[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.

Bu