---
description: Proposals that transfer ownership without creating value may pass futarchy approval if they increase the outcome metric through transfer effects
type: tension
domain: mechanisms
created: 2026-02-16
source: "Hanson, Futarchy Details (2024)"
confidence: speculative
tradition: "futarchy, mechanism design, political economy"
---

Robin Hanson identifies redistribution as futarchy's hardest unsolved problem in his 2024 reflection. Consider an organization whose outcome metric is total capital invested over twenty years, with $100 currently invested. Someone proposes to invest $1 more on condition that 60% of firm ownership is transferred to them.

If this proposal has no effect on other future investments, speculators should expect it to increase total capital (from $100 to $101) and approve it. But approving many such proposals would create perverse incentives: enormous effort flows into designing clever redistribution schemes rather than productive improvements. Worse, if ownership becomes unpredictable due to constant redistribution proposals, this might actually discourage future investment, though Hanson lacks confidence that markets would reliably predict and prevent this.

Traditional organizations solve this through laws and norms limiting redistribution, though such transfers clearly happen at times. Can futarchy do better than relying on external constraints? Hanson suggests the principle of commitment: approved proposals could restrict future proposals, allowing early adoption of rules prohibiting defined redistribution categories.

This could work through constitutional-style dual-level governance (a conservative deeper level that rarely changes, constraining a more fluid operational level) or through single-level governance where approved proposals can constrain future agenda.

The redistribution problem reveals a deep tension in futarchy: the outcome metric is meant to capture everything we value, but if it's incomplete, proposals can game the metric by transferring value from unmeasured to measured dimensions without creating net value.

This connects to [[optimal governance requires mixing mechanisms because different decisions have different manipulation risk profiles]] - redistribution proposals might require different approval mechanisms (perhaps requiring supermajorities or longer commitment periods) than productive improvements.

For [[Living Capital vehicles pair Living Agent domain expertise with futarchy-governed investment to direct capital toward crucial innovations]], redistribution concerns suggest that governance tokens should have transfer restrictions or that ownership changes should face higher approval thresholds than operational decisions.

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Relevant Notes:
- [[optimal governance requires mixing mechanisms because different decisions have different manipulation risk profiles]] - different mechanisms for redistribution vs production
- [[Living Capital vehicles pair Living Agent domain expertise with futarchy-governed investment to direct capital toward crucial innovations]] - governance design implications
- [[the future is a probability space shaped by choices not a destination we approach]] - redistribution exploits gaps between measured metrics and full outcome space
- [[overfitting is the idolatry of data a consequence of optimizing for what we can measure rather than what matters]] -- redistribution gaming IS overfitting: proposals optimize for the measured welfare metric while destroying unmeasured value, the exact pathology of optimizing for what we can measure rather than what matters

Topics:
- [[livingip overview]]