Recycling old stuff

As long as we're on the topic, here's a thing I wrote during the last election on this one blog thingy for friends. Since I don't have much time to post, you get leftovers. And yes, it's (partly) tongue in cheek:

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For the sake of all that's decent please don't vote tomorrow

First of all, only people who own at least 2 cows should be allowed to vote. We can't have just any ol' cowless yokel votin'. Plato recognized this long time ago in his famous book called "The Republicans". Thomas Hobbyist also saw the problem in his also famous book called "Levitation".

Second, given that we gonna have voting for all, including yokels with less than two cows each, we should have a right to sell our damned, mostly useless votes, to the highest bidder. (I'm an Anarcho-Monarchist after all). As that lead singer for The Cure, Albert Camus, said "What better way to enslave a man, then to give him a vote and call him free?". Well, Mr. Cow-moo, if we can sell our votes then it ain't free is it?

Some people might thing that this will result in "bought" elections. To these people I would say...well, I wouldn't say anything I'd just let our ol' pal Reality give'em a few good slaps. At least this way the money would go to poor cowless yokels rather than to PAC lobbyists, advertising executives, and butthead campaign managers (who according to D-Ante inhabit the fourth level of hell).

But wouldn't that mean that people's wishes are not respected? Well first of all I know a lot of people whose wishes should NOT be respected, at all, since that would imply some very silly things like teachin' in schools that we are NOT descedent from monkeys. Since monkeys are cool and cute and mischevious at the same time, this would just be wrong. We should be proud of our simian ancestors. Anyway I digress. The answer to the dilemma is known as "price discrimination". This is where you charge different prices to different people based on their, or your own preferences. Like you know you'd charge a higher price for heroin to a fiend then just a casual user. Cuz the fiend needs it that much more. So if you can sell your vote you should;
1) price it higher to the more desperate candidate and
2) if you don't like Democrats, don't sell your vote to a democrat, and same if you don't like Republicans. Or at least charge the bastards you hate higher prices. This is elementary economics. If you're gonna sell out, make sure you get a decent price.

In the end though voting is just a clumsy way of society trying to make us feel like we matter and like it cares about us - it's a personalized Oprah show for all of us without the decency to own a cow or two. But every reasonable brain cell in your cerebellum will tell you that it society, Oprah included (I betcha Oprah does own at least two cows), don't give a damn and that even if it did, there's so many cowless yokels out there that there's no freakin' way a single can make a difference. Even in Bush vs. Gore a single vote couldn't've made difference. This result is called Mathematics and it was handed down long ago to the ancient Egyptians by the aliens that "seeded" them here on earth. Can't mess with that.
And that's assuming that there's candidates worthy of choosing between!

So please, tomorrow, on voting day, stay home, drink some beer, and look into the present market price of cows, since when I take over it's only gonna be folks with at least two cows that get to vote.

Voter turnout's already too high - leave it alone!

Mark Thoma links (but disagrees with) to a an article by some Australian do-gooder who thinks that people should be forced to vote. Gabriel also comments. I've already left some comments there but here I wanted to say a bit more about the argument that voting is a public good subject to the free-rider problem. So first, let us just note that the author of the article doesn't really know what a free-rider problem is and equates with "when other people don't do what I want them to do".

But anyway. Is higher voter turnout better? Aside from some amorphous and ill defined appeals to 'good citizenship' I really don't see why. Voting is supposed to be a mechanism which takes individual preferences and somehow aggregates them into a social outcome. If the outcome of the voting process is the same whether 20% of those eligible vote, or 60% do so, what's the difference? Most of these arguments are just a smoke screen for the self-interested motives that knows that a different % of voters (this goes both ways) would deliver a different outcome. But this means that what people care is that the outcome resemble their preferences, not how many people vote per se.

Suppose it's gonna be Obama vs. Giuliani. And suppose that 20 million people prefer Giuliani and 20 million + 1 prefer Obama. If 40 million people stayed at home on election day and only that one guy who prefers Obama shows up, what's the problem? The system worked even with .00000256 % voter turn out. And if there is some, even very small cost, to people of voting then there are potentially huge savings from having those folks stay at home.

Or think about it another way. Suppose that choice of our glorious leader is not made in the voting booth, but instead, the government sends out pollsters (who for the sake of argument, are 100% reliable and trustworthy) to ask people who they prefer. "You want Barack or Rudy?" This is exactly the same as voting except from you having to go to the government, the government comes to you. And suppose that there's some small cost of sending the pollster to each individual citizen.

How many people should be polled? Obviously sending a pollster to every single citizen would be very super expensive (but somehow the voting-fetishists don't mind if that cost would be born by individuals). Welp, those ol' buddies the Central Limit Theorem and the Law of Large Numbers tell us you don't need a large sample (*) to be able to estimate the relevant voting shares and preferences. Something like 10% would work, 15% would be golden (and of course that's how the stations are able to fairly accurately predict winners. If they had bigger budgets and could actually get 10% to 15% they'd get it spot on almost every time). So in this case, polling only 10% or 15% of the eligible citizens would work just fine and would save the government oodles of money relative to asking, say 60% or 70% of the population, and accuracy would increase only a tad (I'm gonna keep this a post without any serious maths).

In fact polling 64% of the eligible voters seem ridiculous from that perspective. And that's what the voter turnout was in the 2004 election.

At this point the counter argument is usually something about how we're all members of the polity and voting gives us a sense of belonging. Ok, fine. That's probably why you get that crazy 64% number rather than something much more reasonable and lower. But there's no externality here. If it gives you a sense of belonging you go vote. If it doesn't you stay at home. End of story. And it's not like you can force people to 'feel' like they belong just by making them do something they don't want to.

And like I said before. Only people who own at least two heads of cattle should have the right to vote anyway.


(*) Of course this requires the sample be random. In a sense the sample of those who actually vote from the universe of eligible voters is not random. It's self selected. It's people who have strong feelings (and sometimes even, yes, better information) about the outcome. But that's the way it should be. Do you want people flipping coins in the voting booth?

(So I tend to think that having a small cost of voting is a good thing as it discourages those who only care marginally (in the non-economic sense of the word). Part of the problem with voting as a social-choice mechanism is exactly that it's one person one vote - it doesn't account for the intensity of preferences. If I only care a little I have the same weight in the process as someone who cares a lot. Having a small cost (which could be just the opportunity cost of time it takes to vote) dampens this problem as it eliminates some borderline indifferent voters.

But there's another problem. 'Caring a lot' about an a outcome, or having very intense preferences about it are not always good either. And some of the people with very intense preferences should also be somehow taxed on their voting. For an obvious example take that crazy guy in Iowa who asked Edwards about OJ. Obviously he feels very strongly about something. He's also a total nut case who probably won't be dissuaded from voting his nut case ideas in the booth by a small cost. This is of course a typical problem in a democracy but here overall I think it just falls into that Churchill quote about democracy being the worst possible system except for all the others, and I don't really see an objective way of solving this problem)