Welcome to altinst

--
Welcome to the altinst mailing list!
If you ever want to remove yourself from this mailing list,
you can send mail to "Majordomo@its.caltech.edu" with the following command
in the body of your email message:
    unsubscribe altinst altinst-archive@catena.gps.caltech.edu
Here's the general information for the list you've
subscribed to, in case you don't already have it:
[Last updated on: Mon Sep  8 15:04:54 1997]
You are invited to join "AltInst", an email list on Alternative
Institutions.  AltInst is solely for proposing and critiquing alternative
institutions for various walks of life.  Alternative ways to run
conversations, countries, households, markets, offices, romances, schools,
etc. are all fair game.
AltInst is open to folks from any political persuasion, but general
political flaming/discussion is forbidden.  Skip the theory and just tell
us your vision of how something could be different, and how that would
work.  Many of us are truly excited to hear about creative well-considered
suggestions, no matter what the source, but quickly bored by both
ideological is-to-is-not flaming, and partisan rah-rahs for anything
"politically correct" in some camp.
Each post starting a new AltInst thread should describe an alternative
institution, giving specifics about how it would work.  You can post your
own ideas, or review (and reference) the suggestions of others.  You need
not endorse these ideas, and they need not be immediately practical, but
you should think them worth considering.
Replies can ask for more detail on the mechanism, how it is envisioned to
handle specific cases, or how it is different from specific alternatives.
Followup discussion may also suggest difficult but plausible scenarios to
see how well the proposed mechanism can handle them.  If, however, someone
has declared their proposal to be an attempt to achieve certain goals, it
is inappropriate to question whether those are goals worth having.
To set a context, folks may also give SHORT descriptions of the existing
institutions that alternatives are intended to replace, of current problems
with those institutions, and a diagnosis of their root causes.  And folks
may give SHORT summaries of evidence regarding an institution's
feasibility, such as similar institutions in use at other times and places,
laboratory or field experiments, or abstract models.
But your tone must remain civil, and we are wary of letting the
conversation slip into general debate on politics or economics; the list
administrator reserves the right to step in and say "that's enough".
AltInst is mainly for finding out about novel suggestions; political debate
can be done elsewhere.
To quit (or join) AltInst, talk to altinst-request@cco.caltech.edu or ask:
   majordomo@cco.caltech.edu
to "unsubscribe altinst" (or "subscribe altinst").  AltInst posts may
specify how their distribution is to be limited, but if they don't,
AltInst posts are public and may be freely distributed or archived.
To post to altinst, send it to:  
   altinst@cco.caltech.edu  
This list is now moderated, to enforce the above rules, so your
message might take up to a day or two to appear.
Text written by list originator, Robin Hanson
AltInst List Administrator, Damien R. Sullivan