The Policy Engine

Improving the quality of our lives should be the ultimate target of public policies. But public policies can only deliver best fruit if they are based on reliable tools to measure the improvement they seek to produce in our lives.

--Jose Angel Gurria

This is a very simple and unrefined idea from outside of the legal field. This section will be brief for now.

The Policy Engine​

A definition.

The Policy Engine

The policy engine is a machine that starts with a bill and compares it to its intent at the time it was created. The engine then plays it forward in time applying any modifiers such as other legislation and judicial decisions that affect it through time until we reach now. The details here are for sharks to figure out.

We measure public opinion and if public opinion is different from what it is doing now, then the law is wrong and the legislature should change it. Something like this where on failure it usually goes back to committee for rework.

stateDiagram-v2
    direction LR
      Bill --> Committee
      Committee --> PolicyEngine
      PolicyEngine --> CourtOfPublicOpinion
      CourtOfPublicOpinion --> Committee: Should Not Enact
      CourtOfPublicOpinion --> VoteBothHouses: Should Enact
      VoteBothHouses --> Committee: Failed
      VoteBothHouses --> Law: Passed
      Law --> Monitoring
      Monitoring --> Committee: Public opinion changed

The purpose is to account for changes in culture over time. Laws promoting segregated white neighborhoods that were popular in the 1950s do not reflect our culture today. The Court of Public Opinion would signal the legislature that our cultural values have diverged from the intent of the original law. Then they can fix the law so it represents The People once again.