A Radical Way To Change Politics For The Better

I have three radical, brilliant and yet wacky ideas for how to revolutionise our political system. The first one involves ditching constituencies and drastically reducing the number of MPs with a new system of representation (your local council could fulfil any need your MP can). The widespread mediocrity of our MPs is a lot to do with the fact that they are working within a system that does not provide much of an incentive for moral probity or intelligent policy-making. 

It's only when professional people are accountable for their actions or words that we lessen the duplicity and complacency. I doubt we would have seen the MP expenses scandal nor be subjected to the regular tosh to which we have become habituated if we had upstanding MPs who feared the opprobrium (and voting power) of the electorate, and had to conduct themselves with integrity and intelligence to secure their next vote. 

The main cause of this lack of incentive is that too many MPs are in safe seats in their constituency, and party associations that choose the candidates for constituencies can ensure that those in Ministerial roles get the safest seats. My antidote to this is a whole new system that instils some kind of accountability to MPs, and ideally brings in a better and more scrupulous calibre of candidate, and a more carefully thought out voting process.

Idea 1

First we need to decimate the notion of votes attached to constituencies according to geographical borders. As a replacement, my radical proposal would be that candidates will stand to represent surnames demarcated into sections of the alphabet, not regions of the country. We could reduce the exorbitant number of MPs down to about 500 (that'll save on expenses) - and then have a system in which MP 1 represents everyone whose surname begins with Aa-Ad, MP 2 represents everyone whose surname begins with Ae-Ah, and so on. 

Under such conditions, an MP really would have to work hard to forge a good reputation and the prowess for positive influence, because the people he or she represents would be all over the country, and they would make up a body consisting of a diverse range of classes, cultures and ethnicity. MPs are much less likely to be complacent if they are required to have a positive impact on tens of thousands of people scattered across the country rather than people concentrated in a specified area of the country - they will have to think more innovatively about plans, policies, investments and strategies.

And instead of having constituents and holding surgeries, elected MPs could get involved with local issues through regional councils, primarily motivated by doing good, honest, decent work for the region. There may be occasions when conflicts of interests occur between a local person and a person he or she represents alphabetically, but I don't expect them to be too frequent. Put this system in place and I'll bet we'd see a higher standard of MPs, in a system in which Westminster attracts more candidates who want to be MPs for the right reasons.

Idea 2

In addition, my second idea adds even more intellectual and moral scrutiny to the process - because in order for MP 1 to represent everyone whose surname begins with Aa-Ad, and MP 2 to represent everyone whose surname begins with Ae-Ah, and so on, we could try to lessen party political biases and tribalism by offering category distinctions between policies and parties. In other words, rather than everyone whose surname begins with Aa-Ad voting for a party candidate, they could instead be asked to tick boxes for a large range of policies they support (after reading intelligent annotated arguments for the costs and benefits of each policy - we could make this mandatory), while being blind to the parties to which those policies belong.

I got this idea during the last election, after clicking on one or two of those websites that attempt to tell you which party it thinks you should vote for based on a series of policy selections you've made from behind a Rawls-type veil of ignorance, blind to the parties to which those policies belong. It’s obviously not totally blind, as it’s fairly easy to tell which policy belongs to which party in the most obvious areas - but it certainly was the case that when people did the exercise they frequently ended up being most closely aligned with parties that were not the parties for whom they would usually vote.

Being more economically right wing than most, and more socially left wing than most, when I partook in the exercise it was clear that I am further from all the mainstream parties than any of them are from each other, which means there is no obvious party for me to vote for. However, this isn't true of the average voter - in fact, rather worryingly, a poll seemed to indicate that if people voted for policies not personalities, the Green Party would have won the last election - which does rather suggest that the average voter is likely to make a real mess of things with a policy-only vote, and that democracy would not be all that safe in their hands.

Idea 3

This is where my third idea can help - because, as I talked about in this Blog post, I think the nation pays too much regard to the so-called qualities of democracy. Leaving decisions and policies that require intelligence and evidence-based analysis in the hands of largely uneducated and short-sighted populations is highly overrated. What's needed, in my view, is a voting system comprised of fewer, smarter voters - but having tweaked my system a bit, I'd now wish to incorporate my two above ideas into it.

Added to my above system of having MPs represent surnames rather than constituencies, and voters voting on policies not personalities, I'd also want the outcomes to be in the hands of far fewer, more educated voters - maybe with something resembling jury duty, where a random selection of the population (to ensure a proportional representation of sexes, ages, ethnic backgrounds, income groups, religious beliefs, political views, education, and so forth) - let's say 50 people for each letter group (at 500 groups, that's 25,000 voters) - are called to partake in a rigorous voting process involving careful, considered analytical scrutiny over a number of weeks.

So here's how it would work. The first step is to ensure that voters voting in my reduced voter election are better apprised of the facts, and of the pros and cons of all policies (the seen and the unseen). Rather than decide where your vote should go based on personalities, the 50 x 500 chosen voters get to spend a number of weeks, getting paid for their time, studying the economic, sociological and philosophical tenets of all aspects of the policies in front of them, attending lectures from speakers of both sides of the argument, partaking in group discussions and becoming involved in debates orchestrated by experts in the fields (the benefits of the outcome would more than pay for the financial costs of this, and some of the offsetting savings will occur by not having to employ polling clerks throughout the country on election day).

And then at the end of the process, after developing a much broader understanding of the costs and benefits of all policies, the individuals get to vote on those policies, and then the results are announced, with the winning 500 MPs taking their place in Parliament

You may worry that this will disenfranchise most of the other citizens that don’t get to vote – but there’s no reason to think this.  At the start of play, everyone has exactly the same chance of being selected, and everyone in the country (both those selected and those not) will be secure in the knowledge that the people who are going to represent them in Parliament will have been chosen with more rigour and a higher degree of analytical scrutiny by highly conscientious citizens in the country. That cannot be as disenfranchising as the current system in which every single person that votes knows that that vote will have the same use as if they’d stayed at home.

What I'd also predict will happen is that if politicians knew that their policies would be subjected to proper, rigorous analytical scrutiny - and that they'd have to be credible to pass intellectual muster - the policies offered would be far more carefully thought out, and more in tune with a formal economic accountability.

One would hope the politicians that made empty promises, and sold policies based only on benefits with scant regard to costs, and politicians who took advantage of the electorate from within the comfort of their safe seats, would be greatly diminished, and in many cases got rid of altogether in my proposed system. Who knows - it's even possible that higher quality politicians with properly analysed policies may end up rubbing off on a greater proportion of the electorate.

Which Brilliant Ideas Are Far Less Widely Known Than They Ought To Be?

It's a great question which a friend and I were discussing over a group dinner Friday night. I can offer plenty of suggestions to whet your appetite; there are numerous ideas that would enrich people's understanding of everyday societal matters that are not currently captured with enough depth to do so. Examples would be things like comparative advantage, that which is seen and unseen, deadweight costs, Coase's theorem, Chesterton's fence and the concept of the invisible hand. Then there are absolutely life-changing ideas such as Aumann's Agreement Theorem and Harsanyi's Amnesia Principle that bear repeating regularly to get them as widely disseminated as possible. All of those ideas make an appearance in this blog from time to time.

However, the idea I'll pick as the idea of choice in response to this blog post's title will be Arrow's Theorem, as a tribute to Kenneth Arrow who died this week. He was, up until a few days ago, one of the greatest living economists. Arrow's Theorem is not the easiest to describe simplistically because it is mathematically dense, and is quite counterintuitive too (I had a go once before using voting as the illustrative template). In fact, past reading of economics has given me the impression that several economist social commentators have described Arrow's Theorem as the hardest complex idea to simplify for a layperson. I'll have a try with a version I typed up yesterday in the hope that you find it both understandable and intriguing.

To do so, let's discuss my favourite dessert - cheesecake. What I'm going to illustrate is that no democratic system, however fair it appears in terms of participants and number of choices, can satisfy all the axioms associated with the preferences. So for example, if there are three, then: if two are satisfied the third must be violated, whether those two are 1 and 2, 2 and 3, or 1 and 3.

Let's illustrate this. Every day, Julie, Frank and Timothy split a cheesecake with one flavour - Chocolate, Strawberries or Lemon. Their preference orderings change from day to day - some days Julie is in the mood for Strawberries, other days the very thought of Strawberries makes her wish she was eating another flavoured cheesecake. Every evening at dinner time they have to call in their first, second and third choice cheesecake orders (let's say the cheesecake patisserie insists that you specify your second and third choices in case they run out of something.) So Julie, Frank and Timothy need a method for translating their individual preferences to a cheesecake order. Now as it happens, on the 22nd on February, their preferences ran as follows:

 

	Julie	Frank	Timothy
First Choice	Chocolate	Strawberries	Lemon
Second Choice	Strawberries	Lemon	Chocolate
Third Choice	Lemon	Chocolate	Strawberries

I’m not going to divulge what system these three were using to determine their order, but I will tell you that on the 22nd they phoned the patisserie and expressed Chocolate as their first choice. On the 23rd, Julie ranked Chocolate over Lemon again (and let's suppose we don’t know anything about Frank’s or Timothy’s rankings). On the 22nd, only Julie ranked Chocolate over Lemon, whereas on the 23rd, Julie plus possibly one or both of the others ranked Chocolate over Lemon. So if the cheesecake order ranked Chocolate above Lemon on the 22nd, then it should certainly have ranked Chocolate over Lemon on the 23rd, no?

In principle, yes (disallowing for a change of mind for variety - not something that's as likely to happen in political voting). Any other result would have seemed unreasonable to Julie, Frank and Timothy, so when they designed their system, they designed it with the following feature. If we list Chocolate over Lemon on our order on one day, and if none of the people who prefer Chocolate over Lemon change their minds about that the next day, then we should list Chocolate over Lemon the next day as well.

Because this was implicit in their system (and because they’d listed Chocolate over Lemon on the 22nd when only Julie had that preference), they always listed Chocolate over Lemon on any day when Julie preferred Chocolate to Lemon. That is to say, Julie was the principal figure on the Chocolate/Lemon consideration - the 'authoritarian', if you like.

Now on the 24th, Julie was in a Chocolate/Lemon/Strawberries frame of mind. Suppose again we don't know much about Frank’s or Timothy’s moods except that they both favoured Lemon over Strawberries. Since everyone preferred Lemon to Strawberries, Lemon was, of course, listed higher than Strawberries in the cheesecake hierarchy. Once again, any other result would have appeared unreasonable to Julie, Frank and Timothy, so they’d built their system along the following lines:

Whenever we unanimously prefer option X to option Y, option X should rank higher than option Y on our order.

First, Julie preferred Chocolate to Lemon, so of course Chocolate ranked higher than Lemon. Second, everyone preferred Lemon to Strawberries, so Lemon ranked higher than Strawberries. Logic says that Chocolate must have ranked higher than Strawberries. Logic also says that when Julie prefers Chocolate/Lemon/Strawberries in that order, and everyone else prefers Lemon to Strawberries, Chocolate must be more preferable than Strawberries.

They also agreed the following:

Our preferences regarding Lemon should not affect the relative positions of Chocolate and Strawberries in the ranking. Therefore, the above should hold if we drop all the Lemon-related assumptions. That is to say, on any day when Julie prefers Chocolate to Strawberries, Chocolate must rank higher than Strawberries.

The next day, the 25th, Julie’s preferences ran Strawberries/Chocolate/Lemon, while the other two both preferred Strawberries to Chocolate. Since they all preferred Strawberries to Chocolate, Strawberries came out higher than Chocolate on the cheesecake order. Since Julie was a Chocolate/Lemon authoritarian, Chocolate came out higher than Lemon. Logic tells us also that Strawberries came out higher than Lemon. And the same would be true on any day when Julie preferred Strawberries/Chocolate/Lemon and everyone else preferred Strawberries to Chocolate.

But the ranking of Strawberries vs. Lemon was designed to be unaffected by how anyone cared about Chocolate, so the Chocolate-related information cannot be relevant. This tells us that on any day when Julie prefers Strawberries to Lemon, Strawberries rank higher than Lemon. She’s not just a Chocolate/Lemon authoritarian and a Chocolate/Strawberries authoritarian; she’s a Strawberries/Lemon authoritarian too.

What we’ve uncovered is that any Chocolate/Lemon authoritarian is also a Chocolate/Strawberries authoritarian and a Strawberries/Lemon authoritarian. Interchanging the flavours, we could have just as easily discovered that any Chocolate/Strawberries authoritarian (e.g. Julie) is also a Chocolate/Lemon and a Lemon/Strawberries authoritarian - and so on as every pair of flavours appear. In other words, despite the table of preferences above, Julie is an absolute cheesecake authoritarian as all of her preferences are entirely reflected in the cheesecake order on any given day.

Now here's the upshot of it all. We started by declaring that Chocolate came out on top on the 22nd. But if Strawberries had come out on top, then using Arrow's model I could have given evidence to show that Frank is an absolute authoritarian, and if Lemon had come out on top, then using Arrow's model I could have given evidence to show that Timothy is an absolute authoritarian. Regardless of what happened on the 22nd, someone must be an absolute authoritarian - counterintuitive as that may have first appeared.

Extending that further, if there had been more people than just Julie, Frank and Timothy, and more flavours than Chocolate, Strawberries and Lemon, then although the argument becomes more mathematically intractable, it is not at heart any further from the nub of the wisdom just covered - that is, if you have a scenario that translates a series of individual preference choices into a single group preference of choice, that scenario will throw up an authoritarian.

Crucially here, we're seeing the distinction between what are very coherent individual preferences (called transitivity), and how at a group level it becomes incoherent (intransitivity). Transitivity is formally expressed as: if A > B, and B > C, then A > C - so in other words, with cheesecake choices, if Julie likes Chocolate more than Strawberries and Strawberries more than Lemon, she should like Chocolate more than Lemon.

Groups, however, don't necessarily have a transitive preference order - they have intransitive 'cycling' of preferences, which means Chocolate beats Strawberries, which beats Lemon, which beats Chocolate, which beats Strawberries, which beats Lemon, which beats Chocolate - meaning for group scenarios you might just as well put the flavours of cheesecake in a hat.

  

What Democracy Throws Up

In this morning's papers is the news that an extreme Icelandic party called the Pirate party looks set to form the next government. We Brits have had our own issues with democracy recently after the EU Referendum, as I'm sure will Americans if Donald Trump becomes President, and as have many other people in the Middle East and north Africa in the past few years.

There are lots of issues with democracy, but perhaps the main one is that predominant support means that undesirable things can come to pass if it is desired by enough people to make it democratically viable (stay tuned to the end and we'll ask one or two big philosophical questions about allowing the public to decide important things).

One thing democracy throws up is this. Suppose we have Tom, Dick and Harry and £100. A vote for Tom and Dick to have £50 each and Harry to have nothing could easily be favoured democratically on a 2 to 1 basis. Tom and Dick are happy, and Harry is not.

But now suppose Harry offers an alternative to Tom; Tom gets £60 and Harry gets £40. Dick is unhappy, he gets nothing, but Tom is £10 better off than before, and Harry is £40 better off. Naturally, this second proposal could easily be favoured democratically on a 2 to 1 basis too. In response Dick proposes a fifty-fifty split between him and Harry.

Now Dick is back up to £50, and Harry is now £10 up on the last proposal, which could mean a revised 2 to 1 vote, this time at the expense of Tom. As you can probably gather, this process could go on and on, as it follows the same rule: that predominant support makes situations come to pass democratically.

As the old adage goes, if democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch, democracy isn't great for everyone. And as I pointed out in this Blog a while back, in many cases of political policy in the present age the rich are quite often the lambs, and the rest of the population are the wolves with their tablecloths and knives and forks at the ready:

"While a rigorous intellectual enquiry reconciles discordances, democracy merely inflates them with a system of winners and losers. To rub salt in the wounds, politicians know that a huge number of the electorate are pretty ignorant about politics and economics, so they look not to what's good for the country but what is likely to be popular in terms of votes

Because of how our top earners raise the average wage, the majority of people in the UK earn below the average wage, which means they are going to be swayed by redistributionist policies targeted at the rich, and economic policies that hamper progress. Unfortunately, in terms of viable representatives, this means the public do not get what they need; they get what they think they want. Or to use a culinary analogy, instead of getting to choose between a fillet steak, a sirloin steak and a rump steak, the public instead gets to choose between several rump steaks with slightly different flavoured sauces.

Despite the increased human assent to democratic values, there is one key thing that will always provide a resistance; and it is that for all her picturesque backdrops and glorious natural scenery, nature is not very democratic at all. When it comes to health, looks, size, shape, talents, intelligence, sensory apparatus, opportunity and background, nature is far from democratic - there is a notable difference in all of these human qualities in each of us, as their attainment depends on undemocratic things like fortune and pursuit.

Further, there is no democracy in the qualities we try to attain either. Successful romantic love is not democratic: it reveals itself more to the faithful pursuer of monogamy than it does the uncommitted philanderer. Goodness is not democratic: it emerges more in those who seek moral probity than those who pursue selfishly bad ends. Knowledge is not democratic: it is the natural reward of diligence and effort, and absent in lazy-minded slackers. Good health is not democratic: it is contingent on the lifestyle chosen, genetic legacies, and other physiological factors too. And more generally, the achievements, the wisdom, and the fulfilments we secure are not democratic: they are the reward of hard work and an earnest pursuit of things that are good for us.

Our democratic leanings, then, are assented to in spite of nature not because of it. Those leanings are based on a popular view about equality - the view that it is fundamental to a successful society and peaceable co-existence. Our yearning for equality is in one sense a good thing - it is the recognition that we want everyone to make the best of their raw material, irrespective of genes, looks, intelligence and background. But in another sense, and sadly the predominant sense, it is pernicious in its fear of success and advancement. At its worst its proponents hate the thought of wealth stratification, superiority and divergence in achievement - they behave like starved organisms desperate to lament the oxygen of others, leading only to envy and resentment.

While the first tenet of equality is noble, the second is ignoble, and we must have no truck with it. Just as an education system that gave everyone the same grades would be unrepresentative, and a 400 metre race in which everyone crossed the line together would be pointless, similarly, a society devoid of wealth stratification, superiority and divergence in achievement would be a society in which those richest of human qualities - freedom to pursue talents, rewards for hard work, benefits to innovation, and positives that emerge from moral and intellectual excellence - were rendered meaningless."

Should we always trust the public?
So, to finish - what's been evident is that the Brexit vote has regurgitated issues about democracy that the Greek philosophers used to debate, but which have now taken on a modern context. The following, perfectly reasonable questions now loom large:

1) Are the general public always the best people to ask about big, far-reaching decisions that the majority are probably ill-equipped to understand?

2) When a national referendum is actioned, should democracy always be respected in terms of going with the majority opinion?

3) Under which conditions might we be able to justifiably argue to overturn a democratic decision made by the public?

Regarding question 1, knowing the general public I'd suggest the answer is, not always. However, political intelligence must also involve the mental adroitness to avoid placing the nation in a terribly precarious situation by not having referendums on matters where the 'wrong' outcome would be a disaster.

Regarding 2, I'd answer mostly yes, but I could conceive of occasions when the answer would be no.

Regarding 3, carrying on from 2, where I could conceive of occasions when we could justifiably overturn a democratic decision made by the public would be when the majority opinion was likely to be so harmful and damaging and idiotic that democracy needs a few voices of reason to straighten things out. For example, suppose we ended up with a scenario where the majority of the country voted to make the UK a protectionist nation with no outside trade, or a scenario where the majority of the country voted to ban all immigration into the country, or a scenario where the majority of the country voted for the UK to be governed by an Islamic theocracy - they are cases where even something like the quality of democracy shouldn't have ultimate primacy on the matter.

The upshot of all this, I suppose, is that the key to governments holding referendums is that the ramifications of either result should be intelligently and thoroughly thought through, and therefore referendums should only be offered to the public if one of the possible outcomes was not thought by (presumably) Parliament to be too disastrous for the country (which I admit is a subjective thing in itself).

  

Just Like The Kernel Of Wheat In Jesus' Parable, The Dead Seeds Of The EU Must Be Sown Into The Earth

Today, thousands of people with scant regard for democracy are marching through London to protest against the democratically voted for referendum decision to leave the EU. Putting aside the issue of valuing democracy, the people who voted Remain, and the people who voted Leave that are now regretting it, are worried about the future post-Brexit. They should not be, particularly once they get a handle on the bigger picture that extends several decades henceforward.

Sometimes a little bit of pain is required to prevent even more pain. If your young child comes to you with a splinter in his thumb, you know the best way to deal with it is to get it out from the under his skin straight away by pressing down on it with your fingernail.

Your young boy may resist the added pain, but you know that what is causing him that extra pain is actually reliving him from worse pain, soreness and possible infection in the long run. This is what is happening with our leaving the EU - we are getting out at a time when very few people understand that it is a gradually crumbling empire, and that in its current state it is going to have to eventually die before its constituent nation states can live.

Brexit will almost certainly set off a domino effect of other nations joining us with their own exit in the next few decades. It will be a slow dismantlement of the EU, but it is almost inevitable that it will happen, for reasons I talk about in greater detail in other Brexit-related blog posts. 

Don't misunderstand, I have no time for all the anti-immigration bile going around, and I'd hope that when the other nations follow suit and join us outside the EU that they'd do so because they can see how even more prosperous our nation becomes with independence, not under the influence of the plethora of extreme right-wing parties gathering momentum in the north-western European countries. But for the good of the continent, individual nation states need to save the EU from itself: it is stagnating, it is unsustainable by being inimical to growth, and no nation past or present that has copied its model has seen anything other than economic disaster.

Playing the long percentage game, with the exception of Germany, France and possibly Belgium and the Netherlands if things go their way, the majority of the EU countries are almost certainly going to trail behind the world's emerging nations in the next few decades, and it's for five main reasons.

Firstly, in a wider global market with most countries more actively involved than ever before, cross national competition is going hinder set-ups like the EU that impose tariffs against imports from non-EU countries.

Secondly, the market for consumable goods is steadily shifting away from Europe towards Asia, which will give them the advantage in the market for future consumables too.

Thirdly, the single currency (the Euro) ultimately works far better for Europe's big players - but it is in many ways a hindrance for the rest, which means Germany (in particular) is going to be involved in a lot more Greece-like scenarios as the predominance of the market shifts Eastward.

Fourthly, and this is a development of the second and third points, as the market predominance shifts Eastward, the quantities of advanced engineering products that Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands sell to China are going to diminish as China becomes the leading player in advanced engineering in the next two or three decades. And this won't necessarily be the case, but the yuan is the only realistic trading currency in the world that could become a gold standard.

Fifthly, the whole continent of Europe has a serious fiscal crisis in that it is catastrophically failing to restrain the pressures of increasing government spending with an ever-aging population. The tax burden necessary for a society of this kind is going to be severely detrimental to the economy even if it were a free trade area with the removal of barriers.

However, given that it's not a free trade area, it's a customs area under the thumb of a political superstructure that erects a common tariff bloc around its member nations and robs them of open trade with the rest of the world, I think we can replace the word 'detrimental' with the word 'ruinous' economy.

Forget for a moment about the world we do actually live in - the one where politicians, bureaucracy and establishment-interference is ingrained in our expectations - and consider this question. Why should the UK leaving the EU cause any market instability at all? To answer honestly is to admit that, it shouldn't, and that what's causing the bulk of the problems is the size of the interference in free trade of the politicians, bureaucracy and establishment-interference in the first place.

The moment we decided to leave the EU, nothing about the UK's productivity or its businesses' ability to create value changed. It's as not as though there was a national flood that drowned out the UK's commercial activity. When everyone awoke the following day they woke to the same physical UK. The big thing that changed, however, was that the EU, which regulates countless details of our exchanges became, in potentia at least, a different kind of obstacle for buyers and sellers to trade freely.

Moreover, the attitude of Eurocrats since Brexit was announced gives exhibition to the very reasons it was good to leave them in the first place. The reaction to the prospect of their not having such a big say in our lives, plus their threats of even bigger impediments to our free trade by further taxes, tariffs and social restrictions, demonstrates not just why we're better off out, it also gives a future hint of the fragility of the foundations on which its structure of constraint is built.

As long as each domestic government oversees the basic necessities of light regulation to protect consumers from any of the undesirable things that might affect a mutually voluntary transaction (trades description issues, health and safety breaches, quality of product, and so forth) - basically all the things that we as consumers wouldn't wish to be victims of due to asymmetry of information - there is absolutely nothing that prohibits mutually voluntary and beneficial trade between two people or two nations except the unhelpful constraints imposed upon them by politicians, bureaucracy and establishment-interference.

What we are in danger of is a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom, whereby pontificating about how troubled economy is going to be creates an insidious social instability which affects business and outside investment, which precipitates the more troubled economy for which everyone was blaming the opposition.

What we need, however, is to be smart and resolute, and understand that the freer we can be in becoming even more of a global trade power, the less turbulence we'll see in our economy, and the more other EU nations will begin to see how, in extricating ourselves from the union, and enjoying more mutually beneficial trade relations and increasing our status as dominant global economy, they too can follow suit and help signal the beginning of the end of many of the ways that politicians, bureaucracy and establishment-interference place unnecessary constraints on our lives.

Mark my words, here is what's going to happen - and I probably will be quoting this in a few years' time. After the expected volatility and instability over what people seem to be referring to as 'uncertainty', England (possibly without the union of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, although they'd be mad to divorce us to become wedded to the crumbling EU) will be thriving with their improved global trade relationships, and perhaps (if our leaders are wise) a healthy attitude in not restricting the movement of people, goods and services in Europe.

Then, bit by bit, as the EU political union becomes ever-more precarious, and as more and more countries start to desire autonomy and obtain the domestic economic stability to break away*, the EU as we know it will fold in on itself, as Europe's nation states gradually claw back their ability to play to its market strengths outside the EU bloc, and as everyone gets wiser and wiser to the fact that models like the EU model just won't be sustained for longer than a brief-ish passage in humans' trajectory of gradual progression, less involvement by the establishment in their lives, and increased freedom and liberty.

* No one could have failed to notice what the Eurozone crisis has done to the likes of Greece, Italy and Spain.

The Best Way To Improve Outcomes Is To Have Better, Fewer Voters!

It's been a funny week for the word 'democracy' - the recent EU Referendum, despite having the largest voting turnout for nearly 25 years, has called some to question the democratic process if it throws up outcomes that are unsettling.

Some have asked whether democracy itself is a sufficient system when the results bring about a sense of foreboding, and whether potential costs ought to allow a mechanism by which democracy can be overruled.

 

This is slightly ironic in that people are always calling for more UK citizens to engage in politics and get up and vote, yet when this does happen there are widespread complaints that too many ignorant and ill-informed people voting does not a good outcome make.

Of course, given that politically and economically the majority of the electorate are abjectly uninformed, it is not in the least bit surprising that big decisions put in the hands of the public can be a dangerous thing.

All this makes a blog post I wrote over three years ago seem quite prescient. It was there that I addressed the problem of the voting public and came up with an idea for a solution:

"The only way to vastly improve the quality of our MPs is to improve the quality of the voters – and the only way to improve the quality of the voters is to drastically reduce the number of them, and then give a randomly selected few the time and resources to rigorously research and analyse the candidates before them. 

Here’s what I’d suggest. Reduce the number of voters in each constituency to 200 people chosen at random (to ensure a proportional representation of sexes, ages, ethnic backgrounds, income groups, religious beliefs, political views, education, and so forth) and have each of them accompany the political candidates to a location in which they stay for a week, ensuring the time, resources and intellectual and emotional capacity to question the MPs, give and solicit feedback, and test the candidates’ political calibre before casting their votes at the end of the week (the benefits of the outcome would probably more than pay for the financial costs of this, and some of the offsetting savings will occur by not having to employ polling clerks throughout the country on election day).

You may worry that this will disenfranchise most of the other citizens that don’t get to vote, but there’s no reason to think this. At the start of play, everyone has exactly the same chance of being selected, and everyone in the country (both those selected and those not) will be secure in the knowledge that the people who are going to represent them in Parliament will have been chosen with the utmost rigour and analytical scrutiny by the most conscientious citizens in the country. That cannot be as disenfranchising as the current system in which every single person that votes knows that that vote will have the same use as if they’d stayed at home. 

All that said, the bottom line is, even if the system I proposed is a superior system for improving the calibre of our MPs (which seems logically unimpeachable to me), it might still instinctively be the case that our present less effective voting system is a pearl of great electoral price from which it is too emotionally and psychologically costly to depart."

As would always be the case, you'd have to decide whether you prefer including everybody in the voting process and therefore giving some of the craziest cats and bigoted individuals a voice, or whether for the good of the country you'd be happier with far fewer but possibly better informed voters.

Or suppose, if we could find a workable method for this, we somehow only allowed the smartest, knowledgeable and best-informed 1000 people in the UK to vote on who ran our country, how would that sit with you?

 

If allowing everyone to vote is not as good for the country as allowing a selection of only smart and informed people to vote, which seems like a sine qua non to me, then there will always be a trade off between better outcomes and a better spirit of total inclusivity in the country.

Of course, rather amusingly, I'd like to leave you with the following thought, which perhaps kills two birds with one stone. The whole country gets to vote on whether the smartest, knowledgeable and best-informed 1000 people get to vote for our political outcomes.

 



On Democracy

On January 20th people in the UK celebrated the 750th anniversary of the first parliament, calling it Democracy Day. Democracy is far from perfect, but it does at least give people a voice and makes our representatives accountable at the ballot box. There is a fundamental reason, though, why democracy is strictly limited - it is because, unlike Aumann's Agreement Theorem*, a democratic system isn't about closing the gap on the issues about which we disagree, it is about a proportion of conflicting ideologies winning popularity over others.

While a rigorous intellectual enquiry reconciles discordances, democracy merely inflates them with a system of winners and losers. To rub salt in the wounds, politicians know that a huge number of the electorate are pretty ignorant about politics and economics, so they look not to what's good for the country but what is likely to be popular in terms of votes

Because of how our top earners raise the average wage, the majority of people in the UK earn below the average wage, which means they are going to be swayed by redistributionist policies targeted at the rich, and economic policies that hamper progress. Unfortunately, in terms of viable representatives, this means the public do not get what they need; they get what they think they want. Or to use a culinary analogy, instead of getting to choose between a fillet steak, a sirloin steak and a rump steak, the public instead gets to choose between several rump steaks with slightly different flavoured sauces.

Despite the increased human assent to democratic values, there is one key thing that will always provide a resistance; and it is that for all her picturesque backdrops and glorious natural scenery, nature is not very democratic at all. When it comes to health, looks, size, shape, talents, intelligence, sensory apparatus, opportunity and background, nature is far from democratic - there is a notable difference in all of these human qualities in each of us, as their attainment depends on undemocratic things like fortune and pursuit.

Further, there is no democracy in the qualities we try to attain either. Successful romantic love is not democratic: it reveals itself more to the faithful pursuer of monogamy than it does the uncommitted philanderer. Goodness is not democratic: it emerges more in those who seek moral probity than those who pursue selfishly bad ends. Knowledge is not democratic: it is the natural reward of diligence and effort, and absent in lazy-minded slackers. Good health is not democratic: it is contingent on the lifestyle chosen, genetic legacies, and other physiological factors too. And more generally, the achievements, the wisdom, and the fulfilments we secure are not democratic: they are the reward of hard work and an earnest pursuit of things that are good for us.

Our democratic leanings, then, are assented to in spite of nature not because of it. Those leanings are based on a popular view about equality - the view that it is fundamental to a successful society and peaceable co-existence. Our yearning for equality is in one sense a good thing - it is the recognition that we want everyone to make the best of their raw material, irrespective of genes, looks, intelligence and background. But in another sense, and sadly the predominant sense, it is pernicious in its fear of success and advancement. At its worst its proponents hate the thought of wealth stratification, superiority and divergence in achievement - they behave like starved organisms desperate to lament the oxygen of others, leading only to envy and resentment.

While the first tenet of equality is noble, the second is ignoble, and we must have no truck with it. Just as an education system that gave everyone the same grades would be unrepresentative, and a 400 metre race in which everyone crossed the line together would be pointless, similarly, a society devoid of wealth stratification, superiority and divergence in achievement would be a society in which those richest of human qualities - freedom to pursue talents, rewards for hard work, benefits to innovation, and positives that emerge from moral and intellectual excellence - were rendered meaningless.

I tend to agree with Churchill that democracy is the least bad of all alternatives rather than being stunningly good in itself. Still, we have it, and we're better off than most countries, so we mustn't grumble too much - as long as we keep one step ahead of democracy's limitations.  

* See here for my blog post on Aumann's Agreement Theorem