voting – Page 4 – Anomaly UK

Democracy and Entertainment

Yesterday’s bit on the greater resources of television current affairs departments compared with political parties was more of a question than an answer. I’ll try to work out what it means.

There are a few caveats:

The money that is spent on news programming includes things like studios and cameras as well as developing the content to put on them.
MPs get paid by the government, which is extra resource to the parties not counted in their budgets.
The civil service plays a role in developing policies for the ruling party.
Political parties have an incentive to be vague about policy, whereas media organisations can afford to be more specific and clearer – they gain more by being provocative than by being right.

Nonetheless, I still think that Channel 4’s policy on higher education is the product of more research and investment than went into the Labour party’s. MPs are paid to be MPs, not to develop policy, and the civil service has its own goals and constraints and is not under the control of the Labour party.

What does this mean?

First, I should be less sceptical than I have been about the “power of the media”. I have always felt that, since the media is constrained to doing what gets it audience, its independent influence on policy is small. However, if what it needs to do is to provide some alternative policy with which to challenge politicians, but it has relative freedom to choose which alternative to develop, then its independent influence is greater than I thought.

Next, why is it the case that we (as a society) invest more in reporting politics than we do in politics itself. Either something is seriously screwy, or we value politics as entertainment more than as a way of controlling government. Or both.

I think it’s quite clear that the population does treat politics mostly as entertainment. The resemblance between Question Time and Never Mind the Buzzcocks is too close to ignore. If someone arrived from another planet and had to work out which of the two concerns how the country is governed, I think they might find it tricky. (I think they get similar numbers of viewers). There are even hybrids like Have I Got News For You to make it more difficult still.

Further, I think voters are correct to see politics primarily as entertainment. Since my attempt to construct an argument that voting could have a non-negligible probability of affecting an election – the infamous correlation dodge – died a logical death, I am left with the usual reasons for voting – primarily how doing it makes me feel. Those reasons apply equally well to voting for Big Brother or Strictly Come Dancing.

In conclusion, I think our system of government is one which selects leaders and policies as a byproduct of the entertainment industry. This might not be a bad thing: the traditional alternative is to select leaders and policies as a byproduct of the defense industry, which I don’t think is obviously superior.

News and Politics and Money

I get news mostly from online newspapers, and I tend towards the barest reports. As a result, whenever I see television news, I’m shocked and put off by the heavy slant it carries.

But my shock this evening was more than usual. Watching Channel 4 news, what struck me for the first time was that Channel 4 appeared to have a more clearly defined and clearly expressed position on the issue they were reporting than did any of the politicians they were interviewing.

But why should that be surprising? Channel 4 has more resources to devote to policy than does any political party. Channel 4 spends 54 million pounds a year on news, documentary and current affairs programming. The two main parties each spend something like 10 million a year, but most of that is spent not on “content”, but on content distribution – posters, leaflets, etc.

British political parties’ policies are being constructed on an almost totally amateur basis, compared to the media – and I think it shows. There are think tanks, but I don’t think they turn over tens of millions a year.

I’m not sure what conclusion to draw from this. In the US they spend a lot more on politics, but don’t seem to get noticeably better policies. But my attitude towards politicians when I hear them is likely to change.

Reference for channel 4 finances: http://www.channel4.com/about4/annualreport/annualreports/index.html page 47

Ingredients of Modernity

Looking at modern Western society, and comparing with the past, there are about five things we have which clearly distinguish us from past societies.

We have:

Prosperity
Individual Freedom
Democracy
Political Stability
Secularism

Following Mencius Moldbug, I have been wondering, particularly, what the relationship Democracy has to Freedom and Prosperity. Is it synergistic with them, as normally assumed, or parasitic on them, as MM claims?

I’ve thrown the last two into the mix in case they are important. Much of Europe has been politically unstable within the last 70 years or so, but possibly that is long enough. The fifth ingredient is really the weakened influence of religion, or at least of Christianity; I’m not sure that secularism is exactly the right word for what I mean.

I’m prepared to accept without discussion the dependence of prosperity on freedom. The freedom to do business freely means the freedom to associate, to communicate, to hold private property, and so on – those freedoms can only be taken away at the cost of stifling economic development. This podcast went into detail, but the basic idea is simple enough.

I think it is at least equally obvious that prosperity depends on political stability. Revolutions are just so damned destructive.

So how does Democracy fit in? The pro-democracy argument is that democracy is the buffer that allows freedom and political stability to coexist; that a non-democratic state will generally be forced to curtail freedom in order to preserve stability.

Anti-democrats can argue that democracy is frequently corrosive of political stability, freedom, or both. But that argument is not sufficient. It may be that democracy does not guarantee either freedom or stability, and yet it may nevertheless be the case that the conjunction of freedom and stability depends on democracy.

Are there historical non-democratic states that were both free and stable? Some past European monarchies might be claimed to fit. For that matter, Victorian Britain was not democratic in the modern sense, due to property qualifications. Were these free enough to count? If attempting to change the government is an essential freedom, then no non-democracy can be considered free, but even without begging the question that way, it is still debatable.

And perhaps it is not freedom that is incompatible with stable non-democracy, but freedom plus prosperity. If the poor are poor enough, they have no power which needs to be recognised by the system. Once a modern economy gets going, they have sufficient resources to demand a share in power.

That actually sounds very plausible to me. But perhaps there is some alternative to democracy that can square the circle between a proletariat unconstrained by either poverty or lack of personal freedom, and a government that excludes them from power.

The best answer that MM has come with is the machine gun.

Perhaps the great tragedy of democracy is that mob power became identified with political power at exactly the last point in history at which mobs were militarily relevant. In the age of the machine gun, the military is at all time sovereign whether it likes it or not. As long as it acts in a unified and disciplined way, it can do whatever it wants. As the experience of China shows, it’s by no means always a mistake to fire into a mob. If the sovereigns of the Concert of Europe had realized that technology was on their side, the murderous degringolade of the 20th century might never have happened.

It might be the kool-aid, but somehow I’m just not able to find that convincing. Surely it can’t be that simple? I suppose the standard objection is that at some point the army will refuse to fire.

I haven’t changed my mind since July: While I accept many of the criticisms of the anti-democrats, and the proposition that democratic states preserve freedom only by restraining democracy, the costs of defending a rationally-run state seem prohibitive.

In other words, I don’t really like democracy; I think it’s basically a trick, but it’s a necessary trick. Giving the mob enough power to pacify it is less damaging than forcing it to accept not having power.

This conclusion is significant for developing countries. I think they need individual freedom, they need political stability, they need prosperity, and, in the long run, they will need democracy in order to make the new forces created by prosperity and freedom balance. Starting with democracy is the wrong way round, as without freedom and prosperity it will be only nominal.

Fixed Term Parliaments

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).

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

David Davis.

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.

Conservatives Formally pledge to cancel ID card scheme

copied from archive.org, 8 July 2024

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.


	NEWS Monday February 5, 2007 Conservatives formally pledge to cancel ID card scheme David Davis has written to Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, giving formal notice that an incoming Conservative administration would scrap the Government’s costly ID card project. And the Shadow Home Secretary has warned of the financial dangers of the Government signing contracts to set up the ID card scheme when it faces cancellation if the Conservatives are returned to power at the next election. In his letter, Mr Davis asked what provision, if any, has been made in the relevant contractual arrangements to protect the Government – and public funds – against the costs that would be incurred as a result of early cancellation of the scheme; with a similar letter fired off to likely major contractors, warning them of the Party’s intentions. Just hours before the Conservatives launch a web and print based campaign against Labour’s ID Cards proposals, Mr Davis told Sir Gus: “As you will be aware, the Conservative Party has stated publicly that it is our intention to cancel the ID card project immediately on our being elected to government. You are now formally on notice of our position and fully appraised of the contingent risks and associated liabilities arising from the national identity card scheme.” Referring to the planned roll out of the Government’s national identity card scheme later this year, Mr Davis reminded the Cabinet Secretary of the longstanding convention that one Parliament may not bind a subsequent Parliament. He wrote: “I urge you to consider very carefully the Government’s position, in advance of the roll-out of the scheme later this year. As a matter of financial prudence, it is incumbent upon you to ensure that public money is not wasted, and contractual obligations are not incurred, investing in a scheme with such a high risk of not being implemented. “In particular, I would be interested to know what provision, if any, has been made in the relevant contractual arrangements to protect the Government – and public funds – against the costs that would be incurred as a result of early cancellation of the scheme.