michael_keenan

Consider the following sequence of cases, which we shall call the Tale of the Slave, and imagine it is about you.

1. There is a slave completely at the mercy of his brutal master's whims. He often is cruelly beaten, called out in the middle of the night, and so on.

2. The master is kindlier and beats the slave only for stated infractions of his rules (not fulfilling the work quota, and so on). He gives the slave some free time.

3. The master has a group of slaves, and he decides how things are to be allocated among them on nice grounds, taking into account their needs, merit, and so on.

4. The master allows his slaves four days on their own and requires them to work only three days a week on his land. The rest of the time is their own.

5. The master allows his slaves to go off and work in the city (or anywhere they wish) for wages. He requires only that they send back to him three-sevenths of their wages. He also retains the power to recall them to the plantation if some emergency threatens his land; and to raise or lower the three-sevenths amount required to be turned over to him. He further retains the right to restrict the slaves from participating in certain dangerous activities that threaten his financial return, for example, mountain climbing, cigarette smoking.

Elections are decided by numbers, and the ignorant outnumber the knowledgeable, so the ignorant decide the outcome. This casts an odd light on the lengthy and detailed explanations by the hyper-informed as to why they voted the way they did. A single person only gets one vote, so it is hardly of earth-shattering importance how they voted, let alone why. Sure, a single voter's explanation may be of interest as a microcosm of what tens of millions of people were thinking. Were that only so! Alas, a writer informed enough to give a decent explanation of their vote does not represent the masses who actually decide an election.

terrencechan

Most of the worst politicians and figures in history have been charismatic individuals. I fear charismatic politicians. When it comes to a position of power, I'd much rather have a guy with just so-so charisma; someone that people like but aren't entranced by. Obama creates this wave of excitement and fervor everywhere he goes. It's probably just me, but I'm genuinely scared when I see massive, massive throngs of people gathering to hail any one man as the messiah and saviour and the great bringer of change and bearer of hope. People have always showed up to political rallies to support and cheer for their candidate, but Obama supporters seemed particularly fervent. And today, when his win was made official, people were so fucking happy. There's this great sense of pride among Americans that they elected Obama. And all of that is scary to me. Because at the end of the day, he's still a politician. He and his ilk are still going to take away liberties, still spend other peoples' money, and still make up laws to benefit some at the expense of others. He will say things he doesn't believe or are grounded in fallacy, and he will say them with a straight face because they are the popular things to say. He will do these things because he is a politician, and that's what politicians do.

But still, yeah, I'm glad the election is over, and I'm glad the less-sucky of the two mainstream politicians won. I suppose I'm just less glad than everyone else.

steuard

donaithnen

I'm your game theory professor:

"Ha ha ha! Oh wait, you were serious. Please leave the classroom, and go back to a remedial logic class."

If my payoff is higher from defecting, regardless of what everyone else does, then the logical choice is to defect. Your reasoning is spurious. I cannot force myself to reach an erroneous conclusion because of the hope that everyone else will too. Even if I had such powers of rationalization, it then becomes rational, after going through the logic and making the decision, to defect.

Your argument is, at its core, based on the idea that we can pick a strategy based on what we wish would be true, and what we wish everyone else would do. Rather than what is true, and what everyone else will do. This sort of outcome-motivated logic is not only fallacious, but, in my opinion, is inherently anti-rational and anti-science. From my perspective, you are making an argument akin to Creationism.

WTF is up with arguments that would get laughed out of game theory class being considered "logical" when discussing civics?

The abuses that outrage you (and me) seem to happen in the absence of democracy as well. I hesitate to say that this is the inevitable result of humans living together, but it seems wrong to lay the blame fully on democracy.

I do agree that democracy is not the most important element that's made things so good (relative to everything else tried so far). Common acceptance of rule of law, equal treatment, and constitutional limits on democratic actions are far more important than voting. And it's the erosion of these that cause the problems. Democracy turns out not to be immune to erosion of these ideals, but it's hard to see it as the cause.

Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets.
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Jane Hamsher and I were at two of those homes this morning -- one which had just been raided and one which was in the process of being raided. Each of the raided houses is known by neighbors as a "hippie house," where 5-10 college-aged individuals live in a communal setting, and everyone we spoke with said that there had never been any problems of any kind in those houses, that they were filled with "peaceful kids" who are politically active but entirely unthreatening and friendly
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In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house.
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Nestor indicated that only 2 or 3 of the 50 individuals who were handcuffed this morning at the 2 houses were actually arrested and charged with a crime, and the crime they were charged with is "conspiracy to commit riot." Nestor, who has practiced law in Minnesota for many years, said that he had never before heard of that statute being used for anything, and that its parameters are so self-evidently vague, designed to allow pre-emeptive arrests of those who are peacefully protesting, that it is almost certainly unconstitutional, though because it had never been invoked (until now), its constitutionality had not been tested.

The paper has some nifty graphs showing the incumbent party's vote share (and change in vote share) as a function of relief and prevention spending. The slope for relief is sharply positive; the slope for prevention is flat. Given these incentives, it's hardly surprising that politicians spend about fifteen times as much on relief (which attracts votes) as they do on prevention (which doesn't).

Of course, if prevention were useless, this would be a pretty good outcome. But Healy presents additional evidence that disaster prevention spending has high returns...In the hands of rational voters, government is strong medicine for public goods problems. But in the hands of real voters, government is usually a big bottle of snake oil.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
H. L. Mencken

When the city council bans liquor sales on Sundays, the Baptists rejoice—it's wrong to drink on the Lord's day. The bootleggers, rejoice, too. It increases the demand for their services.

The Baptists give the politicians cover for doing what the bootleggers want. No politicians says we should ban liquor sales on Sunday in order to enrich the bootleggers who support his campaign. The politician holds up one hand to heaven and talk about his devotion to morality. With the other hand, he collects campaign contributions (or bribes) from the bootleggers.

Yandle points out that virtually every well-intentioned regulation has a bunch of bootleggers along for the ride—special interests who profit from the idealism of the activists and altruists.
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( Read more... )I am working on a long piece about the evolution of my political views from self-righteous natural-rights libertarianism to the more pluralistic, "libertarianism as a preference", consequentialist view it is now. This quote captures one of the key parts of my current views nicely: I believe that incidents like above are the rule, not the exception. That in a democracy, legislation is consistently biased to serve special interests, at a huge cost to everyone else. It's not that I'm against clean air, or all of the other many wonderful things we might like to do with government, but that I think almost anything done by government will be implemented with such waste that it is unlikely to be a net win.

One key element to this view is that it is system-centric not person-centric. I have observed that most people see such problems as being caused by having "the wrong guys" in power. I think this is a fundamental human bias towards seeing problems as human-caused, and that it is deeply wrong in the case of government. (Not that human's can't sometimes affect it, like that SOB GWB). And that bias leads towards us thinking that elections are the answer, vote those bastards out, when really they just give us the illusion of control without changing the system.

Sadly, I believe that the same reasoning that leads to this conclusion also inescapably leads to the conclusion that libertarian reform within current democracies is impossible. If anything, the systemic incentives are even stronger against abandoning central power than they are against implementing efficient central solutions. So, while I applaud the courage and vision of those who(say) think Ron Paul has a chance through the electoral process, I think democracy-supporting libertarians are even more wrong-headed than republicans and democrats. Getting the government to do something right may be hard, but getting it to do nothing at all is even harder.

So I'd be awfully discouraged if it weren't for dynamic geography.