Greetings, lawmakers.
When was the last time democracy had a makeover? Arguably, there hasn't been a big change to the way Americans govern themselves for 200 years. Well, except maybe allowing black people to vote in 1969 and women in 1920; OK maybe there have been some 20th-century improvements in terms of who can vote. However, in almost every one of today's democracies, the only governmental venue where the electorate at large expresses their views is at the polling station.
The Checkbox Menace
Yes or no questions can distort your position. Don't believe me? Try:
Elections so far allow only really coarse-grained opinions to pass from the people to the law. Politicians don't have a monopoly on good policy ideas, ergo there are some great ideas floating around which will never see the light of day as long as votes are the only way to influence laws.
Until now, this restriction of opinions has been necessary to keep procedures streamlined: there's been no way of having an intelligent exchange of opinions with 200 million voters. Until now?
Kiwi Wiki
That's right, the New Zealand government has opened up a wiki site where they let you draft the law. Its power so far is only advisory (I think that's wise, at least for now), but it allows good ideas and intelligent debate to percolate up from the people without the government doing a thing (apart from setting up MediaWiki or some such).
I'll be interested to see what comes of the New Zealand experiment. Does anyone below care to register their predictions as to if this will be fabulous or a flop?
Keep on wikin',
LeDopore
Showing posts with label law. Show all posts
Showing posts with label law. Show all posts
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Local Produce vs. International Peace
Greetings, Macaroni Munchers.
A lot of my friends are concerned about buying food from too far away, in the interests of both helping out the local economy and of reducing fossil fuel consumption. It's a scary thought about how much our food supply depends on non-renewable resources like transportation fuel, and it's appealing to have the visceral connection to what you eat that you can get only from being able to visit the place where your food grows.
Agriculture and the Developing World
The unfortunate consequence of favoring domestic produce, however, is that you deprive the developing world of the much-needed foreign exchange which comes from agricultural exports. In fact, in non-industrialized areas of the third world, pretty much the only thing they produce that we consume is food.
A typical Nicaraguan farm worker earns about $.25 an hour (a quarter the minimum wage of neighboring Costa Rica). The cost of living there may be quite low, but still I'm disgusted by the fact that they could pick coffee for 8 hours and not earn enough money for a singe espresso shot in an American café.
By insisting on buying domestic food, we're just driving developing-world wages down farther. There are plenty of options for Americans: they don't all need agricultural work to stave off extreme poverty. Giving meaningful work to developing nations promotes the sense of coöperation which leads to good feelings and peace.
Dependence on developing nations for food can also lead to peace-making policy. You're less likely to invade another country if you need the food they produce to survive.
Aside: I'm being overly-dramatic. Americans consume on average 3790 calories per day (although some of that is spoilage), so losing even a third of food imports wouldn't spell widespread famine. At the same time, you're less likely to go to war with an entrenched trading partner; the European Union may have ushered in an age of post-historicism, now that individual countries are so economically entwined that it would be sillier than ever to go to war.
Fuel Costs by Sea and Land
Trade and peace aside, many of my friends want to consume as little fossil fuel as possible in getting their food delivered, so they're careful to buy only from locally-grown produce. However, raw distance-from-home is a poor tracker of fuel consumed, since freight by sea is so much more efficient than by land. Let's figure out just how much more efficient it is to ship a container one mile by sea than by land.
By land, a typical mileage rating for a semi truck carrying a 53-foot trailer is about 6 miles per gallon. Page 5 of this document has all of the relevant information: an ultra-sized container ship traveling at 22.5 knots burns 180 tonnes of fuel per day, and carries 10 000 twenty foot-equivalent units of cargo. After a little math, we find the ship transports the same 53-ft container at 44 miles per gallon.
A ship coming to the United States from Chile burns about the same amount of fuel per container as a semi truck traveling about 700 miles, and if people drive 8 miles to the grocery store to buy 50 lbs of groceries in a car rated at 30 miles per gallon, they burn as much fuel per grocery item as that container ship from Chile.
Conclusions
Before jumping on the "local food" bandwagon, please consider the impact of shunning the developing world. Also, consider biking, busing or walking to the grocery store when possible if you're really interested in reducing fossil fuel consumption.
Bon Appetit!
A lot of my friends are concerned about buying food from too far away, in the interests of both helping out the local economy and of reducing fossil fuel consumption. It's a scary thought about how much our food supply depends on non-renewable resources like transportation fuel, and it's appealing to have the visceral connection to what you eat that you can get only from being able to visit the place where your food grows.
Agriculture and the Developing World
The unfortunate consequence of favoring domestic produce, however, is that you deprive the developing world of the much-needed foreign exchange which comes from agricultural exports. In fact, in non-industrialized areas of the third world, pretty much the only thing they produce that we consume is food.
A typical Nicaraguan farm worker earns about $.25 an hour (a quarter the minimum wage of neighboring Costa Rica). The cost of living there may be quite low, but still I'm disgusted by the fact that they could pick coffee for 8 hours and not earn enough money for a singe espresso shot in an American café.
By insisting on buying domestic food, we're just driving developing-world wages down farther. There are plenty of options for Americans: they don't all need agricultural work to stave off extreme poverty. Giving meaningful work to developing nations promotes the sense of coöperation which leads to good feelings and peace.
Dependence on developing nations for food can also lead to peace-making policy. You're less likely to invade another country if you need the food they produce to survive.
Aside: I'm being overly-dramatic. Americans consume on average 3790 calories per day (although some of that is spoilage), so losing even a third of food imports wouldn't spell widespread famine. At the same time, you're less likely to go to war with an entrenched trading partner; the European Union may have ushered in an age of post-historicism, now that individual countries are so economically entwined that it would be sillier than ever to go to war.
Fuel Costs by Sea and Land
Trade and peace aside, many of my friends want to consume as little fossil fuel as possible in getting their food delivered, so they're careful to buy only from locally-grown produce. However, raw distance-from-home is a poor tracker of fuel consumed, since freight by sea is so much more efficient than by land. Let's figure out just how much more efficient it is to ship a container one mile by sea than by land.
By land, a typical mileage rating for a semi truck carrying a 53-foot trailer is about 6 miles per gallon. Page 5 of this document has all of the relevant information: an ultra-sized container ship traveling at 22.5 knots burns 180 tonnes of fuel per day, and carries 10 000 twenty foot-equivalent units of cargo. After a little math, we find the ship transports the same 53-ft container at 44 miles per gallon.
A ship coming to the United States from Chile burns about the same amount of fuel per container as a semi truck traveling about 700 miles, and if people drive 8 miles to the grocery store to buy 50 lbs of groceries in a car rated at 30 miles per gallon, they burn as much fuel per grocery item as that container ship from Chile.
Conclusions
Before jumping on the "local food" bandwagon, please consider the impact of shunning the developing world. Also, consider biking, busing or walking to the grocery store when possible if you're really interested in reducing fossil fuel consumption.
Bon Appetit!
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Upfront Cost Disclosure
Greetings, homeowners.
If you're a regular reader, you'll already know that I have both an environmental and a capitalist streak in me. I don't think these two need be in eternal conflict; in fact today's post is going to outline a way in which we can encourage the adoption of green technologies without messing around with the marketplace.
Good Policy Assumes Laziness
First of all, let me fire a diffuse attack at all of the legislated incentives to get people to adopt new green technology. While legislated incentives can be better than nothing, often the incentives are not proportional to the environmental good done (e.g. giving a fixed tax rebate to cars purchased with better than a certain mileage - there's just a threshold and no proportionality), and almost always these bills can't and shouldn't be passed when the technology has only limited applicability. However, I think that there are potentially many diverse opportunities for incremental improvements that just can't be addressed by legislated incentives. Good policy should automatically reward where it should; good policy is lazy and future-proof.
Virtue should be Its Own Reward
In this post I'm going to outline a way to promote environmental benefits in a natural, non-legislative way. Specifically, we should require that the advertised price of goods reflect the total cost of ownership, and not just the sale price. For example, when buying a house, the only price you would be allowed to advertise should be the sum of the sale price and the forecast cost of 20 years of utilities in the house. This way, houses with the same listed price would be equally affordable, and there would be incentives to build houses that were greener. Let me slow down a bit to unpack all of these comments so that they make a little more sense.
I'm Lazy Too
How many of you have bought a house or rented an apartment without first calculating the expected utility bills? I have never requested past utility statements for any property I've rented, and I certainly haven't done any thorough analysis of properties I'm only marginally interested in. I think I'm pretty typical in my laziness too: while I might try to factor in energy efficiency, I don't have a clear idea as to how much a given setup will affect my bottom line.
Modern economists acknowledge that humans make decision (and big ones too) with imperfect information, which results in less-than-optimal buying decisions. The most common numeric piece of information people take into account when looking to buy a house or rent an apartment is its price; my idea is to fold utility costs into the price from the outset so that people can make a lazy but correct decision as to how much they would like to spend on a heated domicile.
Implementation
If I ruled the world, the list price for all houses would have to be the sale price plus 20 years of expected utilities costs, based on prior use records. (Aside: 20 years is a round figure on the order of the inflation-adjusted doubling time of money at prime rates, so if you were to invest this sum at the time of sale its simple interest could pay utilities from the interest essentially for ever. Perhaps 20 years is a little on the short side.) The sale price would be allowed to be advertised only as a line item in conjunction with the utilities cost and the total list price. Lying would be considered fraud.
Guessing the efficiency of a new building might be difficult, but it should be possible to use statistics to fine any construction company which consistently lowball's the heating estimates of the buildings they make.
The same idea could be applied to automobiles: add the cost of driving 50 000 city and 50 000 highway miles before getting the list price. (Aside: this will come out to around $10 000: enough to perhaps convince many people to buy newer, more fuel-efficient cars. Who would want a clunker when the list price is $11 200? We might be able to persuade car manufacturers to lobby for this idea since it would boost new car sales.)
Perhaps major appliances and computers should have a similar addition to advertised price, maybe also including the mean time until failure. At some point gizmos become too small for these advertising restrictions cease to make sense, but I don't know if this transition happens at the "toaster" level or the "microwave" level.
Lazily Greener Incentives
Consider the implications of my idea on builders and house maintainers. If you build a house that's more energy-efficient, its value to the seller will automatically be higher, since it competes with houses of the same list price. The 20-year cost of heating a poorly-insulated house in a cold climate can top $100 000*, so energy-efficient designs and materials could give a significant edge on the open market.
Moreover, if home buyers were to display a fraction of the eco-chic that Prius-cravers show, perhaps small 20-year heating cost stats would carry the same caché as slim cellphones. In any case, energy efficiency could be reducible to a dollar value, which is great for putting things into perspective.
Conclusions
Let me recap a few of the reasons why I think we should add use cost to sale price to determine the list price of automobiles, houses etc.
*Friends of mine in Toronto rented a house with typical winter heating bills of $2000 per month, even though some of them opted to turn the heat down and sleep in arctic sleeping bags. I'm sure that if this heating were advertised in the listed rent they would have rented elsewhere. The 20-year heating cost for this Victorian behemoth would have been over a quarter-million bucks: a significant warning to any prospective home-buyer, and a burning incentive for the current owner to insulate better to protect the house's retail and rental value.
If you're a regular reader, you'll already know that I have both an environmental and a capitalist streak in me. I don't think these two need be in eternal conflict; in fact today's post is going to outline a way in which we can encourage the adoption of green technologies without messing around with the marketplace.
Good Policy Assumes Laziness
First of all, let me fire a diffuse attack at all of the legislated incentives to get people to adopt new green technology. While legislated incentives can be better than nothing, often the incentives are not proportional to the environmental good done (e.g. giving a fixed tax rebate to cars purchased with better than a certain mileage - there's just a threshold and no proportionality), and almost always these bills can't and shouldn't be passed when the technology has only limited applicability. However, I think that there are potentially many diverse opportunities for incremental improvements that just can't be addressed by legislated incentives. Good policy should automatically reward where it should; good policy is lazy and future-proof.
Virtue should be Its Own Reward
In this post I'm going to outline a way to promote environmental benefits in a natural, non-legislative way. Specifically, we should require that the advertised price of goods reflect the total cost of ownership, and not just the sale price. For example, when buying a house, the only price you would be allowed to advertise should be the sum of the sale price and the forecast cost of 20 years of utilities in the house. This way, houses with the same listed price would be equally affordable, and there would be incentives to build houses that were greener. Let me slow down a bit to unpack all of these comments so that they make a little more sense.
I'm Lazy Too
How many of you have bought a house or rented an apartment without first calculating the expected utility bills? I have never requested past utility statements for any property I've rented, and I certainly haven't done any thorough analysis of properties I'm only marginally interested in. I think I'm pretty typical in my laziness too: while I might try to factor in energy efficiency, I don't have a clear idea as to how much a given setup will affect my bottom line.
Modern economists acknowledge that humans make decision (and big ones too) with imperfect information, which results in less-than-optimal buying decisions. The most common numeric piece of information people take into account when looking to buy a house or rent an apartment is its price; my idea is to fold utility costs into the price from the outset so that people can make a lazy but correct decision as to how much they would like to spend on a heated domicile.
Implementation
If I ruled the world, the list price for all houses would have to be the sale price plus 20 years of expected utilities costs, based on prior use records. (Aside: 20 years is a round figure on the order of the inflation-adjusted doubling time of money at prime rates, so if you were to invest this sum at the time of sale its simple interest could pay utilities from the interest essentially for ever. Perhaps 20 years is a little on the short side.) The sale price would be allowed to be advertised only as a line item in conjunction with the utilities cost and the total list price. Lying would be considered fraud.
Guessing the efficiency of a new building might be difficult, but it should be possible to use statistics to fine any construction company which consistently lowball's the heating estimates of the buildings they make.
The same idea could be applied to automobiles: add the cost of driving 50 000 city and 50 000 highway miles before getting the list price. (Aside: this will come out to around $10 000: enough to perhaps convince many people to buy newer, more fuel-efficient cars. Who would want a clunker when the list price is $11 200? We might be able to persuade car manufacturers to lobby for this idea since it would boost new car sales.)
Perhaps major appliances and computers should have a similar addition to advertised price, maybe also including the mean time until failure. At some point gizmos become too small for these advertising restrictions cease to make sense, but I don't know if this transition happens at the "toaster" level or the "microwave" level.
Lazily Greener Incentives
Consider the implications of my idea on builders and house maintainers. If you build a house that's more energy-efficient, its value to the seller will automatically be higher, since it competes with houses of the same list price. The 20-year cost of heating a poorly-insulated house in a cold climate can top $100 000*, so energy-efficient designs and materials could give a significant edge on the open market.
Moreover, if home buyers were to display a fraction of the eco-chic that Prius-cravers show, perhaps small 20-year heating cost stats would carry the same caché as slim cellphones. In any case, energy efficiency could be reducible to a dollar value, which is great for putting things into perspective.
Conclusions
Let me recap a few of the reasons why I think we should add use cost to sale price to determine the list price of automobiles, houses etc.
- It's the duty of the government to protect consumers from false advertising.
- Markets are more efficient when more information is used.
- It's easier to perform cost analyses once per item sold than once per potential sale.
- Green policy should provide continuous incentives to make better products, and these incentives should be proportional to the environmental good done.
- Legislated incentives are rigid, slow-to-implement, and fiscally inefficient.
*Friends of mine in Toronto rented a house with typical winter heating bills of $2000 per month, even though some of them opted to turn the heat down and sleep in arctic sleeping bags. I'm sure that if this heating were advertised in the listed rent they would have rented elsewhere. The 20-year heating cost for this Victorian behemoth would have been over a quarter-million bucks: a significant warning to any prospective home-buyer, and a burning incentive for the current owner to insulate better to protect the house's retail and rental value.
Monday, April 9, 2007
Coöperative Democracy
Greetings, citizens.
Today I'm going to talk about ways in which we can improve democracy by changing the way in which we vote. Specifically I'm going to point out a few flaws in the widespread "plurality" system of voting, then I'm going to promote an alternative: approval voting.
What's Broken?
Before I go into my proposed changes, let me persuade you that there is room for improvement in the current system, especially vis-a-vis vote splitting. Vote splitting is what allowed the Nazi party to take power in Germany, and what let LePen into the final round of the 2002 French presidential elections. In both cases, the majority of the electorate detested the above ultra-conservatives, but since the right was united their total vote count was large enough to give them disproportional power.
A similar situation happened in the 2006 Canadian federal election, where only 36% of Canadians voted for the Conservatives, but since there is only one significant right wing party and there are three left-wing parties the Conservatives took power.
Problems with Plurality?
Vote-splitting is a problem in any democracy where the winner is determined by a plurality, or first-past-the-post system. Since the candidate with the most people voting for them is the one that wins, one of the most tragic ways to lose a pluralist election is to have many good politicians agree with you. I suppose in some ways the threat of splitting the vote might be a good thing in that it encourages politicians with similar platforms to amalgamate, fostering simplicity; but this small good in my opinion is outweighed by occasionally electing extremist governments which don't reflect the will of the people.
However, given that there are going to be a few maverick politicos who refuse to take up another's banner, the reasonable parts of the political spectrum will become crowded with egotists whose best chance at getting ahead is by sabotaging their fellows' images, and politicians adopting unreasonable views will enjoy unsplit votes and my be able to wield disproportionate power.
The poor voter's only recourse is to vote tactically: to give power to a lesser evil to defeat a greater evil. Such tactical voting systems result in meta-stable power structures with all the appeal of a prisoner's dilemma; let's look for something better.
Alternative 1: Approval Voting
My favorite alternative to a plurality system is approval voting. Under approval voting, each voter is given a list of checkboxes next to the names of each candidate. She checks off each candidate which meets her approval. The candidate with the highest approval rating wins the election.
Under this system, one can check just one box (if one approves of just one party), one can check a whole range of boxes corresponding to parties that are all compatible with the voter's views (perhaps along with a few one-issue parties to show support without throwing away a vote), or one can officially show disgust with the entire slate by leaving all boxes empty, indicating that the voter trusts none of the meager offerings this year.
Aside from solving the vote-splitting catastrophe, approval voting discourages mud-slinging among politicians, since discrediting others doesn't behoove politicians as much. Politicians can build platforms partially atop of one another: one could declare "my views are similar to the popular Mrs. X's (which are reasonable and well-considered), with the distinction that I would pander less to the unions than she" without fearing vote-splitting disaster. It would finally make reason and politics more miscible than oil and water: it would be a genuinely good strategy to adopt good policies regardless of "whose turf" they belong to.
It goes without saying that the two-party fiasco of the United States (which in my opinion has done harm by dividing the nation into tribes) could be instantaneously remedied by approval voting: if any new party could win power through good centrist policy with bipartisan support, I would expect a lot less extremism in American politics. Sane policy is awaiting your approval.
Alternative 2: Borda Count
Another vote-counting system is to allow each voter to rank each candidate, potentially letting unranked candidates tie for last. While this method seems appealing since it allows voters to give more information than even approval voting, it suffers from complexity and from odd consequences of tactical voting, as will be described.
Assume that, like any current ballot, a Borda-count ballot has a few big shot politicians and alongside a motley crew of amateurs. The tactical voter who wants to maximize her chosen big shot over the other predominant big shot will rank the former first and the latter last, filling in the middle positions with dimwits whom everyone knows won't get elected. The trouble is: I don't trust voters to rank the filler politicians randomly: perhaps there will be a tendency to rank the unknowns from #2 at the top of the page through #(n-1) at the bottom. This will mean whichever dimwit #1 at the top of the ballot (who will be ranked #2 by pretty much every tactical voter) will have a higher voting score than either of the two leading choices (who will get a roughly 50-50 split between first and last place from each tactical voter) and we'll elect only dimwits. That would be horrible!
Borda himself acknowledged the Borda count's vulnerability to tactical voting. From Wikipedia (so beware the source):
Conclusions
So far, my favorite system of vote counting is approval voting. It gives everybody an equal say, remedies vote-splitting, is invulnerable to tactical voters and encourages collaboration among politicians. Let's start adopting this simple yet powerful method for expressing one's political opinion, and let the reasonable, collaborative, centrist policy begin.
PS: More on Voting Systems
Alas, there is no one perfect method of voting which allows voters to express a nuanced set of preferences, and always elects the best candidate under any criterion. Mathematicians have thus gone berserk in their search for esoteric methods for determining who gets elected; each one is "optimal" for a given view of what should be. If you're interested in the diversity of vote counting systems out there, take a look at the following Wikipedia articles (I'm just amazed by how many there are):
Today I'm going to talk about ways in which we can improve democracy by changing the way in which we vote. Specifically I'm going to point out a few flaws in the widespread "plurality" system of voting, then I'm going to promote an alternative: approval voting.
What's Broken?
Before I go into my proposed changes, let me persuade you that there is room for improvement in the current system, especially vis-a-vis vote splitting. Vote splitting is what allowed the Nazi party to take power in Germany, and what let LePen into the final round of the 2002 French presidential elections. In both cases, the majority of the electorate detested the above ultra-conservatives, but since the right was united their total vote count was large enough to give them disproportional power.
A similar situation happened in the 2006 Canadian federal election, where only 36% of Canadians voted for the Conservatives, but since there is only one significant right wing party and there are three left-wing parties the Conservatives took power.
Problems with Plurality?
Vote-splitting is a problem in any democracy where the winner is determined by a plurality, or first-past-the-post system. Since the candidate with the most people voting for them is the one that wins, one of the most tragic ways to lose a pluralist election is to have many good politicians agree with you. I suppose in some ways the threat of splitting the vote might be a good thing in that it encourages politicians with similar platforms to amalgamate, fostering simplicity; but this small good in my opinion is outweighed by occasionally electing extremist governments which don't reflect the will of the people.
However, given that there are going to be a few maverick politicos who refuse to take up another's banner, the reasonable parts of the political spectrum will become crowded with egotists whose best chance at getting ahead is by sabotaging their fellows' images, and politicians adopting unreasonable views will enjoy unsplit votes and my be able to wield disproportionate power.
The poor voter's only recourse is to vote tactically: to give power to a lesser evil to defeat a greater evil. Such tactical voting systems result in meta-stable power structures with all the appeal of a prisoner's dilemma; let's look for something better.
Alternative 1: Approval Voting
My favorite alternative to a plurality system is approval voting. Under approval voting, each voter is given a list of checkboxes next to the names of each candidate. She checks off each candidate which meets her approval. The candidate with the highest approval rating wins the election.
Under this system, one can check just one box (if one approves of just one party), one can check a whole range of boxes corresponding to parties that are all compatible with the voter's views (perhaps along with a few one-issue parties to show support without throwing away a vote), or one can officially show disgust with the entire slate by leaving all boxes empty, indicating that the voter trusts none of the meager offerings this year.
Aside from solving the vote-splitting catastrophe, approval voting discourages mud-slinging among politicians, since discrediting others doesn't behoove politicians as much. Politicians can build platforms partially atop of one another: one could declare "my views are similar to the popular Mrs. X's (which are reasonable and well-considered), with the distinction that I would pander less to the unions than she" without fearing vote-splitting disaster. It would finally make reason and politics more miscible than oil and water: it would be a genuinely good strategy to adopt good policies regardless of "whose turf" they belong to.
It goes without saying that the two-party fiasco of the United States (which in my opinion has done harm by dividing the nation into tribes) could be instantaneously remedied by approval voting: if any new party could win power through good centrist policy with bipartisan support, I would expect a lot less extremism in American politics. Sane policy is awaiting your approval.
Alternative 2: Borda Count
Another vote-counting system is to allow each voter to rank each candidate, potentially letting unranked candidates tie for last. While this method seems appealing since it allows voters to give more information than even approval voting, it suffers from complexity and from odd consequences of tactical voting, as will be described.
Assume that, like any current ballot, a Borda-count ballot has a few big shot politicians and alongside a motley crew of amateurs. The tactical voter who wants to maximize her chosen big shot over the other predominant big shot will rank the former first and the latter last, filling in the middle positions with dimwits whom everyone knows won't get elected. The trouble is: I don't trust voters to rank the filler politicians randomly: perhaps there will be a tendency to rank the unknowns from #2 at the top of the page through #(n-1) at the bottom. This will mean whichever dimwit #1 at the top of the ballot (who will be ranked #2 by pretty much every tactical voter) will have a higher voting score than either of the two leading choices (who will get a roughly 50-50 split between first and last place from each tactical voter) and we'll elect only dimwits. That would be horrible!
Borda himself acknowledged the Borda count's vulnerability to tactical voting. From Wikipedia (so beware the source):
In response to the issue of strategic manipulation in the Borda count, M. de Borda said "My scheme is only intended for honest men".Let me know if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that there's no advantage to voting tactically in an approval voting system: if you don't like a candidate, there's never an incentive to endorse her, and if you do, you should always endorse her. The only potential for failure might happen if a few "single-issue" parties (like the marijuana party) get more approval than any other; if this is the case thought than the leading parties clearly have missed the wishes of the electorate and deserve what's coming to them.
Conclusions
So far, my favorite system of vote counting is approval voting. It gives everybody an equal say, remedies vote-splitting, is invulnerable to tactical voters and encourages collaboration among politicians. Let's start adopting this simple yet powerful method for expressing one's political opinion, and let the reasonable, collaborative, centrist policy begin.
PS: More on Voting Systems
Alas, there is no one perfect method of voting which allows voters to express a nuanced set of preferences, and always elects the best candidate under any criterion. Mathematicians have thus gone berserk in their search for esoteric methods for determining who gets elected; each one is "optimal" for a given view of what should be. If you're interested in the diversity of vote counting systems out there, take a look at the following Wikipedia articles (I'm just amazed by how many there are):
- Vote counting system
- Approval voting
- Bloc voting
- Borda count
- Condorcet method
- Coombs' method
- Copeland's method
- Cumulative voting
- D'Hondt method
- Droop Quota
- Dynamically Distributed Democracy
- Election threshold
- Hare Quota
- Highest averages method
- Instant-runoff voting
- Kemeny-Young method
- Largest remainder method
- Party list
- Plurality voting
- Preferential voting
- Proportional approval voting
- Range voting
- Ranked pairs
- Sainte-Laguë method
- Schulze method
- Single Transferable Vote
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Today's Oxymoron: Airport Security
Greetings, passengers.
Show of hands: how many of you out there feel safer due to the airport security measures which supposedly keep bombs off planes? If you raised your hand you must think both that there are plenty of terrorists who try to bring down planes, but that the security checkpoints are in general pretty good at keeping them out. In this post, I hope to disabuse you of both of these notions.
First of all let me vent a little. I'm sick and tired of people talking about terrorists in general terms. I hear it all the time: "terrorists look just like us," "terrorists think what bringing down planes is God's will," and other such phrases which imply that there are enough terrorists to lump them into a uniform seething pile of hatred.
In truth, there are very few terrorists in the United States. When was the last time you heard about a US plane hijacking? Terrorism just isn't a big enough threat to justify its looming shadow over the US psyche.
The 90% Hole in the Airport Security Net
Why am I so sure that there aren't dozens of annual attempts at bringing down planes which we don't hear about due to the covert actions of TSA officials who anonymously shield us? It turns out security is regularly audited by undercover teams of agents who try to smuggle bomb-like devices aboard planes, and they succeeded in about 90% of post-September 11 2001 attempts, as reported here.
The take-home message is that the world doesn't hate us as much as militant politicians want us to believe. If about 90% of attempted plane bombings would be successful and yet US passenger planes don't regularly explode, we're left with no other conclusion than airline terrorism is exceedingly rare. If there's been one take-off for every 5 seconds since September 11, that's more than 30 million terrorism-free flights.
Conclusions
We're safe in the air, not because of an army of screeners, but because people don't hate Americans as much as we're told. Now, dear readers, could you let me know if you think our paranoia over plane bombing is just garden-variety misplaced fear, or does it come from a conspiracy of plutocrats in a position to profit from it?
Show of hands: how many of you out there feel safer due to the airport security measures which supposedly keep bombs off planes? If you raised your hand you must think both that there are plenty of terrorists who try to bring down planes, but that the security checkpoints are in general pretty good at keeping them out. In this post, I hope to disabuse you of both of these notions.
First of all let me vent a little. I'm sick and tired of people talking about terrorists in general terms. I hear it all the time: "terrorists look just like us," "terrorists think what bringing down planes is God's will," and other such phrases which imply that there are enough terrorists to lump them into a uniform seething pile of hatred.
In truth, there are very few terrorists in the United States. When was the last time you heard about a US plane hijacking? Terrorism just isn't a big enough threat to justify its looming shadow over the US psyche.
The 90% Hole in the Airport Security Net
Why am I so sure that there aren't dozens of annual attempts at bringing down planes which we don't hear about due to the covert actions of TSA officials who anonymously shield us? It turns out security is regularly audited by undercover teams of agents who try to smuggle bomb-like devices aboard planes, and they succeeded in about 90% of post-September 11 2001 attempts, as reported here.
The take-home message is that the world doesn't hate us as much as militant politicians want us to believe. If about 90% of attempted plane bombings would be successful and yet US passenger planes don't regularly explode, we're left with no other conclusion than airline terrorism is exceedingly rare. If there's been one take-off for every 5 seconds since September 11, that's more than 30 million terrorism-free flights.
Conclusions
We're safe in the air, not because of an army of screeners, but because people don't hate Americans as much as we're told. Now, dear readers, could you let me know if you think our paranoia over plane bombing is just garden-variety misplaced fear, or does it come from a conspiracy of plutocrats in a position to profit from it?
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Making Future-Proof Policy
Greetings, fellow nerds.
Today I'm going to address an emerging problem for policy-makers: how to exploit all the latest tech without getting bogged down in implementation details. I'm going to make the case that governments should adopt an adjudicating rather than a micro-managing role in some kinds of service provision.
Today's Tech is a Moving Target
Ours is an age of innovation. The rate of innovation has never been so fast. There's a yawning gap between the cutting edge of (especially) information technology and typical technology usage. As tech speeds up, I see this problem getting worse, not better. Do we want to perpetually wait around for bright ideas to crawl their way through the legislature? Or, do we want an adaptive system where better solutions to public problems can be implemented and rewarded instantaneously? How would such an unregulated system work?
Examples: Road Construction and Power Distribution
I've already given an outline on how we could get the private sector to automatically implement any useful tech in terms of road durability and safety in the form of bonds which annually pay the holder an amount proportional to the good that was done to the community. See my 21st century capitalism post at the bottom for more details.
I'm going to argue that we should trade in our monopsony/monopoly electrical power distribution system for a free market system with fluctuating prices for the same reason. As soon as a new gizmo which does things better gets invented, you should be able to just plug the sucker in and start making cash.
Case in Point: Cold Dutch Ideas
Recently, a Dutch research agency suggested that refrigeration warehouses should turn off their refrigerators during the day (nature article and ZDNet summary) in an idea called "night wind". Excess wind power is generated at night and might get wasted if nobody used it. Since it's OK for some refrigerated goods to vary in temperature a couple of degrees, you would let your warehouse warm up a bit during the day, but get cooled right off at night using green power through a grid that didn't happen to be at peak.
Let's review some of the steps you'd need to go through to put this idea into practice given the current power system.
I think letting the price of power float is a much better idea, so long as any approved entity can buy or sell energy to the grid. We already have "time of use" power meters which record the time of day each kWh of energy was used. Usually, energy at peak hours costs a high fixed rate while energy at off-peak hours is much less expensive - often less than half as costly.
Suppose we took the time-of-day concept one step farther and let electrical power be traded like any other commodity. Then, the steps needed to get warehouses to take advantage of extra power would be:
Free Market Benefits
There are six benefits to this system:
Conclusions
A market-based power-distribution system has the advantage of instantaneously adding incentives exactly where they would be with an ideal policy system. There would be no lumbering lag between technological innovation and implementation: if it will make money, do it.
Ensuring that financial incentives are aligned with the good of humanity is what 21st century capitalism is all about. Policies where every party has the same goals makes us work together to the benefit of all, harnessing our uniquely human gift of capitalism to do good.
Today I'm going to address an emerging problem for policy-makers: how to exploit all the latest tech without getting bogged down in implementation details. I'm going to make the case that governments should adopt an adjudicating rather than a micro-managing role in some kinds of service provision.
Today's Tech is a Moving Target
Ours is an age of innovation. The rate of innovation has never been so fast. There's a yawning gap between the cutting edge of (especially) information technology and typical technology usage. As tech speeds up, I see this problem getting worse, not better. Do we want to perpetually wait around for bright ideas to crawl their way through the legislature? Or, do we want an adaptive system where better solutions to public problems can be implemented and rewarded instantaneously? How would such an unregulated system work?
Examples: Road Construction and Power Distribution
I've already given an outline on how we could get the private sector to automatically implement any useful tech in terms of road durability and safety in the form of bonds which annually pay the holder an amount proportional to the good that was done to the community. See my 21st century capitalism post at the bottom for more details.
I'm going to argue that we should trade in our monopsony/monopoly electrical power distribution system for a free market system with fluctuating prices for the same reason. As soon as a new gizmo which does things better gets invented, you should be able to just plug the sucker in and start making cash.
Case in Point: Cold Dutch Ideas
Recently, a Dutch research agency suggested that refrigeration warehouses should turn off their refrigerators during the day (nature article and ZDNet summary) in an idea called "night wind". Excess wind power is generated at night and might get wasted if nobody used it. Since it's OK for some refrigerated goods to vary in temperature a couple of degrees, you would let your warehouse warm up a bit during the day, but get cooled right off at night using green power through a grid that didn't happen to be at peak.
Let's review some of the steps you'd need to go through to put this idea into practice given the current power system.
- Some researcher thinks it up.
- Political will is mustered to look into the study.
- The specifics of which warehouses could use no diurnal refrigeration (possibly season-dependent) are compiled by a central authority.
- New regulations have to be developed and approved.
- Businesses are notified of discounts (or worse yet - income tax incentives) available for night-only refrigeration.
- Enforcers patrol the warehouses which signed up to make sure they don't use their refrigerators at night.
I think letting the price of power float is a much better idea, so long as any approved entity can buy or sell energy to the grid. We already have "time of use" power meters which record the time of day each kWh of energy was used. Usually, energy at peak hours costs a high fixed rate while energy at off-peak hours is much less expensive - often less than half as costly.
Suppose we took the time-of-day concept one step farther and let electrical power be traded like any other commodity. Then, the steps needed to get warehouses to take advantage of extra power would be:
- Somebody notices power is more expensive in the day, so she turns off the refrigerators during the day.
- Profit!!!
Free Market Benefits
There are six benefits to this system:
- Consumers would have financial incentives to cut back electricity usage when it's most scarce.
- The market would be able to decide exactly when price-dependent operation is worthwhile. Personally, I would say "no" to lightbulbs which dim when power is expensive, but "yes" to a fridge which works most when power is cheap, and "definitely" to a plug-in hybrid car which guzzled late-night 2¢-per-kWh hydro power. No extra laws needed!
- Power generation systems would be rewarded for producing electricity when it's most needed (potentially making solar power more financially-feasible in hot and sunny areas - solar needs all the financial help it can get).
- If somebody developed a large battery for leveling out peak usage, they would be able to make a quick buck right away. No need for proving the thing first: just buy low and sell high. No public investment risk would be involved, and peak prices would go down as peak supply increased, as if by magic.
- The financial incentives for long-distance power cables (such as HVDC) would be immediately apparent, and if they were economical, would be built quickly by profit-seeking companies.
- There would finally be some elasticity in demand for power. Trying to match generation with consumption is one of the biggest causes of damage to power equipment causing blackouts. If systems become over-stressed, prices would go up and everyone who had a smart air conditioner would instantaneously decrease the load on the critically-stressed system.
Conclusions
A market-based power-distribution system has the advantage of instantaneously adding incentives exactly where they would be with an ideal policy system. There would be no lumbering lag between technological innovation and implementation: if it will make money, do it.
Ensuring that financial incentives are aligned with the good of humanity is what 21st century capitalism is all about. Policies where every party has the same goals makes us work together to the benefit of all, harnessing our uniquely human gift of capitalism to do good.
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
21st Century Capitalism
Greetings, fellow nerds.
Today, we're going to examine a cornerstone of our western world: capitalism. I'm going to first give a brief history of capitalism starting from its evolutionary roots which set us aside from other animals, then I'll settle down into a rant about what I think is wrong with our current implementation of capitalism, and finally I'll give a few specific ideas about how we can tweak public policy so that capitalism achieves its goals better.
Capitalism and Humanity
Capitalism, and its relative friendship, set us apart from the majority of the animal kingdom. I don't believe that early humans were categorically smarter than other animals; even today's humans would have a hard time without cooperation.
Imagine if you were dropped on a desert island without having had any kind of education. (This is really impossible, because humans need nurturing to develop properly, but stay with me.) I doubt you'd be able to do better than the New Caledonian Crow, which can fashion its own tools (National Geographic video link) even out of metal (significant, since metal hasn't been around long enough to develop instincts involving it). You may counter by saying that this crow probably learned form another crow; that's exactly my point though. Individually, we're puny, but together we can build spaceships and make good cheese.
We specialize, we discuss things and we pass on knowledge to others. Why? It's more than having selfish genes; we are happy to forge friendships and help people totally unrelated to us. It's more than the herd mentality; I've met my share of loner humans, and besides I don't think sheep specialize. We share, lend things, trade, and educate each other because we live in a social construct where we can expect roughly the same degree of favors given to us as we give to others. (Doing nice things without reciprocity is a bad evolutionary strategy. However, the reciprocity needn't come directly from the people you help; doing good without expecting anything in return provides evidence to others that you're not a psychopath; see below.) In small groups, reciprocation is mediated by friendships, where we (usually) keep some sort of tally as to how nice the partner has been to us. We don't numerically quantify the favors our friends do us, although your typical human sees one-sided friendships as unhealthy, as if there must be some deeper, twisted exchange going on.
Genetically,We're All Cold, Calculating Psychopaths
I don't mean to suggest that we're consciously cold, calculating psychopaths who use each other for common gain. Our genes shape us to be good-natured towards each other, and it's a good thing too. Imagine if you knew somebody who appeared friendly most of the time but had a few Jekyll and Hyde moments. You'd steer clear of that shady character, and never want to engage in friendly behavior with them. Moreover, you'd tell your friends to watch out for the creep. As a result, being a conscious psychopath is a poor strategy in the long term, since others won't trust you enough to be friendly with them.
However, if our genes keep us behaving civilly towards one another all the time, we're less prone to the slip-ups that betray psychopaths. If we can demonstrate that we always help our friends, more people will want to be friends with us. We don't have to be cold, calculating psychopaths on a conscious level; our genes do a much more consistent job for us without our conscious minds having to bother.
Does understanding the selfish reasons behind friendship make one cynical about human nature? In some ways, knowing that we're hard-wired to do good does exactly the opposite. What do you think?
Money and Friendship
Money becomes necessary when the group of people you want to collaborate with becomes too large to develop a personal relationship with everyone. Money lets you have strangers do friendly things towards you, and to earn it you (usually) have to do friendly things to others. Money is impersonal, quantified, anonymous, fungible friendship, in the sense that it keeps track of the favors you're owed from any member of your trading community.
Capitalism and Human Evolution
Capitalism (if you extend its definition to include its instinctual analogue, friendship) is what lets us specialize, and gives us the incentive to work together to produce all those wonderful creations only large groups of (mostly) cooperative humans have been able to do. Without capitalism, we'd be brawling in the muck.
Language is also one of the fundamental abilities humans have that sets us apart from other animals (if, indeed, we are set apart as far as we style ourselves). Language, however, is mostly useless without capitalism (in the sense I've defined it). Without capitalism, you have no framework within which to trust the speaker. Without capitalism, you have no specialized skill set to describe to others. Without capitalism, you have little incentive to divulge information (especially information about food, mates, etc.), so you probably wouldn't bother. Therefore, language evolved to make us better capitalists; without capitalism language would confer little benefit. Either capitalism predated language in our history or there was so much synergy between the two that sorting out who came first is moot.
People also talk about the "theory of mind" as being important in human evolution. Having a theory of mind means that you try to predict what other entities around you know, often by putting yourself in their shoes and wondering what you would do in the same situation. Clearly, having a theory of mind is useful to both capitalists (for outfoxing your fellows) and speakers (so you can relate exactly what the listener needs to hear given what they already know), so it's no surprise that humans excel at guessing what others are thinking. However, having a theory of mind can also be useful in purely competitive (i.e., non-capitalist) contexts: ravens (but not most birds) notice when something (like food) captures the attention of other animals, and even the odd octopus has demonstrated that it is aware of how others see it. However, these animals lack capitalist tendencies (and therefore have no incentive to develop language), which are the true sine qua non of humanity in evolutionary contexts.
Current Issues with Capitalism
If capitalism really is the Promethean panacea I've proposed, why is everybody complaining about it? Let me list a few possibilities, and suggest a couple of remedies.
A few days ago, a total stranger picked a bunch of grapes for me. She set these grapes on a truck in Chile, which proceeded to a port where a monumental ocean-going vehicle waited. This floating steel mountain's sole purpose it to get things to where people want them; in my case it crossed the Equator and continued to an undisclosed location in North America. Total strangers unpacked the grapes, checked them for damage, and then placed them in a location where I could easily reach them for my culinary enjoyment.
By now, you've probably guessed what I'm up to: I've described what we'd consider to be the most mundane of commercial transactions: buying Chilean grapes. However, all the people involved in the chain of events (most of them total strangers to me) performed well-orchestrated diverse tasks for my benefit and enjoyment. If the context were anything but commercial, I would be touched to the brink of tears by the selfless generosity implicit in shipping me grapes out of season. Yet, somehow, in the monetized context of buying grapes from a local supermarket, it's unnatural to feel gratitude to the ship's crew or the shelf stocker - it's all in a day's work for them, and that somehow nullifies the joy I'd feel from having all these people slave away for my benefit.
Does it have to be that way? I'm going to give an exercise to my readers. For the next week, please try, at least once a day, to feel the connection you have to the millions of people who help you through the messy web of financial transactions we call an economy. Just for a split second, imagine that they were all doing you favors without letting money enter into the picture. Then open your eyes, and ask yourself if you really have to ignore the fact that all these people are conspiring to do you good just because you're paying them for it.
If your assignment rings false, we should try to find out why. I bet that financial transactions, by default, don't tickle the "friendship detector" circuits in our brains. Possibly we don't feel that friendship glow at the market because friendship with total strangers is impossible. It's also possible that brands have taken center stage in stores; give me a show of hands: who finds it easier to remember the brand of a product you bought than the name of the person who sold it to you? It's hard to feel friendship with a faceless company (although many people try).
Why not try to get to know the local shopkeepers a little by name? Maybe entering into a friendly relationship will give your instinctual friendship detector a face to latch onto, and maybe some of the gratitude you feel for the stuff you buy will brush off a little onto the human. You'll have your instinctual craving for mutual support reinforced at the same time as getting low, low prices. (Prices are ridiculously low because of specialization: imagine how hard it would be to travel on foot to Chile to grow your own February grapes.)
I promised this post would lead to practical suggestions; here's the first:
Quirky Staff, not Faceless Drones
I bet not many corporate executives are going to read this blog, but if they do (or if you know one - remember the power of talk), maybe suggest to them that instead of having sales-force employees follow the replaceable-parts model (i.e., interchangeable, single-faceted, lowest-common-denominator automata), they should show a little more personality, especially if they work in small enough units that customers might recognize them in subsequent visits.
I was a regular at Enterprise Rent-a-car until I got a car, and let me tell you, that company understands the benefit of human interfaces. Even though the company Enterprise might be a monolithic, faceless mega-corp, the employees I talked to at the branch were all charismatic, genuine-personality outgoing types. It's true that they were made to recite wrote-learned phone greetings, but other than that visits were all fun-loving chutzpah. I don't know exactly how to foster that kind of environment, but staid companies might do better if they encouraged their staff to be lively and idiosyncratic enough to make customers see them as people.
Marginally Legal, Inc.
Let's consider the second problem with contemporary capitalism: capitalist institutions often do things against the public good. I haven't mentioned law yet, but let me try to describe it as succinctly as possible. Capitalism:friendship :: law:enmity. I'm not suggesting that capitalism is intrinsically good and law bad. However, law and enmity both keep you from doing bad things to other humans; the former uses explicit codes while the latter uses the same level of thought as friendship (i.e. feelings of attraction/repulsion based on how you've been treated).
Enmity is the necessary mirror of friendship: it's the instinctual process which makes you try to be a pain to those who do you disservice. It's also a good game-theoretic strategy to demonstrate that pissing you off makes you a formidable enemy for an analogous reason to why psychopathy is a bad strategy: if people know you have a mean side, they'll try to avoid crossing you.
Law and capitalism are based on opposite reinforcement mechanisms, though, so when government meets private industry strange things can happen. Typically, corporations will do for themselves as much good as possible while narrowly avoiding getting sued. It's usually a good thing that laws change slowly: anarchy is just democracy with constant elections and one voter. However, when corporations can take advantage of this sluggishness through loopholes, capitalism can lead to technically-legal injustices. Moreover, using negative reinforcement (law) on entities that respond best to positive reinforcement (corporations) is a recipe for trouble: public-private incentives aren't going to magically align themselves without help.
There's a way to resolve the root problem caused by the negative/positive reinforcement mismatch between government and corporations:
If governments encourage companies to do as much good as possible, such that their rewards are proportional to the good they do, we can resolve the negative vs. positive reinforcement conundrum.
Practical Example: Road Bonds
Right now, governments set certain requirements in terms of what they would like in a road: they want it made of X material with Y safety feature, and it should last Z years. The company's reward is not affected at all by the value given to the public by the road, so long as the government's contractual expectations are met. If the road doesn't meet expectations, the government can try to sue the construction company for breach of contract: a long and inefficient process. Even in the best cases, the company has no incentive to build a road which will last longer than Z years (indeed they wouldn't want it to last any longer than Z years, since they're in the construction business), and all safety and durability research has to be done by the government body who decides the specifications of the road to build. Research isn't free, and it's hard for public institutions to make the correct call in terms of what research needs to be done.
Scrap the meets-contract/doesn't-meet-contract model. We can do better. Imagine an incentive system like this. When a government wants a road built, the incentive they offer is in the form of a transferable bond. The bond would pay the holder annually according to a formula like so:
Annually, pay $A if the road is usable, but deduct $B per cubic foot of pothole in the road (averaged over the year), $C per vehicle-hour of delay due to repair, $D for every human life lost on this road due to traffic accidents on this road and E% of the costs to drivers arising from damage to their vehicles due to accidents. If, in any year, the road is not usable or the net value of this payment in negative, this bond is valueless for all subsequent years.
Let the government choose B-E, and issue the bonds to the company which accepts the contract for the lowest value of A. Then, the private sector would be able to use new road durability and safety technologies where they make sense in terms of public benefit, without the government having to test any materials or make any policy regarding the specifics of what materials to use. In this case the lowest bidder won't be the one that does the crappiest acceptable job, it will be the one able to maximally align public and private interests, since it benefits exactly when the public does.
In turn, the construction company has the incentive to make durable, safe roads so as to collect the maximum reward from the bonds. By making the bonds transferable, companies good at construction (but maybe not inspection or maintenance) could sell the bonds to investment firms. The better the job they did the more money they could potentially make in the sale.
Governments are bad at details. If you reward results instead of punishing breeches, you align interests and harness the power of that uniquely human tool: capitalism.
Conclusions
Capitalism (including friendship) is more than just what makes being human so good; in many ways capitalism is the fundamental trait that distinguishes humans from other animals. It's vital for our policy makers to understand what capitalism really is and how to harness it to pull our 21st century in the right direction: towards the fellowship, harmony and cooperation. If you like the idea of aligning interests using rewards proportional to benefits, or if you like the concept of being friendly in your commercial transactions, try them out by all means, but also please talk about them. A million cocktail parties could change the fate of the world.
Today, we're going to examine a cornerstone of our western world: capitalism. I'm going to first give a brief history of capitalism starting from its evolutionary roots which set us aside from other animals, then I'll settle down into a rant about what I think is wrong with our current implementation of capitalism, and finally I'll give a few specific ideas about how we can tweak public policy so that capitalism achieves its goals better.
Capitalism and Humanity
Capitalism, and its relative friendship, set us apart from the majority of the animal kingdom. I don't believe that early humans were categorically smarter than other animals; even today's humans would have a hard time without cooperation.
Imagine if you were dropped on a desert island without having had any kind of education. (This is really impossible, because humans need nurturing to develop properly, but stay with me.) I doubt you'd be able to do better than the New Caledonian Crow, which can fashion its own tools (National Geographic video link) even out of metal (significant, since metal hasn't been around long enough to develop instincts involving it). You may counter by saying that this crow probably learned form another crow; that's exactly my point though. Individually, we're puny, but together we can build spaceships and make good cheese.
We specialize, we discuss things and we pass on knowledge to others. Why? It's more than having selfish genes; we are happy to forge friendships and help people totally unrelated to us. It's more than the herd mentality; I've met my share of loner humans, and besides I don't think sheep specialize. We share, lend things, trade, and educate each other because we live in a social construct where we can expect roughly the same degree of favors given to us as we give to others. (Doing nice things without reciprocity is a bad evolutionary strategy. However, the reciprocity needn't come directly from the people you help; doing good without expecting anything in return provides evidence to others that you're not a psychopath; see below.) In small groups, reciprocation is mediated by friendships, where we (usually) keep some sort of tally as to how nice the partner has been to us. We don't numerically quantify the favors our friends do us, although your typical human sees one-sided friendships as unhealthy, as if there must be some deeper, twisted exchange going on.
Genetically,We're All Cold, Calculating Psychopaths
I don't mean to suggest that we're consciously cold, calculating psychopaths who use each other for common gain. Our genes shape us to be good-natured towards each other, and it's a good thing too. Imagine if you knew somebody who appeared friendly most of the time but had a few Jekyll and Hyde moments. You'd steer clear of that shady character, and never want to engage in friendly behavior with them. Moreover, you'd tell your friends to watch out for the creep. As a result, being a conscious psychopath is a poor strategy in the long term, since others won't trust you enough to be friendly with them.
However, if our genes keep us behaving civilly towards one another all the time, we're less prone to the slip-ups that betray psychopaths. If we can demonstrate that we always help our friends, more people will want to be friends with us. We don't have to be cold, calculating psychopaths on a conscious level; our genes do a much more consistent job for us without our conscious minds having to bother.
Does understanding the selfish reasons behind friendship make one cynical about human nature? In some ways, knowing that we're hard-wired to do good does exactly the opposite. What do you think?
Money and Friendship
Money, you got lots of friends-Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr., "God Bless the Child"
Money becomes necessary when the group of people you want to collaborate with becomes too large to develop a personal relationship with everyone. Money lets you have strangers do friendly things towards you, and to earn it you (usually) have to do friendly things to others. Money is impersonal, quantified, anonymous, fungible friendship, in the sense that it keeps track of the favors you're owed from any member of your trading community.
Capitalism and Human Evolution
Capitalism (if you extend its definition to include its instinctual analogue, friendship) is what lets us specialize, and gives us the incentive to work together to produce all those wonderful creations only large groups of (mostly) cooperative humans have been able to do. Without capitalism, we'd be brawling in the muck.
Language is also one of the fundamental abilities humans have that sets us apart from other animals (if, indeed, we are set apart as far as we style ourselves). Language, however, is mostly useless without capitalism (in the sense I've defined it). Without capitalism, you have no framework within which to trust the speaker. Without capitalism, you have no specialized skill set to describe to others. Without capitalism, you have little incentive to divulge information (especially information about food, mates, etc.), so you probably wouldn't bother. Therefore, language evolved to make us better capitalists; without capitalism language would confer little benefit. Either capitalism predated language in our history or there was so much synergy between the two that sorting out who came first is moot.
People also talk about the "theory of mind" as being important in human evolution. Having a theory of mind means that you try to predict what other entities around you know, often by putting yourself in their shoes and wondering what you would do in the same situation. Clearly, having a theory of mind is useful to both capitalists (for outfoxing your fellows) and speakers (so you can relate exactly what the listener needs to hear given what they already know), so it's no surprise that humans excel at guessing what others are thinking. However, having a theory of mind can also be useful in purely competitive (i.e., non-capitalist) contexts: ravens (but not most birds) notice when something (like food) captures the attention of other animals, and even the odd octopus has demonstrated that it is aware of how others see it. However, these animals lack capitalist tendencies (and therefore have no incentive to develop language), which are the true sine qua non of humanity in evolutionary contexts.
The Octopus: Not a Capitalist
Current Issues with Capitalism
If capitalism really is the Promethean panacea I've proposed, why is everybody complaining about it? Let me list a few possibilities, and suggest a couple of remedies.
- People don't feel the love when making economic transactions.
- Governments and capitalist institutions often do not share a common agenda.
A few days ago, a total stranger picked a bunch of grapes for me. She set these grapes on a truck in Chile, which proceeded to a port where a monumental ocean-going vehicle waited. This floating steel mountain's sole purpose it to get things to where people want them; in my case it crossed the Equator and continued to an undisclosed location in North America. Total strangers unpacked the grapes, checked them for damage, and then placed them in a location where I could easily reach them for my culinary enjoyment.
By now, you've probably guessed what I'm up to: I've described what we'd consider to be the most mundane of commercial transactions: buying Chilean grapes. However, all the people involved in the chain of events (most of them total strangers to me) performed well-orchestrated diverse tasks for my benefit and enjoyment. If the context were anything but commercial, I would be touched to the brink of tears by the selfless generosity implicit in shipping me grapes out of season. Yet, somehow, in the monetized context of buying grapes from a local supermarket, it's unnatural to feel gratitude to the ship's crew or the shelf stocker - it's all in a day's work for them, and that somehow nullifies the joy I'd feel from having all these people slave away for my benefit.
Does it have to be that way? I'm going to give an exercise to my readers. For the next week, please try, at least once a day, to feel the connection you have to the millions of people who help you through the messy web of financial transactions we call an economy. Just for a split second, imagine that they were all doing you favors without letting money enter into the picture. Then open your eyes, and ask yourself if you really have to ignore the fact that all these people are conspiring to do you good just because you're paying them for it.
If your assignment rings false, we should try to find out why. I bet that financial transactions, by default, don't tickle the "friendship detector" circuits in our brains. Possibly we don't feel that friendship glow at the market because friendship with total strangers is impossible. It's also possible that brands have taken center stage in stores; give me a show of hands: who finds it easier to remember the brand of a product you bought than the name of the person who sold it to you? It's hard to feel friendship with a faceless company (although many people try).
Why not try to get to know the local shopkeepers a little by name? Maybe entering into a friendly relationship will give your instinctual friendship detector a face to latch onto, and maybe some of the gratitude you feel for the stuff you buy will brush off a little onto the human. You'll have your instinctual craving for mutual support reinforced at the same time as getting low, low prices. (Prices are ridiculously low because of specialization: imagine how hard it would be to travel on foot to Chile to grow your own February grapes.)
I promised this post would lead to practical suggestions; here's the first:
Quirky Staff, not Faceless Drones
I bet not many corporate executives are going to read this blog, but if they do (or if you know one - remember the power of talk), maybe suggest to them that instead of having sales-force employees follow the replaceable-parts model (i.e., interchangeable, single-faceted, lowest-common-denominator automata), they should show a little more personality, especially if they work in small enough units that customers might recognize them in subsequent visits.
I was a regular at Enterprise Rent-a-car until I got a car, and let me tell you, that company understands the benefit of human interfaces. Even though the company Enterprise might be a monolithic, faceless mega-corp, the employees I talked to at the branch were all charismatic, genuine-personality outgoing types. It's true that they were made to recite wrote-learned phone greetings, but other than that visits were all fun-loving chutzpah. I don't know exactly how to foster that kind of environment, but staid companies might do better if they encouraged their staff to be lively and idiosyncratic enough to make customers see them as people.
Marginally Legal, Inc.
Let's consider the second problem with contemporary capitalism: capitalist institutions often do things against the public good. I haven't mentioned law yet, but let me try to describe it as succinctly as possible. Capitalism:friendship :: law:enmity. I'm not suggesting that capitalism is intrinsically good and law bad. However, law and enmity both keep you from doing bad things to other humans; the former uses explicit codes while the latter uses the same level of thought as friendship (i.e. feelings of attraction/repulsion based on how you've been treated).
Enmity is the necessary mirror of friendship: it's the instinctual process which makes you try to be a pain to those who do you disservice. It's also a good game-theoretic strategy to demonstrate that pissing you off makes you a formidable enemy for an analogous reason to why psychopathy is a bad strategy: if people know you have a mean side, they'll try to avoid crossing you.
Law and capitalism are based on opposite reinforcement mechanisms, though, so when government meets private industry strange things can happen. Typically, corporations will do for themselves as much good as possible while narrowly avoiding getting sued. It's usually a good thing that laws change slowly: anarchy is just democracy with constant elections and one voter. However, when corporations can take advantage of this sluggishness through loopholes, capitalism can lead to technically-legal injustices. Moreover, using negative reinforcement (law) on entities that respond best to positive reinforcement (corporations) is a recipe for trouble: public-private incentives aren't going to magically align themselves without help.
There's a way to resolve the root problem caused by the negative/positive reinforcement mismatch between government and corporations:
If governments encourage companies to do as much good as possible, such that their rewards are proportional to the good they do, we can resolve the negative vs. positive reinforcement conundrum.
Practical Example: Road Bonds
Right now, governments set certain requirements in terms of what they would like in a road: they want it made of X material with Y safety feature, and it should last Z years. The company's reward is not affected at all by the value given to the public by the road, so long as the government's contractual expectations are met. If the road doesn't meet expectations, the government can try to sue the construction company for breach of contract: a long and inefficient process. Even in the best cases, the company has no incentive to build a road which will last longer than Z years (indeed they wouldn't want it to last any longer than Z years, since they're in the construction business), and all safety and durability research has to be done by the government body who decides the specifications of the road to build. Research isn't free, and it's hard for public institutions to make the correct call in terms of what research needs to be done.
Scrap the meets-contract/doesn't-meet-contract model. We can do better. Imagine an incentive system like this. When a government wants a road built, the incentive they offer is in the form of a transferable bond. The bond would pay the holder annually according to a formula like so:
Annually, pay $A if the road is usable, but deduct $B per cubic foot of pothole in the road (averaged over the year), $C per vehicle-hour of delay due to repair, $D for every human life lost on this road due to traffic accidents on this road and E% of the costs to drivers arising from damage to their vehicles due to accidents. If, in any year, the road is not usable or the net value of this payment in negative, this bond is valueless for all subsequent years.
Let the government choose B-E, and issue the bonds to the company which accepts the contract for the lowest value of A. Then, the private sector would be able to use new road durability and safety technologies where they make sense in terms of public benefit, without the government having to test any materials or make any policy regarding the specifics of what materials to use. In this case the lowest bidder won't be the one that does the crappiest acceptable job, it will be the one able to maximally align public and private interests, since it benefits exactly when the public does.
In turn, the construction company has the incentive to make durable, safe roads so as to collect the maximum reward from the bonds. By making the bonds transferable, companies good at construction (but maybe not inspection or maintenance) could sell the bonds to investment firms. The better the job they did the more money they could potentially make in the sale.
Governments are bad at details. If you reward results instead of punishing breeches, you align interests and harness the power of that uniquely human tool: capitalism.
Conclusions
Capitalism (including friendship) is more than just what makes being human so good; in many ways capitalism is the fundamental trait that distinguishes humans from other animals. It's vital for our policy makers to understand what capitalism really is and how to harness it to pull our 21st century in the right direction: towards the fellowship, harmony and cooperation. If you like the idea of aligning interests using rewards proportional to benefits, or if you like the concept of being friendly in your commercial transactions, try them out by all means, but also please talk about them. A million cocktail parties could change the fate of the world.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)