Commissions & carry for civil servants

If the mayor & economic development team of a city bring in prosperity, they should get a cut of that after citizens do.

For example, if the city sovereign fund returns billions to citizens, the civil servants should get millions.

Civil servants control enormous flows of money, but aren’t officially supposed to partake of any of it.

In many areas of government this leads to a revolving door. Regulate, then make money consulting when out of office.

Or it means outright corruption: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2020/sf-city-hall-corruption-who-is-nuru

Singapore takes the route of paying civil servants well.

However, simply increasing pay isn’t the entirety of it. As an island with no natural resources, Singapore is disciplined by exit.

The key is to tie pay to performance for society as a whole. https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/05/game-theory-pay-politicians-more-voter-attention-000039/

Rather than high base salary alone, the idea of tying the compensation of civil servants to hard-to-fake metrics like delivering $1000 in sovereign fund returns to all citizens = pay for performance.

Many details to work out, but broadly speaking it could realign many incentives

One of the most interesting things about this — it vectors in the complete opposite direction of our current anti-immigrant, anti-entrepreneur politics.

Rather than stoking nationalist/ socialist hatred of immigrants & entrepreneurs (which means no Moderna!), you recruit them.

Right now, nationalist and socialist sentiment is fusing into something nasty.

“Get out of our city” = “get out of our country”

You can argue about ways to fix an economy or policy, but driving out talent probably isn’t the way to do it.