I love the direction of this, we definitely need government to have more skin in the game.
But I think it's pretty hard to trust the settlement process of these futures. Presumably anyone with a large enough position would want to influence the vote, and people would be happy to sell their votes about what happened 40 years ago because it has no influence on them any longer.
So LPFs would be sold to the highest bidder, which would be whichever entity is most confident in their ability to buy votes at the settle, which would basically be the biggest entity.
That said the idea of having retrospective feedback built into the core of a democracy is very cool.
I assume it would be secret ballot so the future votes couldn't be directly bought. But I agree that voters will have little interest investigating the facts around dozens of laws proposed over 40 years ago, so the signal is largely worthless. I mean, are the Brits here for or against the Acquisition of Land Act 1981, and how does their opinion on this actually relate the the "performance" of compulsory purchase orders? How about the Animal Health Act 1981? No, vegans, despite how it might look on the ballot paper it's not about vetinary standards, it's about mass slaughter of potentially infected herds...
For every iconic wedge issue that public opinion changes on or investment that yields massive long term benefits, there are dozens of obscure minor regulatory shifts to niche industries that have been updated several times, and this isn't the stuff people will expect to win massive returns in 40 years on. As others have pointed out they're not attractive as future performance betting markets but very attractive as selling-current-policy-to-the-highest-bidder market.
But I think it's pretty hard to trust the settlement process of these futures. Presumably anyone with a large enough position would want to influence the vote, and people would be happy to sell their votes about what happened 40 years ago because it has no influence on them any longer.
So LPFs would be sold to the highest bidder, which would be whichever entity is most confident in their ability to buy votes at the settle, which would basically be the biggest entity.
That said the idea of having retrospective feedback built into the core of a democracy is very cool.