Tag Archives: democracy

the “election trifecta”

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This Freakonomics podcast describes an “election trifecta” three ideas to greatly improve US elections.

  1. Non-partisan, single ballot primaries, with the top four vote getters moving on to the general election
  2. ranked-choice voting in the general election
  3. non-partisan redistricting

This all sounds pretty good. The two major parties are not producing good candidates for leadership of our country, and they are preventing more talented potential leaders from competing.

I am a registered Democrat in a state with closed primaries, and I wrote in Bernie Sanders in the primary. I would have voted for Joe Biden in the general, but then again I would have voted and will vote for anyone who is not a serial rapist, convicted felon, and traitor who led a violent attack on the United States Congress.

AI Biden

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I can’t tell if this post is serious or not, and this is the mark of bad satire.

Despite an ambitious and widely praised first term in office, he is currently trailing in polls to a man who incited an insurrection and was recently convicted on 34 felony counts. Something needs to change, and much to the chagrin of West Wing fanatics in the beltway, it won’t be the Democrats’ 2024 nominee. Modern technology offers a clear solution. AI can be used to polish how the president comes across, allowing voters to focus on his substance. How many times have we heard voters and pundits alike gripe that “Biden would be the perfect candidate if he were just 10 years younger?” With modern technology, this exact deliverable is possible.

huffpost.com

I sincerely hope this is intended as irony. I have thought however about an AI-based experiment in direct democracy. In this concept, an AI agent would represent me, the individual citizen. It could spend time patiently interviewing me about my views and opinions, and then it could go to Congress and negotiate and vote on legislation with the AI agents of the 328 million other Americans. If I really have time, I could take over control of the agent at any time I want, then hand the keys back over to it any time I want.

A watered down version of this could be AI constantly talking to an elected representatives constituents about their views on various issues and the content of proposed legislation, patiently explaining to the elected representative how his or her actual constituents would like him or her to vote (the pronoun thing is exhausting, and yes I know I have only scratched the surface of potential pronouns), and patiently explaining to the constituents how it all turned out. Imagine if a politician made it a campaign pledge to always vote according to the wishes of a majority of their constituents (as interpreted through the AI agents) no matter what.

I thought of this a long time ago, with the idea that it could be done through polls or through an app, but the natural language AIs could make this much more practical and achievable by just chatting with humans for a few minutes each day and providing constant feedback.

Now, of course the problem with direct democracy is always that 51% of the people might want to exterminate or enslave the other 49%, which is one way to achieve consensus but not what we are looking for. So you obviously have to couple this with protections for the rights of minorities and human rights in general.

I have no opinion on the politics of Indonesia…

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I am familiar with some facts though. Hundreds of thousands of Indonesian civilians were massacred by its military and paramilitary thugs in the 1960s, and again in East Timor in the 1970s. In the 1990s, street thugs attacked citizens of Chinese ancestry and some families chose to flee the country.

Here is what The Intercept has to say about Indonesia’s (presumptive?) new president:

The heir of a wealthy banking family, Prabowo holds hundreds of thousands of acres of plantation, mining, and industrial properties. He was the son-in-law of the late dictator Gen. Suharto, who, with U.S. support, ruled Indonesia for 32 years…

Prabowo, as Suharto’s son-in-law, was a senior commander of the massacres in occupied East Timor. In one, at Kraras in 1983 on the mountain of Bibileo, “several hundred” civilians were murdered, according to a United Nations-backed inquiry. Prabowo also personally tortured captives; one told me of Prabowo breaking his teeth…

In 1998, with Suharto hobbled by the arms cutoff and facing growing demonstrations, Prabowo abducted 24 democratic activists, 13 of whom he “disappeared.” He also engendered a campaign of murder, arson, and rape, mainly against ethnic Chinese residents.

The Intercept

Compare and contrast with what the BBC had to say:

Where the president is famously soft-spoken and conciliatory, Mr Prabowo has a reputation for ill-tempered outbursts and abrasive opinions. He takes pride in the long career he had as an officer in the Indonesian special forces, despite allegations of serious human rights abuses made against both him and the unit in the past.

BBC

No further comment, except to say the rich and powerful run the world, and maybe in Southeast Asia they don’t go to such great pains to hide it.

Mark Milley

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This upcoming (? – the link is to the Wayback Machine) article in the Atlantic is about how Mark Milley made sure Trump was not able to subvert the 2020 election. Laudable I suppose, but heed this paragraph:

Milley and other military officers deserve praise for protecting democracy, but their actions should also cause deep unease. In the American system, it is the voters, the courts, and Congress that are meant to serve as checks on a president’s behavior, not the generals. Civilians provide direction, funding, and oversight; the military then follows lawful orders.

The Atlantic, via the Wayback Machine

It’s not hard to imagine an alternate scenario where Trump’s scheme to subvert the election succeeds, and the military announces it is temporarily suspending the Constitution to protect the Constitution. A general takes over as president in a “caretaker” role until such time as a free and fair election can be organized and held, and the Constitution restored. Maybe this could even work out, but if it happens one time it is likely to happen again, and the more times in happens the more of a joke the Constitution becomes. Tweaks could be made to the Constitution to stabilize whatever it was that we think caused it to become unstable, and over time we would deviate more and more from democracy and the rule of law, even if the military governors were benevolent. And of course, there is not guarantee there would be – you could get somebody bad emerge as a leader, factions could emerge, and things could get ugly.

the Philly mayoral election

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We have a presumptive mayor-elect who won less than a third of the vote. This is because we have a first-past-the-post system. It is not a democratic system because the absolute lowest bar you can set for a democratic system is majority rule. Cherelle Parker is a Black woman who beat a Jewish woman and an Asian-American woman who (the latter two) had very similar policy positions and together won about 45% of the vote. I mention race here not because it should matter, but because racial politics are a reality in this city and some voters are never going to cross racial lines no matter what policy positions or records of achievement are on display.

https://vote.phila.gov/results/

Now, I wish presumptive Mayor-elect Parker well. I promise to give her some time and ultimately judge her by her actions and not just her rhetoric. But during her campaign, she did not speak to issues that matter most to me. She spoke mostly about violence and education. Of course, I care about violence and education. I am raising (incidentally, mixed-race, not that it should matter) children in this city. But the mayor ultimately has limited control over these issues. Nobody knows, absolutely 100%, what has caused the current spike in gun violence. You can come up with some ideas, look at the evidence for what has worked in the past and in other cities, and try some things. But Cherrelle Parker is not a candidate who talked about evaluating evidence or best practices from other cities. In fact, a large part of her campaign pitch was that other candidates had spent time in other cities and were bringing ideas from elsewhere, and Philadelphia voters do not want people from elsewhere “telling us what to do”. As for schools, they are controlled by the School District of Philadelphia, which the mayor has only some limited control over, and which is limited by decisions of state legislators, some with pointy white hoods in their closets. Again, you can look at evidence and best practices and try some things, but her campaign platform if anything had an anti-intellectual bent, and that seemed to appeal to a plurality of voters in this city. Cherelle Parker was a state legislator at one point, and she is clearly a talented, successful politician, so maybe she will have some ideas on how to get more state funding and remove barriers imposed by the anti-city pointy white hood crowd in the middle of the state.

Philadelphia has outdated sanitation practices. Mayors have 100% direct control over these practices. The trash situation is a major nuisance, and the Atlantic Ocean will be full of Philadelphia trash for 10,000 years after our civilization is gone. I am a civil engineer and an environmentalist, and I am morally outraged by this. I somewhat doubt Mayor Parker is going to fix it, but again I will give her the benefit of the doubt.

Philadelphia has outdated and, I will just say it, incompetent street design practices. Whether children are dying on our city streets from gun violence or car violence, they are dying and this is morally outrageous. I somewhat doubt Mayor Parker is going to fix it, but again I will give her the benefit of the doubt.

You see my point here. Competent leadership at the Philadelphia Streets Department, which oversees sanitation and street design and maintenance, is absolutely crucial. Our city is decades behind even average practice elsewhere in the county, let alone the world, and people and the environment are suffering as a result. Part of Cherelle Parker’s campaign pitch, which apparently resonated with voters, is that she has spent her whole life in Philadelphia and never lived anywhere else. Will she be the one to bring our city up to even average standards of safety? Prove me wrong, presumptive Mayor-elect Parker.

Here are some insights into what happened.

This is so obviously a false choice. Safe, modern street designs, along with reliable public transportation, allow people to get to work and earn a living. They keep children from dying on public streets. But people don’t see it this way. Philadelphia has a concentrated poverty problem. The field of economics predicts that people whose basic needs are not met will not be advocates for what are seen as luxuries, such as environmental quality and convenient, safe travel. People whose basic needs are not met are going to be advocates for the basic needs such as food and shelter. Then, when people whose basic needs are met advocate for a higher level of services, such as safe streets, people whose basic needs are not met resent this. People also just tend to be resistant to change, and opposition to upgrades to safe street design reflect this, even if they would mean fewer dead children.

Sadly, concentrated poverty is the result of a century or more of racist land use and housing policy. It can’t be solved within the narrow political jurisdictions where it occurs, but rather needs to be solved by some income distribution and basic service provision at the state and federal scale. The working class and middle class in Philadelphia is absolutely tapped out when it comes to taxes, so even those of us who might support some level of income redistribution at the state and federal level are struggling to get by. Meanwhile, our local politicians try to address concentrated poverty by narrowing the tax base, restricting development, and creating disincentives for affluent taxpayers to move into the city or university graduates to stay and join the tax base. We were a city of 2 million people at our peak and are down to about 1.6 million. Like it or not, growing the tax base would benefit the poor. Safe modern streets, excellent public transportation, and schools that just meet modern building codes would all help. But our politicians just can’t get out of their own way.

I love you, Philadelphia. Prove me wrong, Mayor Parker.

a third party candidate in 2024?

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Fox News mentions three possible third party candidates in the 2024 U.S. Presidential election:

Asked if three moderates — Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, and former GOP Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland — would be considered for the potential ticket, Lieberman said they “are very active members of No Labels” and “would be naturals to consider” as he pointed toward their “strong records of bipartisanship and getting things done for the country and for their constituents.”

Fox News

Third party candidates matter. I tend to think Ross Perot almost certainly hurt George Bush in 1992, an outcome I liked, and made a decisive difference against Al Gore (and Lieberman!) in 2000, an outcome I hated. It would be much better to have a runoff or instant runoff system which would allow us to elect a President who actually gets a majority of the votes, but that is not the system we have for the foreseeable future.

Just a quick reminder that Bernie Sanders took the moral high ground in 2000 and chose not to run as an independent, or “pull a Nader” as one could say. That would have almost certainly have hurt Biden.

What would a “moderate” (by U.S. standards, “well-right-of-center” by international standards) candidate mean in 2024? It’s hard to say. Biden is firmly center-right, and I somewhat doubt a self-described moderate candidate would be much to his right, if at all. But that is the reality. The perception is that the Republican party has successfully tarred him as a “liberal” as they have successfully done to every center-right candidate since Clinton at least. So a “moderate” candidate might take voters away from Biden who self-identify as centrists. The “moderate” candidate would almost certainly take votes away from Trump, especially if they managed to attract the religious conservative vote. So after thinking it through, I think Trump could actually come in third in a contest involving a third-party candidate, and there could be a pretty close contest between Biden and the third party. Which would leave the Republican Party wondering how it got left on the outside of the “establishment” looking in. The Democrats could be even more dismissive of the actual center-left which favors better benefits for working people in line with other industrialized countries. Long live the Pro-Business, Pro-War (which is a business after all) Consensus!

How Religious is Congress Compared to the Country?

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Axios has some interesting stats:

  • About 27% of U.S. adults report not be affiliated with any religion. Only 4% of our elected officials will admit to the same? This implies to me that organized religion is…well…organized when it comes to pushing its priorities in the public realm.
  • 90% of Congress members identify as Christian, compared to 65% of the population. About 6% of Congress is Jewish compared to 2% of the population, so they are overrepresented. If you round to the nearest percent, “Buddhists or Hindus” and Muslims each make up around 1% of the population, and around 1% of Congress. If you talk to Buddhists AND Hindus, they might have some thoughts on how they have been lumped together in this survey.

So, I suppose the U.S. is still a majority Christian nation, and certainly a majority religious nation, but the viewpoints of nearly a third of us are severely underrepresented by our elected leaders.

This survey did not address how many of our elected leaders who claim to be religious humans are actually lizards who drink the blood of human babies in the basements of pizza parlors.

Is the Pope the king of Italy?

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Just kidding, I’m not that ignorant. That headline was just to get your attention. But then again, I don’t think about the political system in Italy often, so you could say I am ignorant of it. The politics of Italy obviously matters to Italians, but does it matter to the rest of us? Well, there was a guy named Mussolini, but that was quite awhile ago… There’s also a guy called the Pope, who’s not part of the Italian government but has some political power and sway on a global scale. As far as the actual modern government, it’s just a typical European parliamentary democracy, we assume? Well, there is no Italian king, but…

On January 24, when Sergio Mattarella’s seven-year term comes to an end, the Italian parliament and its regional representatives will hold a secret ballot to elect the country’s new president and official head of state…

And yet, in his official capacity as the “guarantor” or “guardian” of the constitution, the president holds considerable power: governments are required to obtain the “approval” of the president, who also nominates (“approves”) the prime minister and his cabinet ministers. Moreover, all laws passed by parliament have to be approved by the president, and he or she is also charged with signing off the dissolution of parliament, for example following a government crisis and loss of parliamentary majority. This means the president effectively decides whether elections should be held or not.

Nor does the president’s power stop there: the incumbent also ratifies all international treaties, and serves as commander-in-chief of the army and as the head of the governing body of the judiciary. The president also wields influence through the technocratic structures of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, particularly the all-powerful Accounting Office (Ragioneria Generale dello Stato) and the Bank of Italy.

Unherd.com

So Italy is at least a Republic of sorts if its head of state is elected by its legislature, which is in turn elected by the people. But the actual powers of the president almost sound like…an ayatollah? In practice, the head of government (i.e. prime minister) may not defer to the President, but it sounds like that balance of power could potentially change with time. And if the President has the ability to dissolve parliament and delay elections during an emergency, the conditions for a potential loss of democracy would seem to be there, at least according to this article.

Mandevillian Intelligence

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Mandevillian Intelligence is an idea where the (wise?) people in charge subtly manipulate incentives so that peoples’ individual dumb choices add up to the collective good.

Mandevillian intelligence is a specific form of collective intelligence in which individual cognitive vices (i.e., shortcomings, limitations, constraints and biases) are seen to play a positive functional role in yielding collective forms of cognitive success. The present paper introduces the concept of mandevillian intelligence and reviews a number of strands of empirical research that help to shed light on the phenomenon. The paper also attempts to highlight the value of the concept of mandevillian intelligence from a philosophical, scientific and engineering perspective. Inasmuch as we accept the notion of mandevillian intelligence, then it seems that the cognitive and epistemic value of a specific social or technological intervention will vary according to whether our attention is focused at the individual or collective level of analysis. This has a number of important implications for how we think about the design and evaluation of collective cognitive systems. For example, the notion of mandevillian intelligence forces us to take seriously the idea that the exploitation (or even the accentuation) of individual cognitive shortcomings could, in some situations, provide a productive route to collective forms of cognitive and epistemic success.

Synthese

I don’t have much faith in the wisdom of the average individual. But if there is one thing we should have learned in the last 20-odd years, we can’t have automatic faith in the wisdom of our leaders either. I’m probably naive, but I like to think system thinking education could help address this. It could make the average person much more wise in their conclusions and decisions about the world around them, and it could help them select wise leaders through a democratic process. I won’t go to that worn out Churchill quote, but I can’t think of any other system of identifying and choosing wise leaders that would reliably work better. The one that sometimes seems to work better is when existing wise leaders choose their successors and put rules in place making it hard for outsiders to break in. But the problem, of course, is that the wise rulers are self-proclaimed, and even if they are in fact wise, if unwise people manage to break in at some point they will be able to manipulate and abuse that same set of rules to keep themselves and their unwise cronies in power.

Bernie Sanders makes the case to (UK?) voters

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A guy named Bernie Sanders has an article in The Guardian. Who is Bernie Sanders, asks the UK audience. According to the article, “Bernie Sanders is a US senator. He represents the state of Vermont”. According to this Bernie Sanders,

If the Democratic party wants to avoid losing millions of votes in the future it must stand tall and deliver for the working families of our country who, today, are facing more economic desperation than at any time since the Great Depression. Democrats must show, in word and deed, how fraudulent the Republican party is when it claims to be the party of working families.

And, in order to do that, Democrats must have the courage to take on the powerful special interests who have been at war with the working class of this country for decades. I’m talking about Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance industry, the fossil fuel industry, the military industrial complex, the private prison industrial complex and many profitable corporations who continue to exploit their employees.

If the Democratic party cannot demonstrate that it will stand up to these powerful institutions and aggressively fight for the working families of this country – Black, White, Latino, Asian American and Native American – we will pave the way for another rightwing authoritarian to be elected in 2024. And that president could be even worse than Trump.

The Guardian

It’s ironic that as the excitement of the election begins to fade, and the feeling sets in that we have dodged the bullet of a second Trump term, we now feel comfortable with beginning to feel disappointed with the Biden administration before it even takes power!

Prove us wrong Joe! I think Bernie has it right. The Democratic party’s message is overly focused on putting everything in race and gender terms, and not focused enough on an economic message that appeals to the working people of this country, which is the vast majority of people. Getting the basic benefits in place that people in other functioning modern societies take for granted – child care, education, health care, infrastructure in good repair – would disproportionately help people who need the most help, without the race and gender-based messages that are a turnoff to many voters and are ultimately ineffective at bringing about change.

“Fighting the special interests” means campaign finance reform. It probably means legislation or even a constitutional amendment clarifying that the right to free speech applies to humans and not dollars.

I have friends and family that voted for Trump. None of these people is openly racist, although only the hypocritical or naive among us think we are completely free of bias. Most of them honestly believe that Trump lowered their taxes and that Biden will raise them. Some are small business owners who honestly believe Trump, or any Republican at all, is pro-business and that Democrats are hostile to business. Some believe 1990s-era free trade agreements took away their jobs, the issue that I still believe edged out Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The solutions are pretty clear. The U.S. probably needs to take in more taxes and reinvest the money in smart ways that benefit working people, and that set the stage for long-term sustainable growth and innovation. This means the social programs I mentioned earlier, plus investments in infrastructure, capital goods, skills and training, research and development. These are also pro-business policies!

But how can you get people to support paying taxes when they have been subjected to decades of extreme anti-tax propaganda? This is really tough. That propaganda was created by decades of the rich and powerful buying off politicians to implant their extremist ideology in all our heads. I think Bernie is right that attacking those forces of propaganda is absolutely necessary. This is politically very tough and a very long game, and it is fighting the anti-tax message which is so simple to understand and so brutally effective.

Another idea, also politically very, very difficult, is to make taxes psychologically easier to pay. A value added tax would do this. This is how the rest of the developed world does it. It is the equivalent of a saved credit card in your iTunes app being so much psychologically less painful than writing a check each month to pay the electric bill. You just don’t “feel” that payment as much, and you see and enjoy the benefits that you getting in return every day. When I worked in Singapore, I submitted a tax return not unlike the one I submit here. But then someone reviewed that tax return and sent me a clear bill for the exact amount I had to pay. I was then able to set up an auto-pay from my bank account in twelve equal installments. Anything that gets tax payments into the background of people’s minds, kind of like the stored credit card on your Netflix account, might help.

People need to see and understand the value of the goods and services they are getting from the government in exchange for their taxes. We get enormous value from the government but we tend to take it for granted. Part of the propaganda has been for working people to believe that the taxes they pay provide benefits to other people, people not like them in one way or another, or people far away. I don’t have all the answers here, we could look at how companies create a sense of value for services. Advertising, branding, and marketing are part of the answer, whether we find that unsavory or not. Monthly statements, or the digital equivalent, might help.

There is also the flip side of helping people understand how much they pay for war and weapons, payments that do not bring any direct, measurable benefits to the people paying them. Federal tax revenue also gets sucked out of population centers where most economic value is created and redistributed to rural areas where it is not (out of proportion to the populations served, I am not suggesting rural people deserve nothing.) The brilliant, successful propaganda then convinces those rural voters that the exact opposite is true, that they are subsidizing the lazy people in the cities who do not create value! So we have to fight this too, and it brings us back to campaign finance reform, constitutional reform, and maybe democratic (small-d) reforms that get us closer to one-person, one-vote and lower the barriers to entry of candidates outside the two large parties. All politically very, very difficult! So who in the next generation will take up the Bernie Sanders mantle and make this case to the UK voter?!?