Thank you. Thank you to everybody for coming back. You thought you were gonna have the week off, but who would wanna take a week off from decentralized governance, really? Right? So, thank you for your patience. I hope that the rest of my family is not gonna get into some video intensive, stream logging right now. And I, my computer is, rejiggered and hopefully going to behave. So let me share my my screen, so you can see my slides. And when hold on. Let me get to okay. Alright. Now for those who were here last time, we were just in the midst of a little mystery. Right? As so I, as a as a for the couple of you who weren't, as a quick preview, I study federalism. Federalism is I'm so happy that Shagun is here because federalism is one of the least appreciated element, but absolutely critical elements of American democracy and functioning of democracies worldwide. And so it's just in the last year that finally people are starting to say wait a minute in The US we have federalism and it seems to matter. And so that's that's been for very bad reasons, right, but still for me as a scholar a joy to have people wake up to it a little bit. So we're gonna talk about robustness. I'm a complex systems and institutional theorist and so what I've been working on over my scholarly lifetime is building a theory of robustness, in the sense that we can think about how institutions may be designed to, in a way that improves their functionality in the face of perturbations, right? So these surprises that might, knock out, institutional functionality. So it's a different approach than just equilibrium based analysis. And and so I where my computer cut off, last time or the connection cut off was I was in the midst of saying when we're worried about, robustness of federal systems and how they operate in fraught times, of course, the person we think about is this man. And this is, of of course and there was oh, there was a Canadian in the room somewhere. Is the Canadian back?

Hello, you, Canadian. So Pierre Trudeau, who is the father was he's passed away but father of Justin Trudeau, who is the current prime minister. A man of flair, fashion, wild lifestyle, deep love of Canada and Canadian, federalism. Controversial for all of the, right reasons. And the case that I was describing was when the, when Canada was patriating its constitution. That is making it its own rather than being an act of the British parliamentary the British parliament and in the act of patriation there was discussion and and heavily promoted by Pierre Trudeau that there ought to be the equivalent of American Bill of Rights that is recognition of individual rights in the constitution. And so they wanted to add on a charter of rights and freedoms. And, this became controversial because it was going to be intention legal tension with, the elements of the constitution that recognized group rights. And those con those, tensions would need to be resolved judicially, and provinces were uncomfortable with the way that the, Supreme Court of Canada had been, handling federalism disputes. That is, they saw them as being heavily on Ottawa's side and not, not as fair minded toward the provinces. So the provinces objected to this patriation, and the and part of their objection, ironically, ended up in court as a reference. That is before this before any act has take been taken, before any injury has been felt, the provinces have the right to appeal to the Supreme Court questioning the constitutionality of this proposed constitutional change. And their dispute was that Trudeau didn't seek our, approval. And we and with other constitutional change, the prime minister has always sought, provincial approval. And, so the court thought about this and says it's, we can't stop him. So there is no remedy here. And as I said, so at the time, Trudeau was off, partying somewhere like South Korea, and, the justice minister Jean Chretien was reached, and he said, great. We're gonna go ahead with this, patriation and adding on his charter. And then when Trudeau was finally reached, Trudeau backed out. And so here's the question, why did he do that? And so I said, you know, we wanna be thinking about this in complex systems terms. For those of you unfamiliar with complex systems, these are some of the things that the a, you know, we're interested in bottom up processes, we're interested in fragmentation of design forms, which is very natural for me as a student of American political institutions. And for me, the question is how do you design a constitution to plan for human errors and changing needs? Right? This constitution, a written document signed, ratified at a moment in time that is meant to be the skeleton of governance for a polity in perpetuity. Right? Where the circumstances what what what the people want out of their government changes and environmental circumstances change. So how do you how do you set this up? And how do you prevent systemic socks, shocks or corruption from tearing the system apart or a crisis like what we've been experiencing. So, key points that I wanna emphasize today is transgressions, that is violations to the constitution, and in particular here, the federal aspect of the constitution, so the the distribution of authority are normal, should be expected, that the performance of these institutions is context dependent, It's dependent on other institutions that I'll set up for you, on culture and norms that I'll hint at. This is really more new work. And that but, really, I want you to be thinking that this constitution is dynamic. So for those of you who have taken a little bit of Con Law, you may be familiar or just, you know, follow the US Supreme Court. You may be familiar with different doctrinal interpretations. You may have heard of things like textualists or originalists. And the tendency there is to believe that the meaning of the constitution is fixed. I am, I'm also, you know, a constitutional law scholar. I am in the camp of people who believe that the constitution evolves. And I'm interested in understanding the mechanisms of its evolution. So you can think about this project as also being a piece of that. Alright. How are constitutions structured? All constitutions kind of have this set of, of elements. There's a preamble, which lays out some values or social objectives. There's a set of rules about, what the government can and cannot do, and what its relationship is with, the public. And also, if it's a fragmented, governmental system like ours, what is the relationship of the pieces, to one another? And then there's a set of procedures that is how do, how are, how is all this, set up and what are the rules about, how it's how it's laid out? So for example, you know, maybe you didn't realize it before this year, but for sure now you recognize that the way we run our elections is set constitutionally as an authority given to the states. So it's it's federal elections. It's not set by, Congress. That, that was a surprise to an awful lot of people. And I would say it's a really good thing that it's run by the states. There is also the kind of glue between it's not written on the constitutional document, but something that emerges. And I imagine, and I hope to hear much more about this in our discussion, there are norms. There are these conventions that emerge. There is the public understanding of what the rules mean. There's this interpretation. In general, this is not something that the court can manage, so we we call it nonjudicial. Right? But it is what makes this whole formal apparatus meaningful. Okay. Quick primer on federalism, federal performance, a set of aspirations having to do with security, economic improvement, political representation. All federal systems express these three general categories as aspirations for why to federate. But in reality, when we look at the performance of federal systems, they're just as likely to go to war, be invaded, or have a domestic uprising. They, depending on how you measure it, but they seem to provide fewer public goods than centralized systems, lower less spending on public education, higher poverty rates, greater income inequality, no better growth, and no less likely to have ethnic conflict. Kind of a mess. And so if we wanna think about and that's not really what the talk is today, but we could we could go through and say okay what countries are doing well and what aren't what I want to offer is some theoretical apparatus for engaging in that empirical exercise so if we were to trace the performance failure in terms of policy we can trace it back to the constitution. So how what would that look like? Well, performance itself is a function of policy and luck, let's just say, in in very high level terms. So that policy is a function of how we distribute authority, like what government is responsible in a federal system. Is it the national government, the federal government, or is it the states, or in the Canadians of the provinces? And a function of preferences, that is those who are setting out the policy, the policy that they adopt, at that level. So this policy is a function of the distribution of authority, and that is a function of the interpretation of this distribution of authority by the safeguards. And the safeguards are a function of the constitution as well as the culture and norms that, those conventions, the unwritten part that I talked about earlier. Okay. So, this distributional choice matters a lot. Right? How we, how we set authority. And so then the question is how should society allocate that authority? As I said before, for example, why is it the states that are given the authority to run the national elections and not the national government itself, right? Lee Drutman, a political scientist who I think the world of, on the day of the election published op ed calling for national authority over the elections rather than federal one. It's one of the few times I've disagreed with him. So, public policy regularly encounters federalism in all kinds of policy domains and so this question is how do we allocate this? Should it be the federal government, the state governments, or as great as is often the case, whether it's formally declared or sort of emerges, it's a shared authority. And this distribution has very real effects. So before we had the ACA, the Affordable Care Act, in The United States, we, well, it still is the case, actually, that states can set Medicaid eligibility thresholds. That is, how poor do you have to be in order to qualify for federally federal and state co subsidized health insurance. And Medicaid eligibility prior to the ACA, the ACA gave the state some pretty massive incentives to raise their increase the number of those who are eligible. But prior to that, we had wildly varying eligibility requirements where this is all expressed in terms of the federal poverty level, which is just a made up index to help us keep track of those who are quite poor. And, so in Minnesota, a family of four, this is 215% of the federal poverty level, that means, like, approximately 48 to $50,000 a family four could be making that much and remain eligible for government subsidized health insurance. Whereas in Arkansas, at 17%, that means that for an a single individual, you could be making something like $2,500 a year and be have too much income to qualify for federally subsidized for, government subsidized health insurance. Okay. So very, very big differences from one state to another. Where you lived mattered. Right? And then the obvious, it shows up in in terms of who's, uninsured. Lots of other kinds of, policy things that we could talk about. So when we're thinking about setting this optimal level of authority, there's some desire to find some golden mean that exists. That is, we might be able to just perfectly balance things. But as I alluded to before, most of these policy areas are shared in one way or another. Whether it's, like, with Medicaid prior to the ACA and and as I with details still, it's the states who set eligibility, but it's co funded. And so if there's funding shared, very often the federal government will, attach strings to its spending. And so it's really some kind of distribution or there's there's multiple possibilities. Okay. So given that the distribution of authority matters a lot, how do we induce compliance? But how do we do it flexibly tolerating some experimentation? And the reason why why would we want to have some experimentation? We want to have that because things change, our needs change. So even as we set this boundary, this authority boundary, which is probably quite thick, we want it to be able to move if our needs change. So we need it to be strong and flexible, which is a really difficult, you know, in standard institutional analysis and equilibrium analysis is a very hard thing to think about. And how do you do it given that these safeguards themselves are imperfect? So I'm gonna tell you more about safeguards in a minute, but they're imperfect. So how how can this this is kind of like what I set out to try to understand. Robustness in federal systems, means we need to talk about recovery, adaptation, and innovation. Recovery. We want this system of safeguards to continue to function despite some unexpected challenges, turbulence in our environment. We want adaptation. We want it to be able to, we want to be able to change the policy making capacity of any of our governments according to new needs. So we don't want it to be frozen in, you know, 1789 times. Right? It ought to be we're very different now and we ought to be able to have a government that keeps up with us. And because of that, we need some kind of innovation, some, ability to explore the policy the policy space. Part of federalism is, with subsidiarity, which is, this sense of, decentralization when possible, preference for decentralization allows us this possibility to explore the policy space. And for those of you who have heard this phrase, laboratories of democracy, which is attributed to Justice Louis Brandeis writing in dissent in a in a case early in the twentieth century in The United States, he praised federalism for allowing this policy exploration and the containment of failure. That is if we have no externalities. You could have, in that case, it was about ice regulation of ice companies in Oklahoma. You could have Oklahoma screwed up, they fail. That's no problem. We're still running strong in the other states and Oklahoma can recover. Right? That's the idea. So, but of course they can over innovate or they can generate externalities. So states' experimentation can also be problematic. Thinking about this problem then, and I'm hoping this is starting to feel theoretically related to some of the decentralized governance problems that you all take on. We have this question of, if we have a set of rules, how do we recognize transgressions to those rules? So, when we see a transgression, who did it? What's the extent of the transgression? Can we measure it? How broad are the effects? Are those transgressions actually beneficial? Right? So is it useful that this happened? And if that's the case, we want to have the system be able to tolerate that transgression. In fact, actually diffuse it, learn from it. Okay. I'll pause for a second because I see a ton of chat stuff, which is probably just Seth having to run off to childcare, but I can't see the chat. So is there anything that anybody would like to bring up right now?

Okay. Alright. And is it because you're on the label Joshua. Are you Josh or Joshua?

Josh. Okay. Great, Josh. Thanks. Now I wanna be able to give you just, you know, the the sense of how this is pieced together. So it might might take me, you know, a a good eight or so minutes more, and then we can open to discussion. Does that sound good?

Okay. Awesome. Alright. So this institutional design question generally, with institutions, the way that we think about it, for those of us who are institutional theorists, we think of an institution as a designation of an incentive environment and an information environment. So it captures, who are the agents, how are the agents in relation to one another, what roles might they have, What choices are available to them? What information do they have about their choices? And what are their con the con what is the consequence of their choices? So that's the way we think about an institution. That's the way I'm gonna be using it today. And then if you are a designer of institutions, whether it's something that's emergent and maybe quasi accidental or something that's very explicitly designed, like the structure of a congress or something like that. It is designed in a way to manipulate the behavior of our agents towards some social goal. Right? So, there's a branch of economics known as, mechanism design. And this is the idea that you have this social welfare function, the institution, maps behavior, toward, some collective outcome. And we might design it in a way to bring us to a better collective outcome. Alright. So the kind of institution I'm talking about today, the way I've been thinking about the safeguards is as trigger mechanisms. Right? Is a trigger mechanism that is something that, where there is a behavior, the behavior triggers some consequence. Generally, we can think about it as a punishment. So let's think about it as if the behavior is non compliance and non compliance that is egregious enough to trigger some punishment. So what it looks like is there's a punishment, there's a consequence that, is specified by the institution. There is some threshold that is some point at which the behavior is just too off the charts and it's gonna, trigger this punishment. There's also, of course, this observation. That is, how do we gather information about what has just occurred? What kind of evidence counts as a part of our signal or our observation? Without getting too into the weeds of the model, this is what it looks like as a figure. Right? So along the x axis, we have, behavior, which I am describing as level of compliance with the rules. Right? FC stands in for full compliance and then as we move along the x axis we have increasing levels of transgression or opportunism. Right? And that there is some threshold after which there is some likelihood that the, punishment will be triggered by this institution. Right? So, the probability of punishment, and this again this, as I to start quickly before, these are imperfect institutions, so they receive some noisy signal. So it could be that you you you didn't really screw up too badly, but there is some low probability that you're punished anyway. It becomes increasingly likely until at some point it's for sure. What does that do to utility? Because of course that's the way we model, individual choice is in terms of expected utility. If compliance is costly, you move away from full compliance up until the point when it becomes quite likely that you're going to be punished. Optimal behavior falls in if the institution is rigged right, falls in somewhere here. What's some properties of this model? In equilibrium, there's gonna be slippage. That is, you saw it moving away from full compliance. So as I said earlier, we should expect transgressions. We should expect the agents here, which are the states and the federal government, to be pushing against those boundaries. That is normal behavior. In equilibrium, there's occasional punishment. You have to have that in order to reduce those incentives to to deviate even more, to run away with self interested behavior. And there's a side question, a philosophical question about what is law when we have these, different components of it. I'm gonna leave that to the side. But that slippage is what I want you to be thinking about. In a system with imperfect observation, you're gonna have slippage. And when you have slippage, that opens up the door for adaptation. That is some of those transgressions could be useful, could help us to change our mind about how we might, interpret the meaning of the rules for the better. Okay. So what are these safeguards then, that I've only been describing in theoretical terms? Well, the one that you everybody thinks of right away is of course the judiciary. The judiciary is there as an umpire, right, to to say whether or not, a state government's laws or the federal or congressional laws are in, line with the constitution. So there's constitutional review or, by by the judiciary. But that's not the only safeguard that we have. In our system of fragmented legislature, you know, Congress well first of course separation of powers. We have, an executive who may go, as we've seen quite recently, very far afield. We have possibly countered by separation of legislature, possibly not countered. And then within the legislature itself we have fragmentation, you know, Senate and the House. Duplicated in 49 of our 50 states, Nebraska being the only one with the unicameral system. So lots of broken apart pieces and each each one is a possibility to put the brakes on any behavior that might be overstepping the constitutional boundaries. So, lots of checks built into the system. There's also checks in the party system, possibly. This is, you know, work by, Peter Orterschuck and Olga Shvetsova, Misha Filipoff, Bill Reicher. On within the party system itself, there's a relationship between the national party and the state and local parties where that might keep the national government in line that is it might keep it from encroaching on state authorities mindful that the state, Republican Party or the state Democratic Party wants to hold on to its own powers. So the party system is a possible check on authority. Intergovernment and retaliation is state on state or like we what we just saw last week with, you know, that extraordinary challenge by the state of Texas, challenging the electoral outcomes in other states. This is state on state through the legal system but it could also be state on state like Civil War. So that would be between the governments. And then finally, there's us, the pop popular electoral safeguards that are that is our own interpretation, which we act on in the streets sometimes. We act on when we vote. Okay. Any questions about these pieces, before we get to Canada? Alright. So the Canadian constitutional patriation, that story I opened with, it wasn't just the court, right? I only told you about the court, but prior to it landing on the court's desk, there were other safeguards operating. So there were all kinds of structural safeguards. There was a conference of the first ministers, which, which is what with the provincial premiers and the prime minister, which the prime minister chose to ignore. Right? So it was it it was there and the prime minister said, yeah, I I hear your grievances, but I think we're good. There was operate opposition in parliament. Prime minister was able to push through that. There was a, this, you know, enduring relationship with Britain. So there was a parliamentary study in Britain and and, prime minister pushed through that. Even with his own within his own party, there was dissent, and he pushed through. So he broke through all of these safeguards and, was still planning to go forward until the court said, we can't stop you. Alright? The federal plan is legal. Alright. So why? I'm still not gonna tell you the answer yet. Okay. So there are three ways I think about this set of institutions. I'm only gonna say it quickly here. They cover different aspects of the federal relationship. They back one another up. This is the sense of complementarity and they are redundant to one another. That is when one fails because there is redundant functionality in the Safeguard system, another may step in. Okay? And, just to give you, you know, just encourage you to pick up my book, maybe? I don't know. There's a lot of theory built around what this looks like. Okay? Which we can get into if you're interested in the, Q and A. So, and in particular, some of you might be interested in the redundancy part, where we have this problem two different kinds of problems that this institution might punish too frequently or not frequently enough, and so we really need this relationship with another institution, either as insurance or as confirmation. That's that's basically it, of the signal itself. That is, insurance, in case they're not punishing frequently enough, confirmation, if they were headed if the, safeguard had a tendency to punish too frequently and with severe consequences, say, civil war, you would want other institutions to step in before that to confirm the signal. Right? Otherwise, the system would be too sparky and probably not be viable as a union. Okay. So insurance and confirmation, which just to give you the sense that there might be some things to talk about. I want to pause on this and then get back to Canada. So here we have these kind of mild safeguards. The safeguards that are most active but have pretty mild consequences. Like, for example, the judiciary. It takes forever for a case to wind its way through the judiciary. It's really unusual to have the kind of, you know, outcome that we had last week where there was the 126 word denial of request for the court to hear it. Ordinarily, you know, it works its way up through the system a couple of years. And in the meanwhile, the the you know, if it's a state, say, the state is able to continue doing whatever it was doing before and pissing off another state. So and again, just like before when I showed you that figure, we should think about the x axis as recognize as designating increasing noncompliance. Right? So in the early stages, very little noncompliance. Nothing really is happening in these safeguards. Later stages, popular consensus, this is us, us clueless selves, at this point, these mild safeguards may become activated. That is, we might hear challenges, say the House may reject something that the Senate is doing or vice versa. And what we do as a public is we say, yeah, this is the way things are supposed to operate. We recognize this set of institutions and this procedure as legitimate. K? And so we allow that challenge to exist and happen even if we might have wanted that that legislation, say. And, but then as things become increasingly egregious, the it might move past the mild safeguards, because the, the agent who is transgressing may find it worth these my absorbing the mild punishments in order to get what he really wants. At some point, the public becomes aware of the existence of a line and starts thinking about whether or not the transgressor is crossing that line. And at some point, the public agrees on the signal, becomes activated. K. So think about this map and think about the power of the public if we choose to act, but how much it takes. Remember that noisy signal. And a signal is noisy even in a courtroom where there are such strict rules about what evidence can be heard and careful deliberation over the quality of the evidence. And if that's a noisy signal, just imagine the noise of the signal that we as a public are receiving. And so imagine how hard it is for us to form consensus over whether or not something's in violation. So let me take you now I'm gonna tell you the answer back to Canada, and then we'll close-up. So he passed through all of this. Here's where we are, Trudeau backing down. And with any most Supreme Court decisions, you have the holding, and the holding here was, we can't stop you. It's legal. And then you have the dicta, or the reasoning, right? You read the dicta and it's extraordinary in the patriotsian reference. So, it says things like this: the exercise of such a power, that is patriating the constitution and adding on this charter, has no support in constitutional convention that is doing this without getting the provincial premiers. Because remember I said there was this tradition of if there was gonna be some modification of the constitution, the prime minister would get the approval of the, provinces. That was a convention. And moving ahead without their approval is not supported by convention. Conventions, the court goes on to say, represent the prevailing constitutional values. That is, remember early I said there's this glue, these unwritten rules, these norms, right? That's what they're talking about here, prevailing values. It's not something you can measure very clearly, but it is our sense of what our constitution means. And the court says, it's the conventions plus the words that were written down that equal the totality of our constitution. Constitution is not limited to the words written on paper, but includes everything that's between the lines, our understanding. They say, okay, it's because the sanctions of convention rest with institutions of government other than the courts and ultimately with the electorate. So what the court has just done is if we go back to this, they have just said, hey. Here we sit, we can't do anything. He's already busted through us. But you, electorate, we're now talking about you as safeguards. And what we're doing is saying that there is a threshold, and we're telling you what that threshold is. And we are actually even telling you that he has crossed the line. And it's up to you. Now, this case was heavily publicized in the media. It was everybody was waiting for what the court would do. All of the nightly news were all about this. Right? So when Jean Chretien was saying, Cool, we're gonna run forward, at the same time the nightly news were saying, The court says they can't stop it, but the people can. And the court says that this is in violation of the Constitution, and it's up to us. Okay, so this is the way it was reported out. So Trudeau, an incredible politician, very gifted, says this, As a lawyer, as a teacher of constitutional law, and a former minister of justice, I felt that the court said what we were doing was legal, we should go ahead and do it. But as a politician, I wondered whether the public would understand our decision, or whether they would think I was being reckless. And here I'm gonna call on Adam, our resident Canadian, to explain the word reckless. Is it good or bad?

It's right up there with maverick. Okay? It's right up there with someone who defies order and harmony. And so when he used that word reckless, and this is actually in his memoirs, it's him saying, I have violated the Canadian principle of harmony. And I can't do this. Okay. So, and here's just, over the fall, lots of evidence that Justin Trudeau was really trying hard to, you know, whether or not it was successful, but trying hard to reach out to, the provinces in making sure that COVID policy was coordinated. Okay. So some of the lessons. I've said breaking the rules is inevitable and it can be good. Right? That we can get perfection from these very imperfect components when they, because of the way that they are structured in this way of backing one another up. And so we can design constitutions with this human error in mind. What robustness teaches me and others who care about federalism, teaches us about federalism, this complementarity institutions, it teaches us that this conflict that we might otherwise judge as being problematic, like could there be anything good that came out of Texas's legal challenge to whatever it was five or six other states? I'd say yeah, there was actually something quite good about that challenge because it reinforced this idea that it's none of Texas's business the way that Michigan runs their elections. And the Court reaffirmed that. So that can be beneficial, but we can also learn good things from pushing against boundaries. And that these norms, as expressed by the people, are a critical component of this system of safeguards. And then maybe this is more useful to some of you who are working on, non federalism, but other kinds of decentralized governments, and and governance and resilience. So we can think in terms of functional complementarity of a system, and as as well as perception complementarity, that is, how are we how are we interpreting our observations? Do we have non, non identical sources of information as we're reviewing transgressions? And and some more things about redundancy. Okay. So thank you. I wanna open it up for conversation now. And, in particular, you know, if you're if you are like me, somebody who cares deeply about the American federal system, I would love to talk about what I think about how federalism has really saved us over in this period of depolarization and how it might save us it might actually be a real tool for Biden as well. Okay. So I'm gonna stop sharing. I could pull a slide up if it's if it's useful, but I'm gonna stop this year so I can see you all. Okay?

Yeah. Polycentricity was really popularized by Vincent Ostrom in the Ostrom workshop. And polycentric governments having multiple locuses of power. And so it is inherently this, you know, networked system, interrelated in ways that need to be, you know, specified based upon whatever particular system you're looking at. Not necessarily multi level. Federalism is necessarily multi level. Federalism also has this distinction that, as far as I know, I'm the first to include this in the definition of federalism, but I think it's important for when we're thinking about polycentricity, is this relationship between, all levels of government. So, let's just assume it's two, federal and state, and the public. That is that each government is directly accountable to the public and can operate directly on the public. And so for those of you who are American history buffs and you you've read a bit about the Articles of Confederation, which is, you know, our constitution before our constitution, under the articles, the federal the national government, the congress, the continental congress, had no direct authority over the public. Everything they did went through the states. So anyway, that would be a distinction between a federal system and a polycentric system. You could think about a federal system as being a subset of polycentricity.

So, again, to this definition of which includes the direct relationship, And then also that includes, some authority that is their own, that is beyond just being, an implementer of a higher level. Because of course in The United States system we have states and then we have counties and townships and school boards and villages and etcetera. Right? But some of those cities are chartered cities, that is cannot be dissolved by the states. And so are in a sense, according to the state constitution, constitutionally recognized. And I would call that at least a third level. There's another sense though that I think is important. Remember the how important the public are is. Public is or are. I don't know. How important we are. And we're important in the sense that, let's say here I sit in the city of Ann Arbor, which is a quite progressive city, And I have within the state of Michigan, which, everybody I think in the country now knows about the politics of the state of Michigan, because of, this last electoral system. But you know that we're very fiftyfifty and we have, because thanks to gerrymandering we have this Republican crazy Republican legislature and brilliantly gifted Democratic, women running the state. But anyway, let's imagine that the Republican legislature just had had it with with Ann Arbor and our progressive rules, and they wanted to dissolve us. Right? Even though we are not constitutionally protected in the same way some other charter cities might be constitutionally protected, there is no way according to electoral safeguards that you could overwhelm the city of Ann Arbor. That said, we had the governor, governor Snyder, who's a republican governor, allow a takeover of Flint and Detroit. And that of course is what got him in hot water because that led to the Flint water crisis. With this takeover we had some stand in public officials who weren't paying attention and weren't caring enough. But anyway, so it can happen. There, you didn't have the public pushback that protected those cities, but I I can guarantee you would have enormous public pushback if he tried to come after Ann Arbor.

Yeah. I'll ask the simplest one since we're just out of time. Do you make a distinction between passive and active sort of in, like, designs. I'm gonna use something very simple. The traffic circle example, like a traffic light versus a circle. So you talked about some of the economic mechanism design, and in particular, I I wanna know your thoughts on, yeah, this sort of passive active dichotomy if you observe it in these institutional settings.

I love that dichotomy, and I haven't thought about it in those terms. I'm an enormous fan of the traffic circle as being a massive efficiency boost, And we might think about a traffic circle as and I imagine this is the way you're thinking about it as well, is just structure that allows people to better to to I don't know which is passive and active, but maybe that's active in the sense that it allows people to actively participate in managing their own flow. Is that what you think? Yeah.

Yeah. So it's a passive active dichotomy. I'm borrowing it from, like, you know, signal processing and control theory. I'm a control theorist. But, like, passive meaning that the system isn't directing people. In this case, the people are the the they're participating in it, and I guess you're right. They're being active, so it's a framing question. But, if we think of it from the designer's perspective, yeah, the traffic circle is passive and the traffic light is active. But, interestingly, you're reframing it from the person's perspective, then the traffic circle is active for them, and the traffic light is passive because they're just being told what to do. So maybe kind of since we're out of time, we'll save this for for maybe a Slack discussion. But yeah. Okay. You answered my question, but more with more questions.

No. No. And I I I think think you've turned me on to a literature I'd like to read a lot more about because what I'm working on right now is what is it that institutions can do to help develop norms and reinforce norms. And so in my reframing, I think I went to that reframing because I have been thinking so much about people participating and having the opportunity to not only express their own views about what is right and what is wrong, but to observe others in also having those views. So it's a way of building common knowledge. I'm sure you guys have talked a lot about common knowledge and how it's constructed. And so, so I thank you. If if, if you have recommendations for me, email them to me because I, I'm thinking that I might wanna turn the next page.

I'll I'll start at a thread with you then because I think on one hand, I can give you relatively technical stuff that's not really related to people making decisions, but, like, a lot of my work relates to turning these control theoretic and signal processing concepts into tools for designing social systems. So I actually really want to better understand what you've learned in this particular framing.

Sweet. Let's let's, converse.

Nice to

meet you. Yeah.

Thank you, everyone.

And Josh, can I ask if somebody send me the comments, which I'm not they're in that are dropped in the chat?

I just copied them. I'll paste them.

Can you somebody send them to me. I would really like to see them because they look super interesting. Amazing. Thank you, everyone.