If politicians were mathematicians
gowers.wordpress.com
gowers.wordpress.com
Unfortunately, everyone is using the same means (i.e. manipulation) leading to some pretty weird systems. Most politicians then fall victim to pursuing their ends relentlessly, even if the landscape has changed so much that an unbiased observer could see it is no longer of value.
To be fair, this happens to most ambitious people at some point. The difference being that the non-politician (e.g. entrepreneur) who becomes blind to material changes fails locally in his pursuit while the politician fails nationally.
For example, amongst economists there is no question that outsourcing work or production overseas is a net benefit to the economy. If this were the entire discussion, then we'd all go home now happy. However, there is an additional level of argument that can only be addressed through one's moral system and values, which differs from person to person. Some people would say that although this outsourcing does help society as a whole, it also harms a small number of people whose jobs go overseas, and that in recompense for this benefit to the rest of us, we owe the now-unemployed some help. The truth of that, and the size of any aid that it implies, is not something we can get to through purely rational argument.
To take your outsourcing example, it is indeed the case that outsourcing is likely to leave everyone better off overall, and individual negative effects could be mitigated with careful planning. But if a large part of your electorate believes in the lump of labor fallacy, and your opponent's campaign team is happy to perpetuate this mistaken belief while dismissing your attempts to foster local economic alternatives as pork-barrel spending, then the arguments in your re-election campaign are rapidly headed for lowest-common-denominator territory. I made a resolution this past new year to give up my hobby of arguing politics on the internet and have (mostly) stuck with it, by the simple expedient of blocking a few websites whose signal-noise ratio had long since gone to the dogs.
I have no idea how politicians deal with the daily tide of incoming phone calls, emails, faxes and so on, beyond hiring thick-skinned secretarial staff. Not that I'm shedding tears for the political class, who in many cases choose to concentrate on the game at the expense of the results, but it's kind of amazing that anything gets done. I don't think it's a problem of scale (eg the size of the federal government); I see the exact same problems at the municipal level.
Based on my observations of political behavior immediately preceding elections, in comparison with behavior of those same politicians following the elections, I assert that most of the time they do act as free agents.
If, by magic, nobody in political life argued dishonestly, then the only politicians who reflected the beliefs and the emotions of the electorate would be politicians who were just as poorly informed and incompetent at logical thought as the voters. One thing hypocrisy and illogic buy us is politicians who are smarter and better-informed than the people who vote for them. Sarah Palin sticks out like a sore thumb precisely because she exemplifies the average voter instead of just pandering to them.
http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...
http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog...
Research does not suggest that formal training in mathematics does anything to improve the quality of discourse on public policy. Please note that I write this as a teacher of mathematics. I like mathematics and think that mathematical thinking is helpful, but I don't expect it to have much help for public discussion of policy.
It's sort of like the bill being proposed in Congress that would limit lawmakers' ability to be lobbyists. It's a noble gesture but doomed to failure. A congressman wrote the part of the Medicare Prescription Plan that prevents Medicare from negotiating prices of drugs. He's now a $2 million a year lobbyist. If he couldn't be a lobbyist he'd be a 'consultant' or a 'researcher'. It just doesn't work.
The essence of the problem is that it's tough to fight apathy, ignorance, and stupidity. Collectively we are easily manipulated. Look at how many people think Sarah Palin is smart. If you don't tackle the issues of apathy, ignorance, and stupidity then you get the current system and no set of rules is going to change this.
As voters, we need to collectively focus on the qualities of a candidate and not which party they are in. Is the candidate smart? Does the candidate show signs of loving to learn? Is the candidate willing to say something like, "You know what? I'm not an expert in nuclear proliferation. There are lots of them around and I'll listen to their counsel and make a good choice." Is the candidate able to see through bullshit?
We've got it all wrong and in this sense I agree with Gowers. He has a creative solution. In the long run it won't help. Greed, incompetence, ignorance, and stupidity are too rampant.
And unfortunately many of the greedy ones are neither incompetent, ignorant nor stupid. If they where they would be a lot easier to stop.
Decision markets (ala Robin Hanson's futarchy) attempt to do this. In short: we vote on our goals. We then bet on whether Policy X or Policy Y achieves this goal. We select the policy with the highest odds of success (say X). Then anyone who bet on Policy Y gets their money refunded, and anyone who favored Policy X loses money if it doesn't work. Thus, anyone who favors bad policy loses all their money.
The main drawback to such a market is that it might not be deep enough; if one bets 1 million dollars on policy "transfer 2 million dollars to me" and causes that policy to be enacted, they lose money on their bets but still make out like a bandit.
This glosses over the difference between prediction markets (markets for bets on outcomes) and futarchy (voting on results we want and automatically enacting the policies prediction markets endorse to achieve those results).
Also, wouldn't a market thin enough to be gamed by interested parties attract investors like a stock trading at less than 1x earnings?
Robin Hanson certainly believes this is true, but Mencius Moldbug believes he has found a real world case where it isn't. I don't understand the issue well enough to offer an informed opinion.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/pipe-sh...
It's all a question of costs and incentives. Right now, it is rational to be ignorant an irrational when you vote. It takes a lot of work to understand all the issues. On the other hand, if you guess wrong, the marginal cost (because your one vote has such a small effect on the outcome) is fleeting. So the cost to each individual voter to be well-informed far exceeds his the benefit from so doing. (See The Myth of the Rational Voter http://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+myth+of+the+rational+voter ).
So you've got to either lower the cost of rationality, raise the cost of ignorance, or raise the benefit of rationality.
Now if it had been punchy, amusing, and wrong, but on Powerpoint with the stereo on, I would have voted for that. Oh wait, never mind.
If you had (open schematic/open source) electronic voting equipment, you could issue a hashed/random ID on receipt of a ballot. After accumulating a number of votes, the ballot data is published alongside the secret IDs and can then be audited by the respective voters.
However, my reservation is those who are pressured to vote in a particular way, their imam/husband/abuser tells them how to vote; that way the vote could be checked and so couldn't be consider truly anonymous.
If you go a step further and then have the hash encrypted with a one-time pad it's getting too complicate IMO and an abuser could simply demand the pad.
I'm sure this is a good article, but I couldn't help but think of fizzbin