a great improvement over the current situation.
Currently, there are zero investors whose money gets you you a visa. Expanding from zero to an unnecessarily small group would still be an improvement, even it if wasn't optimal.
I agree that the immediate effects of the policy would be beneficial. But you have also created a government sponsored body that is now deciding what is a startup and what is not. That is very, very, very dangerous. This organization over time may lobby Congress to actively ban all non-accredited startups. This is exactly the path followed by the law schools, medical schools, architect schools, dentistry schools, interior design schools, etc. The track record is not good.
Can you offer any evidence that university accreditation is a net lose? It may prevent "startup" schools, but it also prevents scams. You haven't made any effort to weigh the costs and benefits.
And even if school accreditation were a net lose, that doesn't mean accreditation in general is always a mistake-- that it's impossible to do right. Whenever you try to build any kind of filter, people will try to game it, but that doesn't make filters pointless.
Gatekeeper laws cost Americans hundreds of billions a year in tuition and lost wages. It's also condemnable from a personal liberty perspective. The burden of proof is entirely on the schools to show that the costs in money and liberty are worth it. They have not done so. Heck, there is no proof that even primary education is worth it. Despite massive increases in enrollment, length of schooling, and school spending, overall rates of numeracy and vocabulary have been flat over the course of the 20th century.
Recently I was talking to friend who had just left law school. He described the process as: "We spend all semester in class where we listen to boring professors who just like to hear themselves talk. Then we do internships where we get paid to learn." I have close friends in architecture school who say the same thing. Almost all the practical stuff about code and structures students learn on the job. The school teaches stuff like "aura" and deconstructionist design. Compare the current Boston City Hall the Old Boston City Hall and you see the results of this wonderful, accredited training. There is simply no evidence that law school or architecture school is a net positive, much less that is worth the cost. (Medical school is a tougher case as care has improved. But this seems to be the result of improvements in science and technology, not schooling).
I hear the same exact stories from people graduating other schools - education schools, meteorology programs, business school, etc. It's pretty clear that the primary result of establishing an accreditation body as legal gatekeeper to a field, is to create jobs for professors and increase wages for professionals. ( note - computer science classes tend to be more sound, perhaps precisely because there is no legal credentialing requirement to enter software programming, and thus the departments must prove their worth the old fashioned way)
If the purpose of credentialing laws was merely to protect consumers, the laws would only care about the results of the schools teaching ( whether graduates could past the Boards or the Bar ) rather than the process ( whether the school was accredited). The law would also allow people to get around the defaults. For instance, your web browser warns you when you access a potentially malicious site, but it still allows you to access it if you really want to. But you cannot do the same with lawyers; you a non-accredited lawyer cannot represent you in court.
And even if school accreditation were a net lose, that doesn't mean accreditation in general is always a mistake-- that it's impossible to do right.
In the context of the American political system of 2008, it is impossible. Washington does not work. You can expect to make a reasonable policy suggestion, and have the actual result come be close to what you wanted. The only thing we can do is keep the poison from spreading through Silicon Valley as long as we can.
Bar associations are very different from college accreditation boards. Bar associations are a guild whose main goal is to restrict supply by making it hard to become a lawyer. (Even still, the US has far more lawyers than it needs.) They exist pretty explicitly to keep legal salaries high.
Accreditation for colleges is much more, well, collegial. There's no big motivation to restrict supply. It's hard to think of any really good educational institutions that can't seem to get accredited for political reasons. The list of over 1000 accredited colleges in CA starts off:
* A-Technical College (LA)
* ABC Adult School (Cerritos)
* Abram Friedman Occupational Center (LA)
* Absolute Safety Training Paramedic Program (Oroville)
* Academy Education Services (Oxnard)
so it's not just the Stanfords that can manage accreditation.
Accreditation for less established and less lucrative professions is much easier. The grip tightens over time, within a profession.
It's hard to think of any really good educational institutions that can't seem to get accredited for political reasons.
Three years of on the job training is better education than three years of schooling in practically every field. Plus you get paid rather than have to pay. Yet on the job training does not count as education that allows you to legally be a lawyer, doctor, teacher, parole officer, military officer, etc.
The problem with government sanctioned accreditation is not that the specific decisions about which schools meet the requirements get politicized. The problem is that accreditation allows the intuitions who reap the tuition money to define what education itself means.
Three years of on the job training is better education than three years of schooling in practically every field.
In CS, this is mostly false. You learn very different things in school and in industry. The former is useful in the latter, but usually not vice versa.
By definition these 10,000 founders wouldn't be taking jobs from Americans: it could be part of the terms of the visa that they couldn't work for existing companies,
This is a good idea because the expected outcome of adding 10,000 new people to the "pool of workers" by existing companies would be to see an increase in unemployment claims (even though not all unemployed people would file).
So by adding 10,000 Founder Visas to the pool of workers and then tracking the rate of decrease (or increase) of unemployment, a metric of immigrant-based job-creation startup foo could probably be determined.
