You are invited to join "AltInst", an email list on Alternative Institutions. AltInst is solely for proposing and critiquing alternative institutions for various walks of life. Alternatives ways to run conversations, countries, households, markets, offices, romances, schools, etc. are all fair game.
AltInst is open to folks from any political persuasion, but general political flaming/discussion is forbidden. Skip the theory and just tell us your vision of how something could be different, and how that would work. Many of us are truly excited to hear about creative well-considered suggestions, no matter what the source, but quickly bored by both ideological is-to-is-not flaming, and partisan rah-rahs for anything "politically correct" in some camp.
Each post starting a new AltInst thread should describe an alternative institution, giving specifics about how it would work. You can post your own ideas, or review (and reference) the suggestions of others. You need not endorse these ideas, and they need not be immediately practical, but you should think them worth considering.
Replies can ask for more detail on the mechanism, how it is envisioned to handle specific cases, or how it is different from specific alternatives. Followup discussion may also suggest difficult but plausible scenarios to see how well the proposed mechanism can handle them. If, however, someone has declared their proposal to be an attempt to achieve certain goals, it is inappropriate to question whether those are goals worth having.
To set a context, folks may also give SHORT descriptions of the existing institutions that alternatives are intended to replace, of current problems with those institutions, and a diagnosis of their root causes. And folks may give SHORT summaries of evidence regarding an institution's feasibility, such as similar institutions in use at other times and places, laboratory or field experiments, or abstract models.
But your tone must remain civil, and we are wary of letting the conversation slip into general debate on politics or economics; the list administrator reserves the right to step in and say "that's enough". AltInst is mainly for finding out about novel suggestions; political debate can be done elsewhere.
To join (or quit) AltInst, send a request to:
AltInst-request@cco.caltech.edu
and wait up to two business days. AltInst posts may specify how their distribution is to be limited, but if they don't, AltInst posts are public and may be freely distributed or archived.
AltInst List Administrator, Robin Hanson