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| date | 2000-12-13:13:59 |
| Speculation |
My lengthy discourse yesterday was leading up to a modest proposal. The nearly equal division of votes between Bore and Gush in the U.S. election highlights how silly first-past-the-post elections are. The usual alternative proposed to this is some form of proportional representation, where seats in congress are awarded proportionally to a party's share of the popular vote, corrected by some more-or-less complex formula that attempts to deal with the glaring inadequacies of this system, which basically tries to fix the problems caused by partisan politics by adding more partisan politics to the process. Proportional representation gives small groups of highly motivated and dishonest people--that is to say, politicians--the opportunity to get representation in parliament or congress that is way out of proportion with their actual representation in the populace. A well-run, dishonest campaign can gather a lot of support for a fringe party that has nothing to do with genuine support for thier policies, particularly when ballots do not have a "None of the Above" box. In the recent election in Canada I seriously considered voting for the New Democratic Party, for instance, who are a bunch of dead-end democratic socialists whose only saving grace is that their leader recently recognized that there is no democratic right to deprive others of their rights (she was speaking specifically in the context of a woman's right to have an abortion, but one hopes she might in time learn to generalize from this.) So given a limited slate of choices--even a dozen or more--most thoughtful people will find that there are important differences between their own beliefs and those of any party they might vote for. Only an idiot would claim to be in full agreement with anyone else on every topic, and being in full agreement with a political party has to be considered evidence of mental deficiency. Libertarians feel this more acutely than most, perhaps, because we tend to be with the left on social issues like the freedom to do what we please with our bodies, and against the left (and right!) on economic issues like the freedom to do what we please with our money. So I have a modest proposal, first the decide who won the recent U.S. presidential election, and next to fix all the problems of modern democracies at one go: we should flip a coin. Given the margin of error in ballot counting, this is what recounts in Florida amount to in any case; anyone who tells you that you can count six million votes to an accuracy of 100 parts per million is living in a separate reality. Anyone who has performed an experiment that requires this kind of accuracy (I have) knows just how insanely careful you have to be, and there is plenty of evidence that the errors in voting machines and hand counting are far greater than this. So the election is going to be decided by random factors anyway--we might as well make them our random factors. Once we're done with that, we should wonder if random numbers aren't the cure for all the ills of modern democracy. Most human problems can be solved with a sufficiently interesting distribution of random numbers. Electoral politics is one of them. It goes like this: we would like to have a government that represents the people. We do this by taking a bunch of self-selected, self-interested yahoos and choosing between them on the basis of how they come across on TV. This is a good system and it has worked pretty well for a long time. But it doesn't produce a representative government: calling these people our representatives doesn't mean they represent us. What I would like is a government that is pretty much sure to do what the people at large would do. This is what governments usually wind up doing in the long run anyway, but they do it very, very inefficiently--less efficiently all the time, in fact, and therein lies our clear and presentdanger. What we need is a government that is almost certain to do what the people want, and the only way I know of doing that is to make the government a statistically representative sample of the people. This is representative government. Nothing else is. It would work like this: increase the size of Congress to 730 people, and retire one of them each day, replacing that person on the same day with a person randomly choosen from a list of all taxpayers. Keep the Senate at 100 people, two from each state, and retire one at each new moon and each full moon, for terms of just under four years. Congressional terms would be two years, and the President would be choosen by members of congress from members of congress who had already served for one year. The term of the presidency would be two years. The cabinet would also be choosen by members of congress from members of congress with terms of two years but that would not be concurrent with the presidency. The idea is to produce a smooth, ongoing transition amongst both the houses and the executive, so if anything in this seems not to make sense--and I'm sure from the responses I've had that most of it won't to most of you--then ask yourself, "How could you arrange that so that there was smooth turnover and no great policy disruptions as people came and went?" Most people are apalled by this suggestion, which is not original with me, but which I did come up with independently while thinking about a quite different statistical problem. They say things like, "Yeah, but if you had ordinary people in the government they'd behave stupidly. They'd raise taxes to prohibitive levels, and slap on ineffective and counter-productive regulations while ignoring useful and beneficial ones, and they'd get us involved in senseless wars in far-off places we care nothing about, and they'd run up tremendous debts that would take forever to pay off, and they'd..." You get the picture. I can't say that a government so constituted wouldn't do all of those things. If that's what the people want, that's what the people will get. But I can say that such a government is one that I'd be willing to be ruled by. I believe in the genius of the people. I think ordinary people, when given the freedom to do so, are at least as capable of making wise choices as any lot of self-selected politicians anywhere at any time. |
| Humans |
I should probably have put my speculations on representative government under "Humans". I'm not very good at categorizing things. O well. After about five years of talking to people about (statistically) representative government, I still have virtually no takers. Most people clearly don't trust themselves with the government of the nation, which makes it pretty strange that they trust the collection of power-hungrry reprobates we routinely elect. But it's a fun idea to float now and again, just to watch people splutter about how impossible it would be to come up with something that such a government might plausibly do that hasn't been done by a more conventional democratic form. Canada's Liberal party got just two percent more of the popular vote in the last election than the National Socialist Worker's Party got in the 1932 German elections, and the Liberals have a majority government on that basis. So let's not pretend that there is anything special about existing systems that protects us from the most horrible excesses imaginable. The NAZI's didn't get a majority under the electoral system in Weimar Germany, but they came within striking distance, and in Canada today they could well have formed the government if the populace thought that way. |
| Reading |
Henry Fielding has redeemed the Iliad in my eyes. There is a delightful parody of it in Tom Jones, describing the assualt on Molly Seagrim by the women of the church. It makes the real things almost bearable to read again. One thing I like a lot about Feilding is the way he spells. Even with some editorial regularizing, the original mess of rules and exceptions shines through. People "chuze", unless they are "stopt". The Homeric parody is done in the "stile" of Homer. I do try to spell correctly, although this is one area where even Caro's influence has not quite done the job. In these journal entries I'm still doing a pretty poor job as there is no online spell-checker (yet--I think there may be some available that we could incorporate into the most excellent journalling program that Caro wrote for this.) So the "stile" of spelling in Feilding's time, only 250 years ago, makes me feel that my failure to conform to the rigid rules of modern spelling is less heinous a crime, although I'd still like to do a beter job of it. |