Bruce Schneier’s Plan to Reinvent Democracy
schneier.com
schneier.com
This sounds to me like a simplified or applied version of Brennan's "epistocracy". There's a nice podcast about this: https://hiphination.org/season-3-episodes/s3-episode-5-demon...
Or, in text, a summary of the book "Against Democracy": https://www.vox.com/2018/7/23/17581394/against-democracy-boo...
OT: Must-read on this subject and good reference material is Ruling the Void from Peter Mair.
This is, in fact, the worst thing about tech bros and other highly paid experts in specific fields. I've grown up enough to learn that my earlier ideas have been terribly wrong because they've lacked perspective. Doesn't matter how good I am at X, there's just no substitute for experience with Z.
The top-tier tech bros have been proving this in the last few years. Many of them have enjoyed the kind of success that they have simply by living in a particular period in history that was very friendly to massive IPOs making them fabulously wealthy. Their more recent decisions have been in many cases absolutely disastrous, and anything dealing with real people is generally laughably bad. See the metaverse gamble, recent Twitter, or poisonous permethrin-treated mosquito nets for examples. They often times have no idea what they're doing.
Edit: another non-tech example is how biomedical researchers want to make people with paraplegia walk. Ask people with paraplegia what they want and they'll tell you bladder control and the ability to have sex. Just listen to people.
LPT to the author of the article: If ideas matter, they can stand alone to the person who you conceive of having originated them and be defended separately.
This word is new to me and I love it, thank you.
> The cube root law is an observation in political science that the number of members of a unicameral legislature, or the lower house of a bicameral legislature, is about the cube root of the population being represented.
The US population is about 336M which would put the size at 696.
This would change it from an average of 754k people / representative to 483k people.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/09/opinion/expan...
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/12/reimagining-d...
That shows a fundamental problem. Given a large number of people with different agendas, how does an action plan emerge? This is a problem with meetings in general. We all know what meetings that accomplish nothing are like.
Democracies needs something to vote on. There's a stage before voting which involves focusing and drafting. This tends to be dominated by lobbyists and others backed to promote narrow, self-serving agendas. That part of the system sucks.
> This tends to be dominated by lobbyists and others backed to promote narrow, self-serving agendas
In a real representative democracy, this shouldn't matter (yes, I know, this veers eerily close to a no-true-scotsman argument). If all the participants promote their own self-serving agendas, the end result will be a mix of those agendas, weighted by how widely particular viewpoints are represented.
The problem of course is firstly that systems like winner-takes-all and first-past-the-post violate democracy by silencing other voices, and secondly that lobbying is done by interests who represent nobody but themselves yet it has a hugely outsized influence on the outcome.
I'm curious about the error rates he mentions. What causes them in practice?
This reminded me of another article on hacking voting machines - https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/2016-electio...
Elections are basically an emergency valve and a way to get people to not complain too much.
These are the types of errors I assumed he was considering there- I guess calling a close election a statistical tie makes even more sense if you're accounting for people not voting/having voted without 'perfect knowledge' as well.
No, they're a collective agreement that we compete with votes instead of on a battlefield. Instead of getting recruited to be in some politician's army, you get recruited to be their voter.
Where exit polls can be off by over 12% in those states.
And where the result of those discrepancies was to stop doing exit polls.
Individual problems can be attacked without dismantling the whole thing. Gerrymandering, especially, seems like it could have an outsized effect on the error rates of some elections.
... the current trend toward zero-sum politics—where one party wins while the other loses—and how that situation isn’t optimal. “We have an economy where my success depends on your failures,” he said. “We need to have a game where everyone wins, and it would be unlike anything we have ever seen. We have to harness plurality and embrace conflict and disagreement.”
To fix this, we have to rethink the nature of growth, which as he says is the fuel that powers the zero-sum world and is relevant only in that world where resources are plentiful.
He ended his talk with suggestions on how to change democracy with built-in security, recognizing other tech innovations to make it more efficient.
In one interpretation, the purpose of democracy is accountability of the leaders and the government. Representative democracy is a means to an end from that interpretation: you don't vote so that the leaders represent you, you vote to keep them in check.
The other interpretation, is an intentional misunderstanding that is promoted, which says that the purpose of democracy is to "represent" the people. What does representation means? Whatever the leading polarization line the media is pushing. Most likely, polarization across left/right, race, sex, ethnicity, religion. Exactly the non constructive sort of representation, the one that requires minimum accountability.
The U.S. media and elite have perfected the art of brainwashing towards the representation interpretation, and against the accountability interpretation (also branded "populism").
The polarization is no accident. It is the strategy producing minimum accountability, which produces maximum power.
One, people enact policies, so we still have to choose leaders. Two, rule-by-ballot-prop is a messy business, with many dubious propositions making it to the ballot not because they're particularly good, but because people with money can pay to make it happen. And three, it depends upon people putting a lot of time into understanding complicated issues. I'm a smart, dutiful person who tries to keep up and who spends many hours every election trying to understand. For me it still often comes down to deciding who to trust.
The only advantage I see to it is when it gives politicians cover to do things that they agree with the populace on but don't want to get yelled at about. E.g., legalizing marijuana. Unfortunately, there are also bad examples, like CA Prop 8, which was just trying to put bigotry in the state constitution.
Take a look at Colorado's system which is implemented quite well.
I think it's too attention-expensive for every law but it's an important guardrail against corrupt state politics.
Most black Democrats are not voting for the black Republican candidate. Most female Republicans are not voting for the female Democrat candidate. The Catholic Joe Biden lost most of the Catholic vote to Trump. And every time a person like Theodore Roosevelt, Ross Perot, or Donald Trump throws their hat in the ring you get a lot of two-party disaffected people voting for them.
E.g., America's founding ended up being an agreement between well-off white men to limit power to well-off white men [1]. We can't blame "the media" for that. Neither can we blame "the media" for things like America's war over whether black people were livestock [2], or how the only successful coup in American history was about white men keeping that power [3].
We've done better over the years, of course, and we should be proud of that. But an important way to keep leaders in check is to have leaders with many backgrounds and experiences. Because their power doesn't just get used once every election, but every time a word is added to our laws.
[1] https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/elections/right-to-v...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_189...
> The other interpretation […]
Where are/were these interpretations of "democracy" defined? What (who?) makes them definitive? What makes them the only two? What makes one correct and the other incorrect?
Any links or ISBNs that you could provide would be most appreciated.
So voters kicking out an incumbent is seen as analogous to scientists abandoning a hypothesis after falsification by an experiment.
It's one of those concepts that people don't really agree on the meaning of, even though it's bandied about a lot (rather like 'freedom').
Are we talking about strictly representative democracy, i.e. the selection of individuals by the voting public to act on their behalf within executive, legislative and judicial branches of government? And if so, how is that pool of candidates itself selected, and by what interests?
Or are we talking about direct democracy, perhaps a mixed system in which proposed laws are written by the elected representatives but then voted on by the general public, e.g. state and national referendums?
Or are we talking about oligarchy masquerading as democracy, with puppets put up in show elections and with their actions controlled by the hidden hands of billionaires?
He beat Snowden to the punch, but no-one was listening.
> But today there’s an even bigger stink brewing around Dual_EC_DRBG. In an informal presentation (http://rump2007.cr.yp.to/15-shumow.pdf) at the CRYPTO 2007 conference in August, Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson showed that the algorithm contains a weakness that can only be described as a backdoor.
> What Shumow and Ferguson showed is that these numbers have a relationship with a second, secret set of numbers that can act as a kind of skeleton key. If you know the secret numbers, you can predict the output of the random-number generator after collecting just 32 bytes of its output. To put that in real terms, you only need to monitor one TLS internet encryption connection in order to crack the security of that protocol. If you know the secret numbers, you can completely break any instantiation of Dual_EC_DRBG.
You're right that it's a blog post regarding the work of others, but even Dan and Niels' simplified presentation is well beyond what a layman can grasp.
Not knowing security, Schneier's post brought it down to a level where it didn't go over my head completely.
As evidence for Schneier not really moving the needle on this: Dual EC remained a component of important industry products --- Juniper/Netscreen VPNs, in particular --- for years after this blog post.
For what it's worth: that's what the major revelation after BULLRUN was. Not that Dual EC was bad --- literally every competent practitioner knew Dual EC was bad --- but that serious products were actually using it. Seeing Dual EC turn up in a VPN server was the smoking gun, not any particular slide from a Snowden tranche. That's when there's no denying it's a backdoor.
(Mark me down as someone who was a Dual EC backdoor skeptic prior to the Snowden fallout, for whatever that's worth to you.)
They still won't understand how it works, but it provides an intuition of the nature of the problem that most people could grasp (vs a presentation where the vast majority of people wouldn't get past the first page, even if they looked).
What differ really democratic organization - democratic order, mean way of making decisions.
To make democratic order really effective (not just imitation), need to follow few simple rules, for simplicity, I could reduce there to only one - rules should work.
So, what says us Dunbars number and democratic organization practice?
First, real people are not subjects, only organized Group is subject.
Second, how large should be Group? - From Dunbar, about 150 people, but exists tricky thing - not all people are subjective, exists 1-10% human-hubs, who affect all others.
So if your Dunbar group all human-hubs, you could have community of about 1500-3000 people (really up to approx 5000), behavior of which you could estimate with high precision.
And that's how Switzerland live just now - more than 80% of their communities have 1000-5000 members.
90% of real-life questions answered inside community, on local level, and their federal system is tiny and make very few decisions, most of them with plebiscite.
Third, to let rules work, must be enforcement (fines, power to enforce punishment) and must be fine tuned system of punishment grades, from just blame, to fines, up to most for me powerful - exclusion from community.
In online communities, enforcement is near impossible, so online Democracy is just hallucination.
Not always. When Genghis Khan died, Marco Polo's legend (not universally believed) says they got a bunch of slaves to bury him somewhere, then killed them all, and then the people who killed them were themselves killed.
The next round could take place further away, since the soldier could probably be more relied on to follow orders and return to a known location when they had completed their task.
No, we don't. We just need to each have a decent true understanding of how policy directly impacts us and those we care about. Then we apply our individual ethical weights and decide how to vote based on that.
> Maybe his suggestions won’t come to pass
Is it just me or are his suggestions never mentioned in this post? I think I read it all (though did not click on any of the links).
Personally I'd like to see the voting power in the house of representatives made proportionate to the number of people who affirmatively voted for each representative. I'd also like to see multi-representative districts so that everyone who got, say, 5% of the vote, is elected, with their voting power in the House proportionate to the number of people who voted for them. Do that and gerrymandering doesn't matter except at the absolute margin.
Maybe do the same with the Senate, except possibly keep it single-senator per state to make the minority party happy. I don't know. I'd also like to see three senators per state, one elected every two years. I'd be in favor of abolishing the Senate entirely, but I know that won't fly.
An example of this proposal and what it would do can be seen at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/10/opinion/house... (though note it comes with "need more seats too" aspect).
https://beyer.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=...
It also continues the effect of granting proportionately more voting power in Congress to districts with a small population. E.g. https://ballotpedia.org/Demographics_of_congressional_distri...
- In 2015 just over 1 million people represented by the single Montana at-large district to just over half a million represented by the two Rhode Island districts.
> The Fair Representation Act would move US House elections into multi-member districts drawn by independent redistricting commissions, and elected through ranked choice voting. The multi-member districts would be effective in states apportioned six or more seats in the House, and would elect three to five Representatives each, depending on the size of the state. Taken together, these three measures would incentivize congressional candidates to appeal to a broader range of voters.
The full text of the bill is https://beyer.house.gov/uploadedfiles/fair_representation_ac...
And the FAQ is https://fairvote.org/our-reforms/fair-representation-act/
One thing the Schneier seems to be missing vs. Wells is that we’re entering an age of unlimited energy production, and therefore unlimited natural resources. Wells has a blind spot around environmental issues, but I think he’s closer to the mark on resource scarcity than current thinking.
Anyway, Schneier actually has some interesting insights not covered by The World Set Free, which is refreshing.
We've been entering this age for almost 80 years. When are we finally going to reach it?
> therefore unlimited natural resources
Natural resources bred inside of a nuclear reactor tend to be radioactive. I also think you underestimate the extent to which populations of all organisms, including humans, will expand until natural resources again become the limiting factor.
Wells’ answer was “once the politicians get out of the way”.
I think that’s still true today.
We have so much more knowledge now, so many more capabilities, but people still argue over socialism or capitalism, for example.
There are numerous better possible systems, but instead of people putting their heads together and really coming up with a better system, at least for our modern day needs, people just stick to arguing what they learned, what gets inherited.
I think we definitely need something new. Capitalism unchecked and without heavy regulation is unsustainable, if nothing else it will lead to revolts and uprising. Socialism has a naive view of human nature IMO.
Hybrid systems like the Nordic countries use are pretty great, but still much room for improvement.
On top of all of that, democracy can't work when, like in the US, almost half the population is severely uneducated and ends up voting out of spite and/or based on belief.
It fell flat. It turns out lawmakers don't want accountability in any way, shape, or form.
If we want that level of transparency, we can't count on the government to do it or even accept it willingly.
Legislation and voting records are all public, are they not?
And looking to the future, how long until we have an LLM monitoring C-SPAN that can start keeping very specific logs?
- Everyone gets to vote if they're over the voting age (eg 18).
- Your vote counts in proportion to your expected remaining years left in society. So if you're 95, you get 1 vote. If you're 20 you get around 60 more, depending on the tables. If you're an immigrant who arrived as an adult, eg a corporate expat, you get maybe 5 votes. There will be a table of stats about all sorts of things like this. Skin in the game.
- If you have kids, you get their votes, split with the other parent. So a 10 year old would give each parent roughly 35 extra votes.
- When you vote, it's a quiz. The questions will be known questions out of a bank of maybe 10k questions, and the quiz is 100 random questions. If you get 75 correct, your candidate gets 75 x your weight. We want voters who cared to learn the facts to have more say.
- Parliament is chosen by proportional representation. Have a few areas represented in proportion, then add overall balancing seats. There's several ways to do this.
- Term limits. Maybe just a single term of 10 years. Takes time to learn politics, like anything else. But also we want people to make decisions that aren't just about getting re-elected. If you know you're leaving eventually you can just focus on getting the things done that are important.
- Large salary and large pension for the MPs. Independent commission that looks at all your finances in private, during and after tenure. Flags things that it finds flagworthy.
- Not sure about geographic seats. Maybe just assign each voter to a virtual MP, at random. Local geographies should have local government to deal with local matters. This also does away with gerrymandering. But if we're going to have geographic seats, get a computer to assign random blobs.
For me, I would add that any law passed must have a relatively short sunset clause. This forces us to reconsider laws periodically to make sure they're still relevant.
The quiz thing is mostly exhaustion at the idea of people who don't bother to learn anything having a say. It's no different from having kids deciding what we should have for dinner.
We can come up with a bunch of facts beforehand that everyone can read the answers to, and then it's up to people themselves to decide how much they really care.
There are still issues with this, but it was an interesting idea to ponder.)
I hear you, I feel that frustration as well. Myself, I've come the long way around to deciding that, those people need to be included anyway. And a robust system of democracy should work even with their input. Maybe at the lowest level, all voters get a "I'm happy"/"I'm unhappy" button, and signals of greater interest unlock more options and details. But I think gatekeeping is fundamentally undemocratic, and if you are going to make it harder to vote you need a better reason than "they don't seem to care".
We want more hands on the wheel, not fewer. If they don't seem to know or care, that's our problem, not theirs.
We won't know who got marked down for not answering correctly "Who was our first president". It might be busy professionals who don't have time to study (look at the CFA exam). It might be underprivileged minorities, which is a legit concern. It might be that it's evenly spread out who bothers and who doesn't.
Isn't that the point? At least from my POV, it's completely meaningless unless literally everybody is included. So yes, I'd include children, the mentally-infirm, and definitely convicts.
Think about how "universal"[0] enfranchisement came about: it has been a series of grants of influence/power, in layers, starting at the top. Barons demanded more say, and less arbitrary treatment, for themselves. They didn't get it, until they used force. Women were treated as we now treat terrorists, when they demanded a fair say.
The whole purpose of electoral systems is to deter people from trying to actually take power. So not including what you call "these people"[1] is a serious mistake.
[0] It's not universal, anywhere. Of course.
[1] The phrase "these people" is often used when othering a group of people. For example, it seems to spring easily to the lips of some Conservative politicans in the UK, when discussing immigration. It's sort of a trigger phrase for me.
I'm generally okay with criteria that are truly evenly instituted, such as age limits. I'm also okay with denying genuine transients the right to vote. These can become problematic at points, so I believe in limiting the limits. But you don't have to include literally everyone.
I would generally include convicts, and especially ex-felons, but I would never include anyone who has maliciously denied someone else the right to exercise the franchise (e.g. murderers, some kidnappers).
And some kinds of politician, I guess.
I like this idea in theory, and I'd love to find a way to implement it. But I think we'd find ourselves in a situation where we either spend a ton of time rubber-stamping all the "good laws", or we end up not having laws for stuff people all agree on and don't waste time rubber-stamping because why bother with the effort if everyone abides by the law anyway ... until decades later we get another guy doing a bunch of destabilizing horseshit because it's not technically illegal.
At the moment every law has an imprecise expected outcome and we never go back to think about whether the intervention worked.
I'm not saying use the stats mechanically to cancel the law if it fails, just that there ought to be a post-fact consideration of whether something worked.
Truthfully, outcome based legislature would be quite a bit more readable too, as the outcome bit will spell out exactly the intention of the law.
For instance a 50 year old with kids who are 10, 12, and 14 would have 30 + 35 + 34 + 33 = 132 votes, roughly. A 20 year old kid would only have about 60.
Not sure what's logistically fragile about it either? There are records of who is the kid of who.
> There are records of who is the kid of who.
Without genetic testing some of these records are going to be wrong. And what of sperm/egg donors?
I hope rapists get no votes, but what if the rapist convinces the raped person to not go to the police?
I care so much about the quality of life of other people's children that I have decided not to have any of my own (this is not the sole reason, but it is a reason).
This entire idea of granting votes from minor children to their adult caretakers would be extraordinarily bad for society.
In the US, at least, foster parents do get paid. A few hundred dollars per month, per child. Some of these foster parents have very large households, and effectively make being a foster parent their job. Some of these foster parents really care about the kids, others see the kids as a paycheck.
Edit to add: If you get more votes for taking on more kids, then politicians will be incentivized to provide more benefits for those with more kids, in order to win their votes. So, regardless of the situation originally, eventually you will have a society in which people are getting paid to have more kids.
Yes, it's possible there will be more kids than in current society. But it would reduce the problem of having a large generation of retirees who essentially vote everyone else's resources to themselves.
The society where you get votes in proportion to remaining life is also one where the kids have to think about not destroying everything for themselves, after all they have to live in it.
The one where a huge group of old people are in power is where skin in the game is least well represented: if I'm 95 I'd like to vote to have three kids take care of me for my remaining years, thanks, adios.
Nope, or if you think so, you might have zero experience with actual politics. Once you start assigning coefficients to people, people will fight to death over them.
That is similar to calling abortion or various speech-related controversies "minor issues". Such "minor issues" lead to convoluted SCOTUS cases that mess up the legal environment for decades.
Someone brought up that quiz voting was wrong, that was a reasonable objection.
On this one it's the principle of whether parents get to vote some share of their kids votes.
Recalculating everyone's score before each new election. (Remember that life expectancy changes constantly, even Covid moved it. Not to mention regional differences that go down to the level of actual neighbourhoods; some racial groups live longer than others, should they wield bigger voting power? Same with richer people. What a can of worms to open.)
Subjecting voters to long quizzes - that alone would filter out a significant proportion of the population that just does not have time for such "fun", probably including the parents of kids that you mention, leading to overrepresentation of bored people at the ballot box.
Uncertain status of kids whose parents are just undergoing divorce or their paternity has been challenged. (Not to mention stuff such as surrogacy, which is legally complicated already and different in each jurisdiction.) What about a kid dying a day before the election?
The entire point system is a micromanagement hell, sorry.
But it's the principle. I mean you could also just say each kid is a quarter vote, each retiree is a half.
Quizzes, yeah, I can see why people think it's a bad idea. But what's the solution to idiots voting? You want people to actually know what's in their interest. And I'm not looking at it from the perspective of any particular country that might have a history of voter suppression through qualifying tests. Just thinking out loud about what to do about this particular issue.
Kid dying before the election is no different from a candidate dying before the election. Or postal early voter dying. We can live with it.
At what age do you get negative votes?
> - If you have kids, you get their votes, split with the other parent. So a 10 year old would give each parent roughly 35 extra votes.
Because we all know that parents know what's best for their kids, or even care what's best for their kids? What about foster parents? What about parents who have been deemed unfit by a court? Wouldn't this just encourage unamicable divorces, especially in mixed-party households? And, of course, the Quiverfulls and Octomoms become a disproportionately large voting block.
> - When you vote, it's a quiz. The questions will be known questions out of a bank of maybe 10k questions, and the quiz is 100 random questions
The problems with quizzes is that they are 1) going to be forced choice (with only one correct answer, that a biased person decided was correct, or at least only one answer getting the majority of the weight); 2) Salience of the questions; 3) There are too many additional criticisms, just look up "cultural bias in IQ tests" to get an idea of why fact-based quizzes are a bad idea.
> - Term limits. Maybe just a single term of 10 years. Takes time to learn politics, like anything else. But also we want people to make decisions that aren't just about getting re-elected. If you know you're leaving eventually you can just focus on getting the things done that are important.
The criticisms with this are 1) Unelected employees of the government gain more power, as they are the people the inexperienced representatives go to for advice; 2) If they aren't making decisions about getting re-elected (which hopefully would be about what the people who voted for them like, and not just gerrymandering or voter suppression), then they are making decisions that will personally benefit them after they are no-longer representatives. Such as the "important thing" of enabling particular industries to thrive at the expense of other considerations; industries which are likely to become their employer when they leave office.
> - Large salary and large pension for the MPs. Independent commission that looks at all your finances in private, during and after tenure. Flags things that it finds flagworthy.
In David Eddings' Tamuli books there's a republic that elects people to office (often against their will). Upon becoming an officeholder their entire assets (minus, presumably, a house) are liquidated and converted into government bonds. If the government does well, then their net worth increases. If it does poorly, then their net worth decreases. If done in the real world there would definitely be possibilities for manipulation here, but in general it seems an interesting idea.
> - Not sure about geographic seats.
Multi-representative districts might be a better idea. There are plenty of local matters that have knock-on effects outside of the locality (such as distribution of water rights from a river). Doing it your way we'd have to have elections for "super regions" between the local (or state) and federal level.
Geographic representation also allows a rep to really know both the federal regulations, and the local regulations of one place, which allows them to better assist constituents, and to consider the effect of federal law changes on said constituents.
Your remaining life expectancy is never negative. That's just a statistical fact. It's not your life expectancy at birth, though a figure in the same region is more or less where you're likely to die until you get quite close. So for instance if you're 10 your remaining might be 70 years (ie expected 80), when you're 60 it's 25 years (ie expected 85). Past about 90 people are down to single digit remaining years.
> Because we all know that parents know what's best for their kids, or even care what's best for their kids? What about foster parents? What about parents who have been deemed unfit by a court? Wouldn't this just encourage unamicable divorces, especially in mixed-party households? And, of course, the Quiverfulls and Octomoms become a disproportionately large voting block.
Ok but who is better than the parents at deciding what's good for the kids? Other people? We seem to be happy for parents to decide a lot of things for their kids, why not this thing?
It doesn't matter whether you're married or divorced, you get half the votes of the kids. At the moment that's still the case, right? Whether you're married or not you and your partner get a vote each, and you can't take the other person's votes.
Unfit parents, deceased parents shares, foster parents, minor quibbles. They don't add up to much. I'd say foster parents get the votes, courts can decide if you're unfit, and the deceased parents votes go to the surviving parent.
Yes octomom will have a zillion votes. There's one of her. Big families, yes, they get more votes. Shouldn't they? They have more stake in society. There's more of them!
> The problems with quizzes is that they are 1) going to be forced choice (with only one correct answer, that a biased person decided was correct, or at least only one answer getting the majority of the weight); 2) Salience of the questions; 3) There are too many additional criticisms, just look up "cultural bias in IQ tests" to get an idea of why fact-based quizzes are a bad idea.
Yeah this is probably the most controversial one. I don't know, you can weaken the strength of the quiz so everyone's weight is 100 + percent correct. We want engaged voters, but we don't want to disenfranchise people. There's no value that will satisfy everyone.
> The criticisms with this are 1) Unelected employees of the government gain more power, as they are the people the inexperienced representatives go to for advice; 2) If they aren't making decisions about getting re-elected (which hopefully would be about what the people who voted for them like, and not just gerrymandering or voter suppression), then they are making decisions that will personally benefit them after they are no-longer representatives. Such as the "important thing" of enabling particular industries to thrive at the expense of other considerations; industries which are likely to become their employer when they leave office.
Indeed, the thing about the civil service is well known. It is a problem in every well-run country.
The commission for MP income is meant to deal with the corruption issue. If you decide to make solar panels and windmills illegal and then take a job in the coal industry, they will tell someone.
> Multi-representative districts might be a better idea.
Generally how PR systems work already.
Because there's nothing to guarantee that the parents are contemplating the future when their kids are adults, and not just the near future. If kids don't get a vote because they aren't expected to know what's best for themselves at this point, then this vote shouldn't be given to someone else. Especially not in such a large proportion.
This is what rights are for, not voting power. To protect and enable parents to decide what is good for their kids, regardless of who votes for what.
And yes, for some people like the Turpins, basically almost anyone was better at deciding what was good for the kids.
It would be unconscionable to strip the votes from a child and give them to an abusive parent. Let the parents first prove they have been good (or at least convincing), and let the votes fall in line. If you parent well, then your children, once they turn 18, will vote similarly to you. Even in your system of greater voting power at a young age, the willingness of 18 year olds to vote in alignment with their parents is the single best test of whether the parents actually did parent well. It is the single best test of whether the parents actually made good decisions for the kids.
> Shouldn't they? They have more stake in society. There's more of them!
No, they don't. The children do. And once they reach their majority those children can then make their own choices. We each, individually, have an individual's stake in society. A particular relationship doesn't change that. There are plenty of people who have large networks of those they care for (many of whom are adults, so there would be no transferring of votes). And plenty of people who have almost no one they care for. But when it comes right down to it, our stake is our own, not someone else's.
Large families also use more of society's resources, at the expense of others
> If you decide to make solar panels and windmills illegal and then take a job in the coal industry, they will tell someone.
And this does what to them? Given that they're already term-limited out?
Of course there are parents who don't think about this, but I think it's reasonable that people who have kids by and large think about the future their kids are going to live in. We have to make some sort of assumption about what interests people will consider, and I think this is reasonable. Naturally there's a lot of people and some won't behave like the rest, but can anything be done about that?
> It would be unconscionable to strip the votes from a child and give them to an abusive parent.
Sure, so don't let the abusive parents have the votes.
> If you parent well, then your children, once they turn 18, will vote similarly to you.
I think this a much riskier assumption than what I put forth above, that parents are thinking about the future of their kids.
What I would say is good parenting is if the kids give thoughtful reasons to why they're voting for whatever, rather than them voting the same way as me.
> We each, individually, have an individual's stake in society. A particular relationship doesn't change that.
We each do, but I'm also responsible for my kids' stakes. The fact I'm their dad is why. I'm not responsible for my adult friends because they're adults. Kids though, you have to do a bunch of stuff in their interest, while assuming you know their interest, aka making a good guess.
> Large families also use more of society's resources, at the expense of others
They also produce more of society's resources, for the benefit of others.
> And this does what to them? Given that they're already term-limited out?
Some kind of sanction of course.
> They also produce more of society's resources, for the benefit of others.
Not at all.
Yes. Don't award anyone extra votes based on the kids that they raise.
> Sure, so don't let the abusive parents have the votes.
Good luck with that, and also good luck correctly identifying only abusive parents as abusive.
> > If you parent well, then your children, once they turn 18, will vote similarly to you.
> I think this a much riskier assumption than what I put forth above,
This has been studied. It is not 100%, but the trends do exist. I should have included some links along with this comment.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/22/13714556/...
> Ojeda and Hatemi found that only two in three of these adult children could properly identify a parent’s party identification with the broad descriptions of Republican, independent, or Democrat.
> And of that group, about one in four rejected their parent’s politics.
> if a child felt she was supported and connected to her parent, she was more likely to adopt what she thought her parent’s beliefs were.
Directly addressing your comment, "that parents are thinking about the future of their kids."
> "Parents are especially bad at perceiving their children, especially compared to how children perceive their parents," he said
> about two in three children were able to accurately perceive a parent’s party identification. But only 42 percent of parents were able to do the same.
A second link: https://news.gallup.com/poll/14515/teens-stay-true-parents-p...
> 7 in 10 currently say they're sticking close to their parents' positions on the ideological spectrum, many will possibly continue the voting tradition of at least one older family member.
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> We each do, but I'm also responsible for my kids' stakes. The fact I'm their dad is why.
No, you aren't. Morally you may think that you are, but legally you aren't. You're just responsible for how you raise them.
Morally I consider myself responsible for the future of all children, despite not being a parent. Legally, just like you, I am not though. I'm just legally responsible for not abusing other people's kids.
Why would a single person, who doesn't know how long they will live, vote for policies that they think will be bad for your kids' future?
But this is an issue with any identification problem, there are false positives and false negatives. If we have a bunch of laws mistakes will be made.
> This has been studied. It is not 100%, but the trends do exist. I should have included some links along with this comment.
Not quite sure the article supports what you're saying? It seems to be pretty confused about how kids get their political opinions.
> Why would a single person, who doesn't know how long they will live, vote for policies that they think will be bad for your kids' future?
Well I mean you might think you are helping the kids but you might not be? This is part of skin-in-the-game, right? Experiencing something might give you a new point of view on it. For instance how will you form an opinion about whether schools are well run?
So be cautious when adding yet another imperfect system onto all of the rest. Especially one with such disparate weightings attached to it.
> It seems to be pretty confused about how kids get their political opinions.
It's not confused. Most children get their political opinions based on:
A) Whether or not they felt they had supportive parents.
B) What they think their parent's political opinions are.
It is thus up to parents to both be supportive of their children, and to affirmatively communicate to their children what their political opinions are. If this happens much more than 70% of children will mimic their parents' politics.
> This is part of skin-in-the-game, right?
It's not your skin in the game, it's your children's skin in the game. Some persons do indeed see people as cliques and tribes, which have interests in lock-step, and believe it is just to have them vote in sync. But I believe that most people are more nuanced.
> For instance how will you form an opinion about whether schools are well run?
You made the mistake of triggering one of my hobby-horses. :D
The way I do this is by knowing what policies helped and hindered me, my spouse, and our siblings while going through school. And then reading the policies promulgated by those running for office (especially of the local school board), and of the school proposals submitted to the voting population as initiatives or referendums. And reading criticisms by teachers, parents, students, other politicians, etcetera. And then weighing all of this data to determine what I think is best, for students like me, my spouse, and our siblings.
Let's say that all of your kids are still in primary school. How are you, as a parent, supposed to form an opinion about whether the secondary schools are well run? How are you supposed to form an opinion based solely on your own kids? Kids are not identical. My wife thrived in a particular pre-school, while her brother later said he thought it wasn't good for him. The schooling choices you make for the eldest of your kids may turn out to be bad decisions for your younger kids. Now factor in that your kids are only a tiny proportion of the school-attending population.
I, at least, have spent a couple of decades researching these schooling subjects. I've watched documentaries on it (specifically Waiting for Superman, and Hoop Dreams). I've seen the movies Stand and Deliver and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I know a bit about the differences between schooling in Scotland, England, Australia, and my home country the USA. I've read Miraca Gross's books on gifted education. I've read John Taylor Gatto's critiques of the education system for regular kids. You're telling me that with all of my knowledge my political power should be much less than your own?
You gain knowledge I cannot by dint of having your kids in the system. I have knowledge that you do not by dint of having gone through a system, as well as having done my own research. Let us both have an equal vote. If you don't like how I vote you can always home school your kids, or send them to a private school (or "public" as they call them in England).
You seem to be saying that because you've done a bunch of research about schools, you deserve a vote.
And I should get a vote due to having kids in the system.
But that leads to some interesting questions.
You are happy to let people who have done neither have a vote, too? How does that make sense?
What about people who have both? I read Gatto as well. I also know a bunch of stuff about different systems. Plus I went through education. But I get the same number of votes as you?
There's also the interesting question, which is the core of politics, of who gets to decide stuff. If it comes down to knowledge and deliberate research, why don't we just let people who know stuff decide things for everyone? I think that path has some positives, but it has the fatal flaw that even a very knowledgeable person does not necessarily understand what it's like to be the the recipient of their decisions. Principal/Agent problem, for instance is one of the ways to think about this. It has some real issues, which one of the commentators mentioned regarding the civil service.
The core of what I'm saying is that if we have skin in the game, we will end up learning the things we need, so you will have both. You won't be an expert in everything that you need to make decisions about, but you will have an incentive to inform yourself.
> You are happy to let people who have done neither have a vote, too? How does that make sense?
Given statistics on down-ballot voting, a fair chunk of people who have nothing riding on a particular office, or don't have knowledge about it, opt themselves out. This is the democratic way of handling the situation. No other party except the voter themself can genuinely discover whether the voter is "informed enough" to cast a vote. There are plenty of hyper-informed hyper-partisans who let their ideology overrule their knowledge. Who say "my kids matter, but I don't give a damn about yours, and will vote to that effect". Do you believe that in your system those who homeschool or send their kids to private school should vote on the public schools? I do, but it seems like you wouldn't.
> But I get the same number of votes as you?
Yes.
> You won't be an expert in everything that you need to make decisions about, but you will have an incentive to inform yourself.
Sure. And in a democracy yours will hopefully be the most informative, and hopefully convincing, voice. And your voice will convince many of the other voters that you are correct, and they will vote in the way you recommend.
If old people are so selfish that "a large generation of retirees who essentially vote everyone else's resources to themselves" is the problem this proposal aims to solve, maybe parenthood just doesn't make people much more thoughtful about their votes...
Say what you like about gerontocracy, at least it's the product of old people actually being more motivated to turn up to vote rather than the bizarro logic that twentysomething single mums of eight kids with unknown fathers are so good at decision making they need two orders of magnitude more votes than the average retiree (provided they sneak their phone into the voting booth to look up the trivia quiz answers)
Unfortunately it doesn't matter. lordnacho (what an appropriate user name) has more kids than all of us critiquing him do, so his idea will be the one voted into law. :(
Maybe his kids will listen to us once they hit 18, and vote to overturn his law. It is, after all, men who voted to give women the vote.
Tests-to-vote have a… checkered history:
Its either not relevant (and therefore any coincidental discrimatory effect is far out of proportion to its value) to the voting at hand, or its not uncontroversial (in which case its simply a test for agreement with the viewpoint of the test creator, and a direct tool for excluding other viewpoints).
Let's try some other questions.
In what decade did we land on the moon?
Who was elected in the previous presidential election?
The Earth is thousands? millions? billions of years old?
Is the Earth round or flat?
This is both a bad general idea and a ridiculous specific application, as immigrant citizens who arrived as adults do not, in fact, have particularly reduced future in society than any other citizen of the same age.
> There will be a table of stats about all sorts of things like this.
And…how detailed will those stats be? Will it take into account race, income, place-of-residence, and similar factors that correlate to expected lifespan in society? So that those who are most disadvantaged in the status quo have their voices systemically deweighted to protect the status quo elites?
> When you vote, it’s a quiz.
Other comments have addressed the problems with poll tests with regard to history, but structurally, this is just another way to deweight the voices of those least well served by the status quo system.
> Parliament is chosen by proportional representation.
This, OTOH, is a good idea.
> Term limits. Maybe just a single term of 10 years.
The form of PR suggested above (MMP with some by-district proportional method underneath) renders this mostly superfluous; while there may be a decent argument for term limits to mitigate problems in a system which denies effective choice because of FPTP, or denies effective specific candidate choice because of simple party-list PR, that really applies only to top-up seats in MMP.
> Large salary and large pension for the MPs.
“Large” is extremely vague this could be good or bad.
> Not sure about geographic seats. Maybe just assign each voter to a virtual MP, at random. Local geographies should have local government to deal with local matters. This also does away with gerrymandering.
You already suggested areas with proportional representation, with top up seats for finer-grained proportionality. Each voter than already has a set of MPs set by the side of the “area”, with a very high probability of having an ideologically largely aligned MP from that area. This also already solves gerrymandering, since once you get away from FPTP winner-take-all districts to multiseat proportional districts, (especially with at-large top-up seats for fine-grained proportionality) the ability to influence partisan balance or other features of the legislature by where you draw district lines is basically eliminated. All the random assignment suggested in this item (whether voters to an MP or addresses to an electoral district) is superfluous.