The U.S. Gets Less Subway for Its Money Than Its Peers

There, fixed that for you.

Look, I'm very progressive, but we need to firmly stand behind "innocent until proven guilty" especially when it is so easy to create a slander campaign against a political opponent. And, yes, even the democrats are capable of that.

What such simulations consistently miss is the information problem facing range voting (approval voting has a similar problem; preference systems don't entirely lack information problems but they are much smaller.) And that is that, contrary to simulations where preferences are based on quantified utility and there is a clear and consistent relationship between that and ballot markings on a numerically scored ballots, real world preferences are ordinal preferences which, while they do vary in intensity, are not consistently quantifiable, resulting in radically different score ratings for the same preferences by different voters. (There's quite a lot of research showing that numerical rating systems in all domains have this problem.)

> Approval Voting is extremely competitive in terms of performance, and _dead simple_.

Approval Voting again suffers from an information problem like range voting; there's no consistent mapping from actual preferences to ballot markings. This is easily solved if you are doing open-ballot voting for a group activity—eithet treating “approve” as a binding commitment to participate if the approved action is chosen or “disapprove” as a binding opt-out nearly resolved the information problem. In scenarios like that, Approval is a great system.

Likewise, Range Voting is great in a scenario where your score is a commitment to contribute an amount of resources proportional to the rating if the option is chosen.

But when you are voting with secret ballots in public elections, these information-problem mitigations don't apply.

> No comparison exists between the best PR methods and the best non-PR methods, so it's still very much an open question.

Comparisons in actual government satisfaction between countries do exist and show that proportionality of outcomes is key. See, e.g., Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy. The absence of flawed, limited, abstract mathematical comparisons that ignore key features of the real world is not particularly a problem.

> And you may have to get Score Voting or Approval Voting to get PR in the USA anyway.

The article making that case considers the federal situation ignoring the possibility of bottom-up reform from the states, which is possible because many states permit the citizenry to bypass the politicians to institute reforms from the ballot box directly. And bottom up reform is desirable anyway.

> A significant fraction of the world's major electoral procedures experts support Approval Voting. E.g. www.electology.org/approval-voting

I don't see any support for that claim on that page.

> I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the book "Gaming the Vote" by William Poundstone.

I haven't read it, but unless the book's own promotional copy substantially misrepresents the argument it makes, I can't imagine I'm missing much of value. Arguing that US Presidential elections going to a candidate other than the most preferred is due primarily to spoiler effects on simple majority elections and that a solution to that would satisfy both the left in the right ignores completely the existence, original purpose, and continued structural effect of the Electoral College.

If it were truly the case that rural voters down play the importance of intercity public transit, then Vancouver should have the same dismal public transport priorities that plague NYC. In contrast, Vancouver has a long history of progressive public transit initiatives despite being attached to a very large and sparsely populated province which suggests that NYCs problem isn't the upstate voters.

Later on, the city built its own third competitor to the two private operators, and eventually ended up purchasing them both. These days the entire system is owned by the state of New York (which took over when the city was out of money during the decline of the 1960/70s).

(There is a lot more nuance here... but the highlight is that the city/state often directly or indirectly financed capital construction regardless of whether they were the operator of the system at the time)

The initial IRT subway was funded by the city with bond issuance, which then contracted the construction and operation of the railway to private bodies.

Later expansions were funded by a mix of public and private funds - but again, with the city retaining ownership of the property and leasing to private hands for operation.

The NYC subway was never a private enterprise in the usual understanding of the word. It's frustrating when achievements like the NYC subway are attributed to free-market triumphalism when there's nothing in its history that justifies this conclusion.

The US healthcare system is extremely far away from being a free market style system. Healthcare hardly even crosses state lines. It's absurdly regulated. It's about as regressive in terms of markets as it gets these days. Over half the US system is government healthcare now, either directly or indirectly; eg heavy subsidies, SSD, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, VA, numerous other programs.

Part of the reason for the vast cost inflation, is that the system has gradually spread out to cover a lot more people over the last 30 years. 5% of people are half of the cost in the US system. In a market system, if you focus on covering the other far healthier 95%, the system is dramatically cheaper - that's how it worked in the 1970s-1990s, and US healthcare was radically less expensive. 50% of people in the system (in terms of cost) are only 3% of the total cost of all healthcare in the US, you can cover those people for extremely inexpensively in a free market system.

By changing the system as they have, such that you commingle government and quasi-private systems, you risk dramatically screwing up a private market system and the government system simultaneously. Ultimately you can do one or the other, you can't do both at the same time and in the same phone booth where they constantly collide. You get the worst aspects of both worlds, which is what the US now has.

I'm not talking about efficiency as in providing the best bang for the buck to consumers, companies and investors don't care about that. I'm talking about returns. Cold, hard cash.

Efficient at extracting rents and higher profits, yes.

> And you haven't addressed the difference in public service efficiency since 10% in scale is not nearly large enough to explain order-unity inefficiencies in the US public sector. (And in absolute terms the US is larger, anyways.)

Wait, you do know how good social services are in Germany and Switzerland, and how bad they are in the US, right?

If I had to rate social services in DE and CH, I'd give, let's say, an 8 and a 9.

Now in the US, well, maybe a 4 if you're lucky.

And they cost about the same per capita.