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Comment by assbuttbuttass | Hacker News Reader

Alternative voting schemes sound good, because we all can recognize that our democracy is broken. But the underlying problem isn't the voting scheme, it's the lobbying and corporate money in politics. Changing out the voting system while leaving Capitalism in place would just have the corporations buying different politicians. Not surprising that the economist doesn't mention this angle.

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> the underlying problem isn't the voting scheme, it's the lobbying and corporate money in politics

There are certainly many problems, but voting schemes appear to be a very powerful lever. In particular:

- Representative democracy incentivises parties rather than independents, since like-minded candidates can pool and target their campaign resources

- Plurality/first-past-the-post voting incentivises a two-party duopoly, since voting for a third-party is a 'wasted vote' (they won't win outright, hence they'll get nothing)

- A two-party system incentivises 'least-bad' voting (i.e. voting for someone we don't actually want, to stop the other candidate who we want even less)

- A two-party system gives no choice on issues which benefit both parties (i.e. maintaining the status quo; e.g. lobbying, pork, military budgets, etc.); whilst polarising along irrelevant issues (e.g. 'culture wars')

There's no agreed-upon 'ideal' voting method; but most alternatives are regarded as better than first-past-the-post. Any system which doesn't 'waste' votes for third-parties (e.g. preferences, scores, fall-backs, proportions, etc.) would allow voters to indicate what they'd like (rather than what they'd dislike least); that gives a chance to candidates who don't benefit from the status quo; and that brings important topics like lobbying back into the political arena.

I think your comment means that the "will of the people" isn't why democracy is broken, but it's the extra-democratic processes involved in making legislation that is the problem. Do you have an example of some policy that is generally popular, but not passed because of corporate lobbying?

I think solutions to immigration/health care/climate change are generally contentious and don't have a popular consensus. Something smaller like a "simpler" tax code seems more convincing, where a small industry of tax preparation software or something lobbies to keep income taxes complicated. At the same time, many deductions are quite popular, and these are necessarily complications to the tax code. I'm just not entirely convinced that lobbying is hurting us in any meaningful way, though a stronger example or argumentation might change my mind.

In fact health care is an example where the majority favors a government (or primarily government) paid solution [1], but it does seem unlikely to ever be implemented.

Climate change is another issue which actually has majority support in the US, but action is very little [2,3].

In fact I believe the perception of it being contentious issues is largely due to a relatively small minority which has a disproportionate influence on policy (and likely corporate lobbying will have influence as well). This is actually on e of the issues that alternative voting schemes want to address, diminishing the influence of a minority which has very strong/extreme views.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/29/increasing-... [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/06/23/two-thirds-of... [3] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public-vi...

When I look at these health care charts, I don't see a real consensus, even when oversimplifying health care to 4 broad categories (36 20 30 6 percent respectively). I don't know who the respective corporate interests would be for each of the categories, though I'd guess that there's big corporations that favor 2 or 3 of these potential solutions, and only a third (at most) of Americans that support one of them. A third of the populace doesn't make a popular mandate, and it certainly isn't enough for a senate majority (especially for democrats).

The climate change one might be more convincing, but I actually think we've seen some real progress on this. Alternative energy is getting cheaper, there's tax incentives for installing solar panels or EV chargers in many areas, and tax incentives for buying EVs. There's certainly more we can do, and the polls were phrased to suggest that the general public thinks so too. But if the admittedly significant oil and gas lobby is trying to hold this issue back, I'm not sure how successful they've been. Finally, this isn't an actual bill or anything. Every "green" bill I've seen is opposed by conservatives based on their constituency, whether they're a red conservative from texas, or a blue conservative from west virginia. I don't know if Joe Manchin takes donations from coal companies, but he'd unquestionably support coal either way.

> Do you have an example of some policy that is generally popular, but not passed because of corporate lobbying?

Here is an example I saw just recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos#United_States

Really disgusting to read about it.

I'd probably support an asbestos ban for most construction (though I'm not a chemical or civil engineer, so I could have some blind spots here), and this probably comes across as pedantic, but I didn't see anything that indicated that there's broad public support for banning asbestos. Again, that's not saying that we shouldn't do it, just that I'm not sure it's a great example of the "will of the people" being overruled by a corporate interest.

I'd say it's pretty broad when so many countries banned it completely.

Well, the American public is an outlier when compared to many other democracies in other ways as well, in general I'd guess they'd view environmental/health regulations less favorably than most other developed nations. "Just don't lick the walls lol" is something I've heard regarding lead paint here in America, which sounds insane to me, but it's the insanity of democracy, not anything else.

What it tells me is that the successful corporate lobbying against it is an outlier, meaning that in US it is a problem. No one in their right mind (unless those corrupt who profit from it) would be against such ban.

Lack of understanding the issue could be an exploited factor too. See also articles that point out how asbestos companies knew about problems for decades and hid the facts.

right but corporate lobbying isn't the only way in which America is unique. Concerns about concealed research results could be very true, but that's an entirely different question than corporate lobbying. My position isn't that companies don't do anything wrong or aren't trying to influence policy, I'm just skeptical how successful political donations are at subverting democracy.

In my opinion they are way too influential. Take a look at corporate sponsored laws that try to ban ISP competition and community / municipal broadband. Correlation between presence of such laws and corporate backing is very clear.

Sortition (random selection of politicians from the pool) is the answer. https://www.ted.com/talks/brett_hennig_what_if_we_replaced_p...

I may have heard of this once on a reddit philosophy post or something, I think this really isn't an example of a popular idea that's squashed by corporate interests. That's not to say it's not a good one (I have no idea), but I don't know if we'd pass this (or if there's even any corporate opposition).

> Do you have an example of some policy that is generally popular, but not passed because of corporate lobbying?

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

Yeah, I brought up this idea in my parent comment, but the part I'm unsure of is whether or not there's broad public support for making taxes simpler. The devil is in the details here. If making taxes simpler included removing the mortgage interest deduction or maybe the child tax credit, I could imagine the proposal being extremely unpopular. I think some republicans have included simpler taxes on their list of campaign promises, but there hasn't been a swelling consensus around the issue. Finally, complicated tax deductions are a way for the govt to incentivize certain behavior or have some fine tuned controls over revenue, so there's a reasonable justification to keep some complications. tldr I agree that turbotax (and probably others) have lobbied to keep taxes complicated, but unless there's evidence that the broad public really cares about this, I'm unsure that those donations really did anything. It's easy to vote in your donors' interests when the vote doesn't matter (or if you were already voting that way!)

Economists are universally in favor of things like carbon pricing, healthcare for all etc etc, don't be so quick to judge

Glen Weyl (the economist who has done a lot of work on quadratic voting, mentioned in the article) has also written and talked extensively about Harberger taxes and quadratic funding; the former is a fairly deep change to how property rights work, and the latter is a way of democratically allocating funds to public projects. I would definitely encourage reading up on both of those!

(outside the United States point of view)

In Democracies with a reasonable proportional representation (PR) improving how to choose from N options, or how to allocate M resources, is secondary to the problem of how to select and parametrize N and M.

In PR democracies mechanism design should focus more on how to improve participation and deliberation before final voting.

Deliberation is a process of selecting and articulating options and figuring out problems. Mechanism design for deliberation can emphasize cooperation, dialogue, creativity and reason, as opposed to the use of power that is voting for given choices.

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