
On quadratic voting and politics as education - vwoolf
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/01/my-thoughts-on-quadratic-voting-and-politics-as-education.html
======
xnull2guest
While this mechanism may seem as though it may work for minority groups with
strong preferences, it's important to point out the implicit assumption of
class equality between majority and minority voters. That is, the example of
gay rights works because homosexuals are spread evenly across the wealth
distribution (and in fact are _more_ financially and socially successful in
the aggregate than non-homosexuals).

But compare this to transgender peoples, who are marginalized,
disproportionately homeless, almost universally imprisoned, and make up a very
disproportionate percentage of the lower class (usually they 'fall' to this
class rather than being 'borne of it'). It is unlikely that transgender people
could buy the votes to achieve policy measures they felt necessary just as it
would have been impossible for slaves and poor indentured whites and
immigrants in the 1700s and 1800s, Native Americans pushed from their land and
made to walk trails of tears, children working in factories, or women for
these same centuries (who in addition to having effectively no political voice
also had few reasonable financial options) to 'buy' freedom.

Additionally, entrenched interests within classes - and in disputes between
them - make it easy for the upper division of the wealth distribution to buy
political power to block the opposing classes vote, this exacerbated by high
wealth inequality. That is to say so-called Quadratic Voting also depends on
the wealthier class having no strong opinion - yet its very easy to find
examples both today and historically where this is easily shown not to be the
case.

So its suspect whether today's working poor, child laborers, blacks and
latinos, immigrants, or members of small (or no) unions would benefit from a
system like this.

Finally, these market based solutions to voting would be yet another way to
trade financial power for political power. The history of all governments show
how strongly political power already responds to wealth. Is it smart (and
ethical) to make votes market commodities?

~~~
zephjc
A niggle on the term "transgendered" (via
[http://www.glaad.org/reference/transgender](http://www.glaad.org/reference/transgender)),
specifically the final point:

Problematic: "transgendered"

Preferred: transgender

The adjective transgender should never have an extraneous "-ed" tacked onto
the end. An "-ed" suffix adds unnecessary length to the word and can cause
tense confusion and grammatical errors. It also brings transgender into
alignment with lesbian, gay, and bisexual. You would not say that Elton John
is "gayed" or Ellen DeGeneres is "lesbianed," therefore you would not say Chaz
Bono is "transgendered."

~~~
WasSlowbanned
The difference is a person is born gay, they don't need an operation to become
gay. The Ed reflects this process. Hence you cannot be gayed, but you can
become educated, indoctrinated, experienced, and transgendered.

~~~
21echoes
Transgender does _not_ mean having a sex change operation. Statistics say that
somewhere between 66 and 90 percent of transgender people do _not_ get sex
change operations[1][2], and 40% have any no medical treatments at all
(hormonal, surgical... _anything_ ) related to transitioning their gender[1].

[1]
[http://www.thetaskforce.org/static_html/downloads/reports/re...](http://www.thetaskforce.org/static_html/downloads/reports/reports/ntds_full.pdf)

[2]
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/nyregion/23gender.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/nyregion/23gender.html)

------
rayiner
> I would gladly have gay marriage legal throughout the United States. But
> overall, like David Hume, I am more fearful of the intense preferences of
> minorities than not. I do not wish to encourage such preferences, all things
> considered. If minority groups know they have the possibility of buying up
> votes as a path to power, paying the quadratic price along the way, we are
> sending intense preference groups a message that they have a new way
> forward. In the longer run I fear that will fray democracy by strengthening
> the hand of such groups, and boosting their recruiting and fundraising. Was
> there any chance the authors would use the anti-abortion movement as their
> opening example?

This is the punchline for me. At the end of the day, the whole point of
democracy is that the majority is in charge. Majority control is the general
rule; protection of minorities is the exception to the general rule.

~~~
rdc12
Which is very problematic, the minority will forever be limited to the whim of
the majority.

On the otherhand if you look at the super wealthy minority, allready have a
disproportionate say in poltical matters, donations, lobbyists etc.

~~~
rayiner
The whole point of democracy is to limit the minorities to the whim of the
majority. This is unfortunate when we're talking about harmless racial or
social minorities. However, the alternate state of humanity, where the
majority is subservient to minorities, such as warlords or hereditary feudal
lords, is worse.

As for the super wealthy, in a democracy the manner in which they exert
influence is very different. In a non-democratic system, minorities have
direct power (they own the guns). In a democratic system, wealthy minorities
can't beat the majority with firepower. This is a _fundamental distinction_.
They have to rely on indirect power--usually by leveraging their ownership of
the means of production. This is inevitable so long as capital resides in
private hands. "My factory creates 10,000 jobs in your district, so you had
better vote against that environmental legislation" will always be a
disproportionately powerful argument, even in the total absence of direct
exchange of money for political influence.

~~~
rdc12
Personally I view that as being a pretty big flaw in democracy, but it also
works the other way when the extremist element has a hard time gaining
influence. But that is not a guarantee either, the Tea Party being a good
example.

It may be a distiction, and the second way is more subtle and covert, but the
net result of a power imbalance is still the result.

~~~
rayiner
Flaw in democracy relative to what?

Thought experiment. Zuck & Co., fed-up with U.S. immigration policy, skip the
PAC and just import foreign labor in heavily-armed gunships past Navy
defenses. Sounds preposterous, but that just goes to show how desensitized
people living in democratic countries are to the plight of humanity. A system
that forces elite minorities to get buy-in from the majority instead of
unilaterally imposing their will is a historical aberration and still not
enjoyed by most of the world.

The Tea Party is a great example of the resiliency of democracy. Money buys
influence, but billionaires must at least make the case that their interests
are aligned with those of the majority. Again, it's not clear what you can do
about this within a capitalistic system. The factory owner can always tell his
workers: "universal healthcare will be bad for you because I won't be able to
keep all of you employed if my taxes go up." And that message will always be
tremendously compelling.

~~~
rdc12
Does a flaw in a system have to be relative to another system, or can it be a
flaw in isolation?

How does that show resilience, numerous Tea Party members have been elected,
it may have been under a Republican banner, but that is more a symptom of a 2
party electorial process.

~~~
rayiner
> Does a flaw in a system have to be relative to another system, or can it be
> a flaw in isolation?

I think talking about flaws in political systems without any point of
reference is navel-gazing and not very interesting. Kind of like talking about
whether the Flash or Superman would win in a fight.

> How does that show resilience, numerous Tea Party members have been elected

Even $80 billion between the Koch Brothers can't buy the election of proper
statist libertarians, much less railroad through actual policies consistent
with the ideology. The Tea Party is libertarian ideas watered down to the
point of almost being unrecognizable. In the end, it's just a bunch of
Republicans running on a platform of lower taxes, less regulation, and,
inexplicably, conservative social issues--ideas that have always had
tremendous traction among the majority.

------
nwj
One thing that was helpful to me in making sense of this post was to
understand that Quadratic Voting is trying to solve the problem of the
"tyranny of the majority." It's a voting scheme that gives greater weight to
minority preferences than the one-person-one-vote schemes we are mostly
familiar with.

(Please note that this is "minority" in the "!majority" sense of the word, and
not merely "!caucasians.")

Tyler's contribution here is to push back a little against the idea that we
should be favoring minority preferences more than we do currently. He thinks
this is too indiscriminate. Some minority preferences are quite good and
others are pernicious. Favoring _all_ minority preferences empowers the good
and the bad.

I was also struck by the last paragraph: > "In any case the relevant question
is what kinds of preference formation, and which kinds of groups, we should
allow voting mechanisms to encourage."

In other words, all voting schemes favor certain preferences and groups over
others. There is no perfectly objective voting scheme that would let us avoid
this. We as a polity have no choice but to grapple with what and who to favor.

The implicit criticism in that final paragraph is that Quadratic Voting is
leaping over the "what/who should we favor" question and optimizing for a
particular answer. Tyler is saying "wait a minute, we haven't even agreed on
the fundamental questions. So why are we already optimizing for a particular
solution?"

~~~
eli_gottlieb
While I broadly agree with your criticism and Tyler's, what I have to
_particularly ask about_ is the following:

>One thing that was helpful to me in making sense of this post was to
understand that Quadratic Voting is trying to solve the problem of the
"tyranny of the majority." It's a voting scheme that gives greater weight to
minority preferences than the one-person-one-vote schemes we are mostly
familiar with.

There have always been minorities insisting that we are under a moral
imperative to avoid a dreaded monster known only as "tyranny of the majority".
Strangely enough, they have never been required to prove the existence of any
such creature by actually measuring the degree to which the status-quo system
functions in a majoritarian way and represents majority preferences.

Since the status-quo system largely seems to represent the top 10% of the
population by income, who are already a minority, I would say that contrary to
talk of "tyranny of the majority", we actually need the system to represent
the broad masses _more_.

------
cubano
Why purchase votes retail when you can just buy a Congressperson wholesale?

------
oakwhiz
This system seems to encourage extremism - extremist groups are more able to
affect political decisions than indifferent people.

------
A1kmm
The person who gets to decide how to break down policy into binary decisions
and when to ask questions is the one with all the power here.

Suppose they want to suppress a 49% minority who care far more than the 51%
majority and will pay far more. Assume that if the question (e.g. do you
support gay marriage) was asked once, the minority could afford the votes for
it to pass. If the person deciding what questions are asked wants to suppress
this, they simply formulate the policy so that for the minority to get what
they want, they have to answer 'No' to n binary questions (e.g. each of the n
questions is a measure that bans gay marriage in a slightly different way).
The minority can afford to overcome the majority on one question, but for some
n, they can't afford to defeat the majority repeatedly. Therefore, asking the
same question more than once would change the outcome.

Bundling decisions would also allow manipulation of binary preferences - for
example, by mixing popular and unpopular measures (e.g. cutting taxes and re-
establishing slavery) in a single decision so that just enough people
considered it worth supporting, even though they don't support all line items.

The mechanism is therefore useless as a voting mechanism without some way of
controlling how things get on the ballot.

Of course, the bigger issue (assuming, as the paper does, that a real currency
is used and not an artificial one) is that the laws in place are never
perfect, and measuring how much influence a group should have to make new laws
based on how wealthy became under current laws will likely lead to dynamic
evolution towards a solution that benefits a tiny minority.

For example, suppose we live in a fictional world where the currency is apples
with 100 people. A person needs 1 apple a day to live (which is consumed,
destroying it). The world has enough trees to produce 125 apples a day (and no
more land to plant more trees). Due to an archaic and unfair law, people
numbered 0-49 get 1.5 apples a day, while everyone else gets 1 apple a day.
People 50-99 perform services to people 0-49 and get a little bit of extra
apple in exchange. People 50-99 never vote, because they can't afford it (or
if they do, it is the minimum - they always vote for everyone to get 1.25
apples per day), while people 0-49 put forward a bit over the minimum and
easily win to retain the archaic law.

One day, people 0-48 decide they want more apples, so they propose to change
the law so that person 49 gets only 1 apple per day. Person 49 puts in all
their savings, but it is not enough, and the law is changed. Person 49 is now
impoverished and in the same state as people 49-99. Gradually, this continues
until one or two people have virtually all the superfluous apples - and
everyone else even has to work hard for that small group of people to get even
the one apple they need to survive.

