Robin Hanson & James Hughes – Futarchy vs Plutarchy: Vote on Values, or Pay to Play?

Vote on values, forecast on facts, and firewall the whole thing from money.

This Future Day 2026 discussion starts with the question: who gets to decide what happens next – and by what mechanisms. Economist Robin Hanson argues that many of today’s failures are downstream of “pretty broken systems of governance”, and that we’ve “hardly tried” most plausible alternatives. His proposal, futarchy, separates values from beliefs: elected leaders define measurable national wellbeing goals, while prediction markets help identify which policies are most likely to achieve them.

Bioethicist James Hughes offers a very different diagnosis: futurism’s emancipatory promise has been enclosed by tech-billionaire power — from platform degradation to bunker-and-seastead escapism – turning the future into an exit strategy for the wealthy and a control system for everyone else. He argues this isn’t just a moral failure but an epistemological crisis, and calls for democratising (even expropriating) key technological platforms and institutions so the machinery of tomorrow serves the public good.

The panel brings these threads together: Can we get governance that’s genuinely competent without it being captured — and what would it even mean to govern well in a world of accelerating tech?

Will prediction markets improve policy outcomes by 2030?

Is billionaire capture the main bottleneck?

Which metrics should define ‘national wellbeing’?

Both talks are really about incentives and information. Hanson says: current governance is incompetent because it doesn’t reliably reward accurate beliefs about consequences. Hughes says: current governance is corruptible because the levers of belief-formation and agenda-setting are increasingly controlled by billionaire interests. Is the solution a choice between markets or democracy, or is it a synthesis?

Robin Hanson will speak on the topic of Futarchy: Competent Governance Soon?!, and James Hughes will speak on How Billionaires Ruined Futurism.