My old university just announced its new branding. The new look is competently executed, attractive, and elegantly consolidates the school’s various sub-brands.

It also perfectly captures how fundamentally ill-equipped the school is to cope with the present, let alone lead towards the future.

It’s no secret that the university has been trying to move away from its reputation as a party school, this rebrand is the most transparent attempt possible to do so.

I’m frustrated because education is rotting from within, and this is how the school tries to stay relevant. For all the complaints about how the movie industry is stuck in the 1960s, our education system is stuck in the 1760s. And proposed updates, like Blackboard’s unforgivably bad software (WebCT in my day), do nothing to change how education works, they just digitally codify outdated practices and give university administrators the mistaken impression that they’ve managed to stay with the times.

An “education,” whether for its own value or to help you get a job, is–at least to me–about developing the skills to find the information you need, assess its value, integrate it into the context at hand, and make a better decision than you otherwise could have. These skills aren’t taught at university; we develop them to cope with university.

For example, before most of my exams, I would save a copy of my notes to my phone so that I could check discreetly check them if I got stuck. In other words, I set myself up to cheat. I never actually checked those notes, but it felt nice knowing that I could. (It’s worth noting that in Philosophy you either understood the material or you failed–notes or not.)

In the “real world,” having a copy of your notes is called being prepared. Instead, university exams expect us to tie one hand behind our backs and master a skill we’ll seldom if ever use again. Why not make the problems harder and let students use every possible tool or resource to solve them? Even students singularly focused on learning for its own value would get so much more out of the experience.

“Western University” faced a branding problem and declining academic rankings. Instead of taking the opportunity to have the legions of smart, engaged stakeholders ask and answer hard questions about education, they made their official colour slightly darker and produced an awful video. This problem isn’t unique to Western, this just happened to hit close to home.

Your brand is everything that you do, not how you choose to portray yourself.

The biggest problem with politicians is that they’re human, which is to say they’re greedy, or “rationally self-interested.” This is more of a problem than when you or I are greedy, because we’re not elected officials expected to act in the public good. As a result, we get stuff like SOPA. Elected office is a great place to make more money, often in spite of your campaign promises.

We need to make integrity more attractive to politicians. Since capitalism is about designing a context that directs greedy behaviour towards a larger good, why not repurpose some of its better ideas here? Clearly the language politicians think in is money, so let’s start with that. If government is bought and paid for, we’re going to have to pony up some dollars so that we can do the buying.

Here’s the idea. For whatever it’s worth, I release it under the GPL:

With Kickstarter, if you believe in a business, you pledge money. Once enough money is pledged, everyone is charged. (It’s the same structure as Groupon, but used for good instead of evil.) The core idea is that once an event happens, the money is unlocked. With Kickstarter, the event is a total number of dollars pledged. For our purposes, the event could be something like a politician actually delivering on a campaign promise.

In practice, it would work out like this: A politician lists their core goals, and you can tick off the ones you like. Let’s say they’re saying four things you really agree with. You pledge $100 dollars. $20 goes to them off the bat, and each subsequent $20 is linked to a specific election goal. Each time they accomplish a promise, the money linked to that promise is released–to fund re-election or whatever it is that politicians spend money on.

This has a few interesting results:

1. It aligns the interests of politicians with their constituents. They don’t have to worry about raising money from lobbyists to get re-elected, they just have to deliver on their campaign promises.
2. It pushes us towards evidence based policy. If politicians want to get paid, they have to identify measurable goals. None of this “I’ll go to work for you!” It instead become “I’m going to delivery this outcome by this date.” This emphasizes the importance of measurement in governance.
3. It encourages politicians to steal one another’s ideas. I wish there were a lot more of this. Smart ideas can come from anywhere. If politicians are in the evidence based mindset, and their opponent has a great idea that will be in everyone’s best interests, why not just steal it? Good ideas should thrive no matter who’s in charge.

This theme can be varied. For instance, during a campaign people could pledge $10/month so long as there are no attack ads. If a candidate gets too aggressive, they lose access to that revenue stream.

There was a brilliant move by the Obama campaign that I heard about through the grapevine. A system was set up to monitor the things being said against Obama by his critics. Every time an opponent referred to Obama negatively, Obama supporters automatically donated a few bucks into his campaign. Say $5 for calling him a communist, $10 for calling him a terrorist. This way, talking trash about your opponent just bolsters their financial position, so play nice. This kind of secondary/negative market would be easy to set up.

To ensure a level playing field, all donors could be capped at $500/year, and if you wanted to get really progressive about it, you could issue everyone a $500 tax refund to kick things off.

Clearly there will be ways to game this system, but for now it’s a thought experiment. I’m sure that with enough discussion we could map out avenues for exploitation and come up with ways to prevent them.

Also it’s entirely possible that what’s mapped out here is illegal in practice. That can be changed.

Enough years have passed that I can publicly admit to playing Magic: The Gathering as a teenager. Briefly: it’s a strategy card collection game. It’s funny looking back at it now to see why the business model works. It’s a scratch-ticket lottery for children.

Without going into details, there are many different types of cards and some are more rare than others. Cards also work together in sets/combos. Cards can be purchased individually from trading shops, or purchased in random sealed sets of ten or so.

Because some specific cards are desired, because they’re rare or they complete a set/combo, and because the cheapest way to get new cards is to buy the random packages, the game is a random reward schedule–just like lottery tickets and World of Warcraft. Players don’t know when they’re going to get the card they want, so their only response is to buy as many random packs as they can, hoping for the best.

There is also a strategic gameplay component to the game, but it’s only there to drive sales. Put simply, because anyone can spend money to upgrade their deck, everyone has to. Players are locked in an arms race. And by releasing new, more powerful cards, the pressure to buy more is increased.

Zynga’s a brilliantly evil company but Wizards of the Coast was doing the same thing decades earlier–on nothing but pieces of paper.