In what passes for the contemporary blogosphere, there's been a bit of a kerfuffle about tooth decay.

Richard Hanania expresses his admiration of, and his epistemological deference toward, Scott Alexander by confessing he has "let some genetically engineered bacteria colonize [his] mouth" on Alexander's apparent say so.

If you'd like to do the same, Hanania offers an affiliate link you can use.

The bacteria have been genetically engineered not to convert sugar to lactic acid, the corrosive agent that eats cavities into our teeth. These brave new microbes are designed to supplant our native population of tooth-decay germs, once and for all time, leaving nothing that can harm us.

In a best-case scenario, this would be a near cure for tooth decay. Which would be a big fucking deal.

But reality does not always dole out best-case scenarios. Only most of the time.

Scott Alexander, whose vocation is careful, exhaustive reasoning, pulls a "Woah, Nelly!". In response to Hanania's flirtations, he confesses that he thinks there's only a 50% chance these bacteria will help at all, and just a 5% chance the bacteria prove as powerful against tooth decay as the application of fluoride.

Fluoridation, while genuinely a big fucking deal, did not cure tooth decay. I, like Hanania, had inferred a more optimistic take from Alexander's prior writing.

Nevertheless Alexander seems enthusiastic about a project to bring these bacteria to market. A company called Lumina Probiotic is just going to produce and sell the stuff. Apparently they have been selling the treatment for some time in Próspera, Honduras, which Alexander describes as

a libertarian charter city... Prospera allows the sale of any biotech product under an informed consent rule: as long as the company is open about risks and the patient signs a waiver saying they were informed, people can do what they want.

Soon Lumina will sell it here too.

You can preorder from their website, which patiently explains on a page called "science" how their microbe displaces native bacteria, reducing lactic acid which "erodes enamel over time, causing issues". Then, at the bottom of the page, "These claims have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease."

Of course not.

I'm not worried about all this. It's fine as far as it goes. With any novel bacteria, or any widespread deployment of anything once very niche, there are potential tail risks. Those risks seem ordinary, however, similar to lots of other things we do all the time.

But is just jumping into the marketplace really a good way forward for a promising new treatment?

Inventor Jeffrey Hillman and Oragenics, a firm he cofounded, did begin putting these bacteria through a regimen of FDA trials. Alexander writes

The FDA demanded a study of 100 subjects, all of whom had to be “age 18-30, with removable dentures, living alone and far from school zones”. Hillman wasn’t sure there even were 100 young people with dentures, but the FDA wouldn’t budge from requiring this impossible trial. Hillman gave up and switched to other projects (including an intranasal COVID vaccine!)

[Lumina founder] Aaron [Silverbook] heard this story and figured that brash, move-fast-and-break-things Silicon Valley biotech might be able to find an alternative route to commercialization. The strain was off-patent, so he first tried to synthesize it himself from the clues in Hillman’s published papers. When that didn’t work, he made a deal with Oragenics for 10% of profits in exchange for samples and the full recipe...

The FDA has already set unreachable standards for any drug approval study, so Aaron wants to try a different route.

The FDA has lower standards for probiotics than for drugs.

Kevin Drum disputes this characterization, and I think Alexander basically concedes the point. One, very small, human trial did occur — on denture wearers, because it was a safety trial, and dentures would be easier to clear than teeth if the treatment proved unsafe. That trial succeeded, and a second trial on real teeth was planned. (Via Drum, see articles in Popular Science and the New York Times.)

If it was FDA's fault the treatment didn't go forward, it was not because of "unreachable standards". The cost the agency exacted was time. FDA was cautious about transgenic therapy, for reasons that should be obvious after the last few years' "lab leak" debate. FDA made demands, which were understandable but far from trivial. Oragenics met them, but the process took a long time. Then Oragenics just stopped. Drum (remarkably) dug up a transcript in which Oragenics' CEO John Bonfiglio says "because of some regulatory concerns and patent issues, we decided to, at least for the time being, put it on the shelf and not develop it."

Patent issues.

The patent status of the bacteria is ambiguous. Drum notes that Oragenics scored a patent in 2016 for "Replacement Therapy for Dental Caries". In the press release announcing a collaboration between Oragenics and "Lantern Bioworks" (now apparently Lumina), Oragenics emphasizes, "Crucially, this agreement does not entail the transfer of intellectual property ownership from Oragenics to Lantern Bioworks."

Yet a precursor of the Hillman's replacement therapy enjoyed its first patent filing in 1978. Alexander dates the current strain to a survey of grad-student mouth fauna by Hillman in 1985. Since 1978, Hillman has filed a steady stream of patents many of which, at least to naive eyes, look like variations on the same theme. The most recent grant was filed in 2020 and approved in 2022. An application for yet another was filed that same year.

US patent protection lasts no longer than 20 years, and is not renewable. Just because a patent is granted doesn't mean it can be enforced. Protection has definitely lapsed on the version of the bacteria upon which Hillman first sought to conduct human trials in 2004. Whatever the basis for Oragenics' 2016 patent, or Hillman's in 2022, a rival might successfully contest whether, in light of all the prior work, they are sufficiently novel, useful, and nonobvious to be enforceable.

Indeed, while Oragenics crows about its "intellectual property ownership", Lumina investor Yishan Wong characterizes the product as "in the public domain", flatly stating that "[i]n 2023, the patent on the treatment held by Oragenics expired."

So the issue seems not to be, as Alexander originally claimed, that "[t]he FDA...set unreachable standards". The issue is that clinical trials, while perfectly doable, are expensive. Since the treatment likely lacks enforceable patent protection, it's not worth it to any commercial entity to bear the cost.

Under the circumstances, adopting a "move-fast-and-break-things Silicon Valley" ethos and characterizing the treatment as a supplement might indeed be an "alternative route to commercialization". But is it a good route?

Alexander has previously examined whether expanding the relatively laissez-faire regulation supplements enjoy would be a good circumvention of FDA bottlenecks. His conclusion is appropriately mixed:

[Supplements are] shockingly safe — 50 - 70% of Americans take supplements regularly, and there are only a tiny handful of negative outcomes nationwide...

On the other hand, there’s little agreement on which supplements work, or whether any of them work at all. Most doctors ignore the whole field rather than try to sort through the competing claims, and studies are few, dubious, and often contradictory...

[A] company might release a great new drug as a supplement instead of seeking FDA approval, and then doctors might stay lazy and never think about it or prescribe it. In a perfect world, the company could use the revenue it makes from supplement sales to sponsor the FDA approval process. But in practice, if it switches from a supplement to a drug, that makes life worse for patients (they’ll need a prescription and lots of money for something they used to get cheaply and conveniently) and those patients would probably resist. So supplement status might end up as a ghetto that drugs stay in forever.

If our happy germs are indeed 95%+ effective against any reoccurrence of dental caries with basically no side effects, then releasing as a supplement might be great. Cavities develop slowly, so it'd take a bit of time. But early adopters like Hanania (and Mrs. Alexander!) would try the supplement. They would almost universally report never needing a filling again. Eventually we'd all catch on. That "eventually" might not be much longer than it would have taken to get formal clinical trial outcomes. In the meantime, early adopters would have been spared significant pain and disability, and an important liberty interest would have been served.

But fluoridation would not have yielded such clear, word-of-mouth success. Alexander now claims that a fluoridation-level improvement is his 5% probable "best case", and that even if the treatment does work to some degree, he thinks its benefits are likely to be more modest.

Absent clinical trials, how will we ever know the treatment works at all, then? How will we tell whether whatever we hear is genuine good news, rather than enthusiasm of TikTok influencers incentivized by Lumina or its less ethical future competitors? How will medical and dental authorities become comfortable to recommend the treatment?

My own kid has suffered terribly from tooth decay, and addressing it has cost a small fortune. But as long as this treatment has the status of a supplement Joe Rogan might hawk, we'd be unlikely to risk it for him. Suppose the treatment actually does work. Does the welfare benefit of releasing it as a supplement exceed the welfare cost paid by people who might have benefited but won't because it will be insufficiently vetted?

I think settling for this trade-off is just stupid.

Another aspect of "move-fast-and-break-things Silicon Valley", and the adjacent rationalist community, is a prejudice against the possibility of a functional state. Alexander succumbed to this prejudice in his initial characterization of why clinical trials languished.

Alexander comes by his views honestly, but "Silicon Valley" writ large does not. "Silicon Valley" telegraphs that the state does not work and cannot work, because the titans of Silicon Valley — the VCs and founders, sycophancy towards whom defines the culture — do not want the state to work.

A working state has legitimacy, which means legitimacy to regulate, legitimacy to tax, legitimacy to enforce competition law and to break empires into pieces. No, no. The state is a dinosaur. Hayek proved it just can't work. Government is hopeless, broken. It had fucking better be.

Of course government can work. Despite very real pathologies, even today it works much better than we give it credit for. It has worked better still in the past, and, if we are not idiots, it will work much better in the future.

If Dr. Hillman's microbe is effective, in order to realize its potential benefit to human health, we will need formal, clinical trials. Not to overcome regulatory speedbumps or to jump through bureaucratic hoops, but to persuade ourselves, at an institutional level, that it works.

And not just any clinical trials. There are no two words more common and less credible in the supplements industry than "studies say". We'll need trials supervised and certified by some kind of authority — an administration even — to whose judgement various professional associations routinely defer, out of genuine respect for the rigor of its processes, or, more cynically, by virtue of a rational astrology.

But high quality clinical trials really are expensive! If the treatment is out-of-patent, who would possibly perform those trials?

We have a state.

A core function of our state is to pool resources and purchase public goods, like knowledge about the effectiveness of medical treatments. It is not a problem if an effective treatment is out-of-patent. It is a blessing. It means the treatment can be made available inexpensively. If it would have been worthwhile for the holder of a freshly minted patent to conduct trials, that means the social value of the treatment is much greater than the expenses FDA demands. We don't need to rip our hair out that there is no patent-holder to make this investment. We have a state.

We even have a democratic state.

Our democracy is deeply flawed. There is no more urgent task before us than to improve it.

Nevertheless, our state remains more open and democratic than nearly any formal institution of comparable scale in human history.

I have written to my representative in the US House and to both Florida senators, encouraging them to fund public trials of the genetically engineered bacteria Richard Hanania stuffed in his mouth on Scott Alexander's say-so. If it works, I'd like it to be stuffed in my kid's mouth as well, on the well-informed recommendation of his dentist.

I encourage you, dear reader, to write your representatives in Congress too.

Richard Hanania and Scott Alexander both have far larger readerships than this blog. If they believe that Dr. Hillman's treatment could be a benefit to humankind, they also could encourage their readers to write.

If you believe in this treatment, you can feel edgy circumventing the regulatory state and making it available to biohackers. You can hit Hanania's affiliate link and become a biohacker yourself. Totally cyberpunk. Awesome.

Alternatively you can help improve the institutions through which the treatment might contribute to the welfare of millions and ultimately billions of people. Maybe that's a bit cringe.

Cynicism about democracy is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Only you can say what kind of prophesy you prefer to see fulfilled.

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p.s. Here's my letter to Anna Paulina Luna, my representative in Congress. Feel free to use it as a starting point!

p.p.s. If the treatment does work, the state should grant Dr. Hillman and Oragenics generous rewards, despite any weakness in their intellectual property portfolio. In general, we should deemphasize grants of monopoly to encourage innovation, and try other models, including retrospective funding. State-granted monopolies may be time-limited, but they lack meaningful ceilings in the costs and economic distortions they impose while they last. (And grantees have proven very capable of innovating around the time limits!)

What really happened to Boeing?

A cliché has emerged to explain Boeing's decline. Following the merger of the two firms, McDonnell Douglas' "financial", "Wall-Street-oriented", "bean-counter" culture displaced an engineering-centered culture that had hitherto prevailed at Boeing.

I find this explanation unsatisfying, because I do not know what it means. "Culture" is a kind of catch-all in social affairs that can be deployed to explain almost everything everywhere, and so it usefully explains nothing at all. If the advice your theory yields is "change the culture", then you have no meaningful advice.

Boeing's turning point was arguably when Harry Stonecipher, formerly of McDonnell Douglas, more formerly of Jack Welch's General Electric, ascended to the firm's leadership. Stonecipher's successor, James McNerny, also hailed from GE.

Jack Welch managed GE as a certain kind of rationalist. The business of a business is to maximize revenue and minimize costs. Plant, labor, and raw materials are costs. GE was already a conglomerate, not a unified firm. Welch sought to rotate its holdings towards lines of business that would bring in greater revenue with fewer of those costs, which meant he increasingly favored finance over industry. He gutted activities like basic research, whose connection to revenue was too loose to reliably value. He imposed very blunt, clear, incentives — ranking all employees, firing supposed underperformers and giving bonuses to outperformers in fixed percentages.

A thing to notice about this style of management is that you don't need to know anything about GE's particular businesses or technical processes to understand it. Welch's prescriptions reflected a form of economic rationality that is universally accessible, that could be taught in business school and tried anywhere. In my own little lingo, they reflect unsituated virtues.

But if you think the one weird trick to managing highly technical cutting-edge business processes at scale is a checklist of B-school bromides, you might just be mistaken. Basic research is very difficult to value. It remains essential to many firms' long-term viability regardless. Performance in highly collaborative processes may be hard to measure and easy to game. Canning supposed underperformers and rewarding "your best" might in practice lead you to shed your best and reward the cunning and disloyal. The mere exercise of ranking performance might undercut trust between employees, hobbling productive collaboration.

So a simple, not wrong, story about what happened at Boeing is that Jack Welch acolytes were elevated to the firm's leadership, and began to impose Welch's caricature, one-size-fits-all, business-school-friendly management style on what had already been an excellent enterprise, and in doing so they destroyed it.

I want to tell a slightly more sympathetic story. What, after all, was Harry Stonecipher supposed to do?

A modern aircraft is a marvel of technology, built upon an edifice of hard, empirical, science. Every element of an aircraft can be precisely described, characterized, and tested. But each choice about how any of those elements should be designed and all of those elements should be combined introduces tradeoffs, benefits and costs that are not straightforwardly commensurable.

You might think aeronautical engineering would be the ultimate "hard-information" kind of enterprise, but you would be wrong. The design space of an aircraft, the alternative combinations of plausible choices at every level from the tiniest part to the shape of the fuselage, is effectively infinite. There is no one true optimal design. Beneath the broadest specifications — how big, how far, how fast, burning how much fuel — an endless array of choices may have been made well or poorly, and expensively or cheaply. There is no objective measure by which to judge the quality of the process from outside of it. Designing and building — "engineering" — an aircraft is a soft information exercise. You can only have any idea if it is being done well if you are situated within the process and interacting with participants.

The key fact to note about Harry Stonecipher is not that he was influenced by Jack Welch. It's that he was, for the first time in the firm's history, an outside hire. Stonecipher had been President of McDonnell Douglas, which had under his stewardship been merged into Boeing. But he had no access to, no visibility into, no way to monitor, judge, understand, or discipline the je ne sais quoi that made Boeing work.

In order to do his job, Stonecipher undertook to rationalize and simplify and render legible the firm. Lacking access to "soft information" that could only come from developing relationships within Boeing over years of collaboration, he sought to manage the firm on the basis of "objective" so-called hard information. Among the most salient hard information in any business enterprise is cash flows, so the sway of "bean counters" was elevated automatically. Among the least legible information in a firm, to an outsider, is the quality of employee judgment calls, so internal expertise was demoted.

The Boeing Harry Stonecipher inherited was an integrated powerhouse. Every step, from the conception of new aircraft through their design, manufacture, and sale, was controlled and performed in-house. The new CEO infamously sought to transform the firm into a narrow specialist that would outsource all but a few aspects of the process. Again, you can blame Welch's simplistic B-school dogmatism for that. Specialization and trade are better than bureaucratic central planning. Focus on your core technology and let the market provide the rest. In retrospect, those ideas were obviously stupid for a domain where modification of any one element can cascade into requirements that myriad other elements change, requiring intensive coordination and costly renegotiation of contracts if those other elements are outsourced. Ronald Coase is also taught in business schools.

But the terms of contracts with outside vendors are objective and tangible in a way that continually evolving plans by managers and employees are not, especially when you don't know those managers and employees well enough to know whom to trust. Outsourcing was a business school fad by the early 2000s, but it also solved an information project for Boeing's new CEO, who, fêted but flying blind, was trying to manage a company that ran on processes he could not evaluate or even perceive.

Contracts, however, he could read. And understand, and negotiate. Organizational competences are soft information. The terms of legal documents are hard information.

In Seeing Like A State, James Scott famously described the perverse results that can occur when attempts to rationalize a system necessarily simplify it, eliminating as extraneous factors elements that in fact are essential, but whose role is not included in the reformer's simple model.

How was Harry Stonecipher supposed to run a firm whose excellences were embedded in talents and habits that could not be tabulated, systematized or measured? Was he just supposed to trust the judgment of "old Boeing hands"? Which ones? With whom would the buck stop?

That was his job. He had to reorganize the firm into something he could see, understand, and manage. So he did. Of course it did not help that Stonecipher and his successor James McNerny came out of Jack Welch's orbit. They had Welch's playbook too close at hand. But if you think the Boeing they inherited was a national treasure, the root of the rot was to bring in outside hires.

Contrary I think to many of our perceptions, the vast majority of firms, especially larger firms promote their CEOs internally. The idea of the superstar CEO turnaround artist, endowed with a managerial g factor enabling excellent leadership at any firm, is bullshit. Complex human institutions are their own realities, whose most important characteristics subsist in habits and relationships and invisibly distributed skills.

Effective leaders certainly do strive to surface and measure objective, quantitative data about their institutions, and incorporate it into their decision making. But those kinds of measures cannot be remotely sufficient to guide and govern the living organism that we call a firm. Track your EKGs and blood oxygen and body mass and lung capacity all you want. You'll never think out how to get peristalsis right. A brain detached from, incapable of regulating, the most of what we are that is submerged and "autonomous" is the brain of a creature not long for this world.

Firms like Boeing, that are not mere holding companies, but that develop and sustain and expand unique and complex competences, are each their own "deep state". Making outsiders brain and dictator of such an organism is an incredible disruption, an incredible sort of gamble. Perhaps when we have decided that the pathologies of our deep state so outweigh its capabilities, a YOLO on effectively killing the organism and reconstituting something else from its assets might make sense. But usually all you end up with is a corpse.

Which is what Boeing is, or would be, if its customers and the government that regulates it didn't require it so much. It's a firm on a ventilator. Perhaps it can be restored to rude good health, but that will take a great deal of time and dedication and care, and I think recruiting a lot of help from people likely now retired who knew it, and made it, when.

What it does not need is further bloodletting by shareholders. Even the most productive workers demand subsidy when they find themselves in intensive care.

The electoral system I favor for most elected positions is approval voting.

Under approval voting, voters are handed ballots identical to the ones they currently receive. The only difference is that instead of being asked to select our one most favored candidate, we are asked to select one or more candidates of whom we would "approve" for each position.

Votes are tallied just like they are now. Every votes is counted, and the candidate with the most votes wins. Every candidate is allocated all of the votes they received, regardless of whether a voter selected one or several candidates. Approval voting is extremely simple.

Approval voting addresses what voters most detest about the current system, that often we cannot express our true views without empowering those we most oppose.

Suppose you are some neocon, neoliberal, never-Trump person. You don't like Joe Biden. He's been veering towards social democracy, which you call "communism". But Trump, Trump is an idiot moral catastrophe who will destroy America. Under the current system, your only choice is to hold your nose and vote for the communist. Even if your true heartthrob — Mitt Romney! — could be persuaded to run as a third-party candidate, you couldn't vote for him. It would split the anti-Trump coalition. Given the dominance of the two big parties in America, a vote for a third party means a vote withheld from one of the candidates that might actually win. So if you care about the consequences of your vote rather than mere narcissistic self-expression, you have to vote for the one of the two major parties you think least bad, rather than for the third-party candidate you love. But then the fact that you do this, and that everybody else does this, cements in place the dominance of two parties few of us are very happy with.

Approval voting lets us break the cycle. Under approval voting, our beleaguered neolib neocon can put a check next to Mitt's name on her ballot, and also next to Comrade Joseph's. The first time around, while the two-party habit is still strong among us, the vote for Mitt is probably just self-expression. But it's no longer narcissistic self-expression, because now it does no harm. The vote for Biden still sets Trump back just as fully as it would have under our current system. And the self-expression is productively public. When votes are tallied, if a silent near-majority has expressed its love of Mitt and his new Old-Tyme Republican Party, voters will observe that, and next time around OTRP candidates will be real contenders rather than mere messaging.

Under approval voting, voters can always vote their true preference without splitting their broader coalition and handing an advantage to the worst candidate. And because voters' actual preferences become publicly visible, the self-fulfilling dynamic that stabilizes our current two-party duopoly is undermined. Third-parties can emerge as contenders. Once major parties can submerge.

"Breaking the two-party doom loop" is the first thing most discontents look for in electoral reform, and approval voting does that. But it does it in a way that has some really useful characteristics. In particular, it privileges candidates who can reach across factional lines over candidates who appeal exclusively to their own factional base.

In single-winner elections, where one person is going to have to serve a whole public, that person should be someone nearly everyone can live with, rather than a person adored by her own faction and hated by others. Elections ought not be contests over who will dominate whom. They are means by which we establish a government under which we all must thrive together.

Not all elections should be single-winner elections! We absolutely do want the purest, strongest, and best expressions of all of our political factions to participate in government. We just don't want the purest, strongest, and best of only one faction dominating the government and usurping control of the state. At the Federal level, members of the US House of Representatives should be elected not by any single-winner voting scheme, but by one of the many electoral systems that yield proportional representation, including MMP, multi-winner single transferable vote, or random ballot. A deliberative body meant to represent and include the full diversity and cacophony of the polity is quite different from a single official who must serve the whole public. The two demand different kinds of elections.

The US House should be assembled by proportional representation. The Senate, in which two at-large electeds must represent the whole publics of their states, should be selected by approval vote. That reform alone would dramatically alter the character of the body, and help render it a cooling saucer rather than a veto point for ideologues.

Approval voting represents a very incremental reform. It is approximately the current system. The most obvious strategy for voters is simply to cast one vote for their most preferred candidate. Most people will likely do just that. If everybody did it, then nothing would have changed.

But not everybody will vote only for their one favorite candidate. Some fraction of voters will "approve" two or more candidates.

Contrary to some very mistaken presentations, people who select multiple candidates are not "casting multiple votes" and thereby usurping voting power, violating the principle of one-person-one-vote. On the contrary. Selecting multiple candidates under approval voting is an act of generosity. You have selected your first choice, but then you add a candidate that is someone else's first choice, that is lesser from your perspective, and put that candidate on an equal basis to your own. The more candidates you select, the less you are insisting "my way or the highway". You are supporting your way, but you are also assenting to other ways that are not yours, but you can live with. This inverse relationship between preference imposition and number selected becomes obvious when you consider what happens if a voter approves every candidate. That has the same effect on the outcome as simply not voting at all.

So multiple selectors are generous voters. They are voters looking to find bridges and overlaps between their own preferences and those of other factions. And in what would be a close election if everybody chose only their fave — or under the current system — it is these generous voters, willing to make common cause with people whose values and interests differ somewhat from their own, who become kingmakers. Ironically, individually each voter cedes power by selecting more than one candidate. But as a class, approval voting elevates this group of less narrowly insistent voters to a position of influence.

Approval voting disfavors "mobilize the base" electoral strategies in favor of outreach and persuasion. One shouldn't evaluate electoral systems only by the electoral outcomes they tend to produce, but also by how they shape the behavior of candidates and the electorate. Our current system, in which primaries favor factional extremists, who are then mostly either shoe-ins for their position or subject to coin-flip general elections, does more even than Elon Musk to turn politics into a carnival of performative whack. Approval voting would dramatically change candidate incentives, and by doing so, would dramatically change our society for the better, regardless of who wins the various contests. Approval voting promotes social cohesion.

But wouldn't approval voting just elevate squish moderates, or even worse, "centrists"? I know, dear reader, you don't like "centrists". I detest "centrists". But what "centrism" has come to mean in American political discourse is the set of values and interests well served by the status quo, or at least the status quo as it prevailed until 2016. "Centrists" are socially liberal but fiscally conservative. "Centrists" don't want to tax billionaires, because they worry about incentives and "supply side effects" and whether soaking the rich would do "institutional violence" somehow to the country.

The actual center of American opinion looks nothing at all like this. Across factional lines, taxing extraordinary wealth more heavily is close to universally popular. Only the very rich themselves, and the weird sliver of "centrists" that serves them, object. The actual center in the United States is less socially liberal on some causes than "centrists" (which is why "anti-woke" can be an effective populist strategy), but very liberal on reproductive rights, and is overwhelmingly live-and-let-live. Approval voting would give us politicians whose agendas would be better aligned with the actual center of the electorate. This would look nothing like the agenda of contemporary so-called "centrists" in politics and media.

Approval voting would tend to yield candidates not perfectly aligned to my own socially liberal, social democratic views, but closer than what either party gives us now. And that would be the experience of most voters. From whatever direction we come, we do tend towards a common center when the politico-plutocratic freak show is not actively dividing us. Approval voting yields winners who deliver to no one everything they want. But its winners will be much closer to the vast majority than what's on offer from a duopoly that performatively chisels open social and cultural fissures in order to distract from a plutocratically constrained "consensus". And its winners will enjoy broader mandates than the 50% + one voter that the current system tends to, making it easier for elected officials to actually get things done.

Approval voting improves social cohesion. Social cohesion improves state capacity. State capacity deployed on behalf of a widely shared consensus improves all of our lives, in the ultimate virtuous circle.