## Fix incentives One of the things I love the most about politics and economics is that humans act largely in self interest. By shaping politics in such a way that it incentivizes people to do stuff that is also good for the majority of people, we can align incentives with larger political goals. One of these mechanisms is called [Pigouvian taxes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax), whereby you can tax things that are bad at large. And although I don't know if this works, I imagine this money could be refunnelled into things that are good for society, like [[Nutrition|healthy foods]] and other good stuff. ## Restore truth How do we work against propaganda? Social media runs entirely on algorithms, where people's attention is captured relentlessly. The more time one spends on social media, the more attention they give the platform, the more money the platform earns. To increase attention the platforms will exploit human nature and push their buttons to make them sad, frustrated, hopeless about the future. Keep them angry. People live [in bubbles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble) and get brainwashed with the same kind of information over and over again. This is an issue we have to fix, or at least look through. How can we allow algorithms to exploit our psyche? I think this will become a much larger problem in the future, more and more. ## Education needs to be improved I increasingly see people who don't have critical thinking skills. I'm thankfully blessed to be surrounded with people with loads of critical thinking skills, but in order for humanity to establish a great society, we must equip as many minds as possible with reasoning skills, decision making, financial literacy, mental health and discipline, learning how systems and incentives work together. A basic understanding of how the world works. And let's be real: not only academics, but how to tackle life at large. How to make friends and influence people, how to listen and cooperate with others, how to start and handle relationships gracefully, and basic sexual education on how to satisfy your partner and handle that aspect of life. How to handle bills and unpleasant situations, how to stay positive. How to treat other people well. ## Fight corruption Politics is a beautiful thing. Not everyone has the time and effort nor interest in leading society and managing it all the time. During the past several hundred years of progress we've been able to widely establish democracy as a functional system for leading our societies. We choose leaders who are supposed to represent us and fight for our beliefs in our place. But in a world of money, skewed incentives and easy outcomes to cheat the system, we've ended up in a place where the people we choose to represent us can end up backstabbing us and favoring their own interests instead. How do we manage this? Here's my opinion: the people we've chosen to be our leaders are not chosen as private people, they're public tools. They're a tool for us to easier be able to fight for our interests instead of having to discuss every issue all the time. I believe in radical transparency for public officials. It should be a privilege to lead your people, and the people should know that you are not corrupt. At large, your finances and your life should be extremely transparent. Politics overall need to be more transparent. A solution is to keep all of the governmental transactions stored somewhere in a database however possible to make it easier for independent actors to verify the amounts and discover if the people's money is spent wrongly. Another solution is to not allow any publicly chosen officials to own stock during and for a while after their positions of power, to ensure that no insider trading or votings are used. Maybe discussions in different political debates, conversations and other politician information needs to be shared more publicly. Group chats, conversations between politicians. There are a lot of discussions to be had regarding how much and in what way information is made publiclyt available, but I think a radical change in the amount of transparency is necessary to ensure that our leaders are chosen and fairly represent the opinions of the people. Also, make sure that the voting system is improved, debates are improved so that real issues are discussed, fact check during debates to show which of the politicians it is that know what they're talking about. [Factcheck.org](https://www.factcheck.org/) is a fantastic website with a fantastic mission, and they should gain more attention.