What do I think about fixed term parliaments? Since I’ve been recently considering whether I would prefer to continue with democracy at all, this is a slightly odd question. I think it relates to my previous examination of the length of the term between elections. The advantage to the incumbent of choosing the date is not necessarily a problem, if a balance is needed between stability which increases the time horizon of the government, and the opportunity for change which discourages insurrection. Effectively shortening the campaign is an advantage. If we know now that election will be on particular date in 2008, everyone — government and opposition — will be organising around that date. We’ll have 3-year election campaigns. And I’m coming to the conclusion that politics is bad for government.It could be argued that the mere possibility of an early election caused extra politics in the recent past, but that’s a rare occurence, and likely to become even rarer in future as a result of the points Brown lost over the whole thing.
Also, unlike, for instance, the US federal system, we have a system where the executive requires the support of the legislature. If it no longer has that support, and no other government can get support, we need to have an election. Currently, it is up to the government to resign and call an election when it no longer has support. With fixed term, it would require a formal no confidence vote, and you can get some weird games, such as a government actively seeking passage of a vote of no confidence. Something of the sort happened in Germany a year or two ago if I recall correctly. So, I’m against fixed term parliaments (at least as a single reform in the context of the current UK system).
Tag: voting
Tax and Democracy
chris dillow is ready to give up on democracy, based on observations that cutting inheritance tax, paid only by the rich, is more popular electorally than cutting income tax, which is paid by the poor.
I’m not here to cheer for democracy, but his explanation, that the low expectations of the poor lead them to accept being victimised by the tax system, does not seem to me the most likely one.
For me, the key fact is that PAYE income tax is the ultimate stealth tax. If someone pays £100,000 in tax on inheriting a £500,000 house, that is seen as a huge blow, but I have never heard anyone ask what difference it would make to someone on £20,000 a year if they weren’t paying £3,500 of it in income tax (and, while we’re at it, another £1,500 or so in VAT).
Evidence for this is articles like the one I picked on in 2005 , which claimed that transport was the average household’s biggest expense, ignoring the fact that taxation added up to as much as transport, food and housing put together.
Further, it is still widely believed that higher taxes help the poor. Helping the poor by cutting income taxes would generally be looked at as an absurdity. The same goes for inheritance tax, of course, but that is more likely to be seen, probably correctly, as a fringe issue. Therefore cutting inheritance tax wins votes of those who pay it, but does not lose many from the rest.
The fact is that when government took 10-20% of the economy, it could be funded mainly by taxing the rich. As the figure has grown to 40%, the tax burden has fallen far more heavily on the poor, despite the widening of the franchise. To me, the obvious explanation is that government has for a long time been extracting as much or nearly as much from the rich as it practically can. If that is correct, then the only way to achieve genuinely redistributive taxation is to drastically shrink the state.
If I’m right (and I admit I’m asserting a few controversial things here without much in the way of evidence), then the problem isn’t any fundamental conflict between democracy and equality as chris fears, but a single mistaken view which might possibly be reversed.
Help the poor – cut taxes.
Views of Democracy
What do I think of democracy? I’ve been contradicting myself like mad recently, so I need to take stock.
The Mencius Moldbug theory, which I referred to this morning, is that democracy is something which the ruling caste wastefully pretend to be governed by. It has no substantive effect on policy, but carrying out the rituals helps to prevent the masses from rising against the permanent government.
I don’t buy that. I don’t really think that democracy is the “rule of the people”, but I do think its effects can be underestimated. What in many cases produces the underestimate is the observation that elections rarely change anything significant. However, that would be the case even if democracy were working perfectly. Politicians in the modern age know pretty well what will get them elected and what won’t, and therefore take the positions that will get them elected. The election, provided the politicians are acting sensibly, is a non-event. Looked at that way, it is a sign of the imperfection of the democratic system that elections have any effect at all.
So, we have some democracy. Good thing or bad thing?
I am going to be boringly conventional and say it is better than the alternatives I have come across. Mencius has not really explained his alternative: Abu Dhabi, Singapore and other port city-states are not necessarily replicable across real countries, and while I get that the enlightened self-interested despot would produce an open, free, high-economic-growth society that he could extract the maximum tax revenue from, I don’t see how he would prevent his subjects using their freedom to try to grab his loot. I don’t think today’s AR-15 vs armour comparison really covers the difficulty of holding onto power without a highly militarised police state. I stand by what I wrote here last year: The biggest cost (in the widest sense) of any political system is that which it expends in preventing its overthrow.
So if democracy is a necessary expense for a society free enough to have a really good economy, what about the story today that repressed societies are growing faster? Well, I agree with Tyler Cowen that they are not yet at the level of productivity that would be inconsistent with their lack of freedom. That is, I am claiming that repression limits productivity more than does freedom, not growth.
It still remains to decide whether – given that democracy is just part of the overhead cost of freedom – we should have lots of democracy, or just a minimum. This morning I was arguing for a minimum, but in the past I have asked for more than we actually have currently in the UK. Bryan Caplan claims that the US government follows better economic policy than it would if it actually obeyed public opinion.
I’m not sure. I suppose that despite the undemocratic features in the UK that I’ve complained about, the actual policies I object to are not ones that are opposed by the large mass of public opinion, and so more democracy would not actually help.
Why Five Years?
I happened to ask in a debate recently, why should we elect governments for five years? Most democracies seem to use four or five years between elections, but I’ve never seen a justification. One or two years would be quite practical, and ten or more years very easy.
I mentioned I’d been reading Unqualified Reservations lately. One argument made there is that all governments extract the maximum loot from the population, and the difference between governments is in the horizon they have (a government with a long horizon will try to maximize growth so as to be able to steal more in future), and in the dead-weight losses involved in holding on to power.
If one considers the value of elections to be that they prevent expensive civil wars and revolutions, by making it more tempting for rival factions to wait their turn, you can get some idea of how long an elected term should be. In order to maximise the time horizon of government, giving it an interest in shearing the sheep rather than slaughtering it, it should be as long as possible, but not so long that rivals give up waiting and try to overthrow it, necessitating wasteful countermeasures.
Given those concerns, I think we could beneficially stretch the term a bit longer than five years. Even ten might be possible, but that would be pushing it. More than ten, and I think the opposition would not be willing to wait.
It might not matter. Other features might be manipulated to advantage incumbents to a degree that compensates for overly short elected terms. I can imagine that there’s a sort of equilibrium – incumbents have enough power over the system that they only ever allow just enough chance of being deposed to prevent violent revolution.
Liberty is not best defended by sacrificing liberty
Also, Conservatives formally pledge to cancel ID card scheme
As things stand, I think I will be voting for these buggers for the first time.
Well done to the volunteers at No2ID, who have done so well in keeping the profile of this issue high.
Newcomb, Voting, and Moist Robots
Patri Friedman points out in a comment that, since “correlation is not causation”, using the correlation between my vote and those of others to estimate an amplified effect for my vote is bogus.
Oh yes, so it is.
That almost disposes of the question. But my thought experiment about identical robots all voting the same way is still valid, I believe. And while I and some other voter I pick out are not robots and not identical, we are phenomena in a physical universe with some strong mechanical resemblances.
Like Newcomb’s paradox, it comes down to the nature of human choice. The traditional view is that each person is an independent entity that can make uncaused choices at any point in time.
That traditional view is implicit in the question, “what difference does it make whether I vote or not?”. The assumption is that, in imagination at least, we can hold the whole world constant and consider it with or without me voting.
As I have implied by talking about robots, the traditional view is not true. My mind is part of the world, and you cannot “hold the world constant” without holding my decision also.
One response to the problem is to say that the whole question is invalid, humans do not make choices, they are “moist robots” (as Scott Adams would say) following their predetermined programs.
But the question clearly is valid. We maybe cannot hold the world constant in every last detail while varying my decision, but surely we can come close enough for the question still to make sense. We will just have to assume some small changes to the world to be consistent with my decision being changed.
Now if we vary, for instance, how much of an idiot the candidate is, we will get an answer to my question very much greater than one. But that’s silly. Whatever the question really means (because I’ve demonstrated it’s not quite as unambiguous as it looks), it doesn’t mean that. Facts we have observed must be held constant.
It would be a more sensible interpretation of the question to, for instance, hold the universe outside my skin constant, while varying the inside as far as necessary to be physically consistent with different votes.
If we do that, then the answer we will come up with is that my vote makes exactly one vote of difference – the whole argument I made in the first place is wrong.
But varying my brain is not straightforward, even in principle, because it breaks continuity over time. In order to be imagining a physically possible universe, that nonetheless is consistent with the history we have observed. I might have to vary unobserved facts that extend beyond my brain and body. Those facts may even extend into other voters’ brains and bodies, possibly giving me the >1 answer I wanted. This is what was nagging at me in the first place: the notion that “my mind” is not quite something that can have a neat boundary drawn around it, that it is some kind of extended phenotype. In the identical robots examle, there is only really one mind, that is duplicated or distributed in space, which is why one decision produces many votes. As Dennett says in Freedom Evolves, “if you make yourself very large, you can internalize anything”. In order to internalize the decision to vote, that is, to be able to describe it as something I have done, might I need to make myself large enough that I overlap with others?
That is a coherent possibility, but it seems much more likely that to create the hypothetical implied by the original question, we could vary my vote without varying past observed facts by merely varying quantum randomness in my brain between now and when I vote, or, failing that, that varying unobserved facts in my brain back to my birth would be sufficient. In either case, 1 is a reasonable answer to the question “How many votes of difference does my decision to vote make”
Summary
The question is: How many more votes will my candidate get if I vote for him than if I don’t?
The question is too vague to give an absolutely rigorous answer – changing my vote requires, in order that physics be consistent, that other things (by implication, things that are too small for us to have observed) are changed also. Depending on which other things are changed, the answer possibly could vary.
However, there is a large probability that the most straightforward possible answer to the question is, one vote, meaning that unnoticeable changes inside my body are enough to change my vote without being inconsistent with the observed past.
I’m slightly disappointed (I liked the idea of getting free extra votes), but, on the other hand, the answer is the one that is consistent with “free will”, so if you’re insecure about whether you have free will, the answer is good news for you.
And I’m pretty sure I’m close to having a good answer to Newcomb’s paradox, which is the same kind of question. It’s an attempt to turn the question of free will into a motivated question. Asking about things like free will in the abstract tends to degenerate into arguing what the words mean, and unless there’s some reason to care, then one meaning is as good as another. Taking both boxes is an assertion that you have independent free will, and that you are not just a cog in a machine, but at the same time it’s a choice that matters and could cost you money if you’re wrong.
My voting paradox has a name
I learn from Chris Dillow that the question I asked about voting – “Is the fact that others’ votes are correlated with mine something I need to take into account when estimating the effect of my vote?” – is in fact a long-standing question with a name: Newcomb’s Paradox
The questions are not quite identical – Newcomb postulates an entity called “the Predictor”, whereas I am working from the observed fact that opinion polls more or less work.
The question may come down to why Fred Bloggs’ vote is correlated with mine. I used a thought experiment in which Fred and I are identical robots being fed identical inputs, and our votes are correlated 100%. In that case, the correlation is due to the fact that the two votes are determined by the same inputs.
On the subject of free will, I take the view that what matters is whether my decisions are all determined by the world outside myself – and I think it’s pretty obvious that they usually aren’t, and that therefore I am free.
The fact that my actions are determined by the state of the world including myself is both trivial and uninteresting.
The bit that is interesting is “what am I”. The relevant answer is that I am a phenomenon of matter – that what I refer to above as the world outside myself must necessarily not include my brain and body. The reason this subject has caused confusion historically is that there was an assumption that my body was external to my self.
(There is much more to the answer than that, but that is the part that is relevant to questions of determinism and freedom).
Scott Adams is interesting on this, though he doesn’t yet get the point. I suspect he eventually will.
Blair and Me
What do I think of the current Blair feeding-frenzy? I admit to being a bit conflicted.
First, chris dillow is right as usual that compared to real questions about policy, all this is relatively insignificant.
Related to that, I think the press just wants him out, because they’re bored and would like to see something happen. I can understand that feeling, indeed I share it, but it can’t be a good reason to change the Prime Minister.
I don’t think we’d get better policies either from Brown or from whoever emerges as anyone-but-Brown.
What is distinctive about Blair is his idealism. This leads him to overambitious social and economic engineering projects, which is bad, but it also causes him to resist (to an extent) the Labour Party’s “core values”, meaning the prioritisation of the interests of public sector workers above everybody else. That is good. Will his successor’s corruption be worse than Blair’s idealism? Hard to say.
Then there is the next election. Will an early change be better or worse for Labour? Will the Tories be any better? Is Cameron lying when he says he is really just like Labour? What pressures will be on Cameron from the rest of his party? What would happen to the Tories if they lost the next election? Would they become better or worse, and in each case would that make them more or less likely to win the election after next, and what effect would that have on a Labour government in the meantime?
When it comes the the question of how to influence such an enormously complex and unpredictable system for the better by throwing a single vote at it, the only possible rational response is to give up and do something useful instead.
Current levels of voter turnout and engagement with politics are inexplicably and frighteningly high.
No Electronic Voting
Proposed trials of voting via internet or text message in next year’s local council elections have been scrapped by the government. (Via Risks Digest)
Just occasionally the government trips over reality and notices. It’s also encouraging that Opposition spokesman Oliver Heald was, firstly, able to dig this out, and secondly, correctly said that “Remote electronic voting is even more vulnerable than all-postal voting.” The reference to the vulnerability of large-scale postal voting strongly suggests that he understands the issues.
We’re not completely out of the woods – a Department of Constitional Affairs spokesman has said “We are not ruling out piloting e-voting in the future and any future plans will be taken forward at the appropriate time.” I hope that’s “at the appropriate time” in the Humphrey Appleby sense.
Previous: Voting fraud
Why QMV?
Anyone reading the previous piece on the EU textile quotas might by surprised by the bizarreness of the U’s “Qualified Majority Voting” rules.
To recap:
Under QMV, a decision needs 232 out of 321 votes, AND a majority of countries, AND countries constituting 62% of EU population.
Where did those numbers come from?
The problem of the EU is that it is not a country, and no-one needs it.
If, say, a bunch of the biggest and richest US states felt like they were being outvoted in the federal government by people who were practically foreigners, it would be enormously difficult for them to just leave – they have 200+ years of history, essential government functions, and the precedent of a failed war of seccession to hold them in.
In the EU, any country could just decide to leave, much more easily. The institutional arrangements have to guarantee the most important members a reasonable say, because the EU can’t afford to lose them. At the same time, the EU has to pretend that it is really one country, and that a Slovakian or a Lithuanian is equal in status to a Frenchman or a Dutchman. The method of squaring this circle has been the weighting rules that ensure, on matters of significance, that the important countries can’t be overruled by unimportant countries. That was just about possible with 15 members, but now with 25, including the large population of Poland, it’s proving near impossible.
Some earlier arguments on the issue here