Democracy for Young People (2018)
talkingpoliticspodcast.com
talkingpoliticspodcast.com
What especially captured me about this piece since listening to it a few weeks ago, and what's been bouncing around my skull ever since, is the political dynamic of elderly populations, and Runciman's notion thatin democratic polities elections favour the rich, well-educated, and old (and correspondingly disadvantage the poor, uneducated, and young), by design and intent:
[T]he reason you have elections, is precisely because of those ancient fears about being ruled by the poor, the less well educated, and the young no longer hold. You don't need to be frightened of being ruled by the young anymore because there aren't enough of them. Democracy was until very recently always understood to mean politics for young people because there are always more young people. Democracy is now politics for old people.
Which puts an interesting spin on how to resolve issues, not only at local, regional, and national scales, but global scales, where the disproportionately affected are the overwhelming majority who are young, poor, and undereducated, comparatively.
Runciman's statement that the challenges of electoral politics to the young and poor are deliberate and by design is novel to me, however. And something I thought worth drawing attention to.
In computer science (a field I am admittedly only tangentially knowledgeable in) there is a process called 'garbage collection' in which portions of a zero-sum resource base (memory) are periodically freed up by removing the unused/underutilized processes so that the primary program or series of programs can use them to accomplish a directed task.
One would imagine that if electoral politics truely was designed maliciously it would have some similar function, yet we have the opposite in the form of various social safety nets which actively seek to prevent this.
Humanity most frequently seeks to do good. We fail, surely, but we strive nonetheless. What really worries me is whether this impulse will doom us in the lifeboat of the climate-ravaged future... But that's a topic for another day :)
But Runciman's an interesting and thoughtful commentator on politics, political philosophy, and the history of both. I'd discovered his several podcasts ("Talking Politics", "Talking Politics: The History of Ideas", and his current project, "Past, Present, Future", in the past year or so, and they are consistently excellent.
I'm among that group of people who puts forward ideas (my own or others) not because they're necessarily true but rather that they're interesting (though I try to note that distinction, I may not have been sufficiently clear here).
And I don't think Runciman is ascribing malice to the situation. More a noting of a characteristic.
Particularly in long-standing human institutions and/or systems, I myself tend more toward an evolved-systems viewpoint: it's not that these systems were designed in a specific way, but that systems that are durable, persistent, and successful tend to have certain characteristics. In that sense, I suspect Runciman is excessively teleological here. But that still leaves the observation that democratic electoral systems which diminish the political power of the poor, uneducated, and young, appear to have a fitness advantage.
Which remains an interesting observation.
I'm not sure I'm following your GC comparison. Could you clarify that?
As to political intent and outcome: the problem as I see it are local optima which produce negative outcomes. Nash equilibria, prisoners' dilemma, collective action problems, tragedy of the commons, etc.
My GC comparison was meant to show how optimized systems remove unproductive consumers of resources. Here 'unproductive' can simply mean consuming more net production than you generate (largely through tax and program subsidy).
The poor are, generally, unproductive. The uneducated are, generally, unproductive. The young are, generally, unproductive.
I had meant to illustrate that if elections had necessarily been created intentionally to perform a similar action, we would see elements in society that sought to perform a sort of socially Darwinian 'GC'. But we don't, we see the opposite where these groups are somewhat provided for despite their inefficiency and we have active programs that prevent (or attempt to prevent) them falling victim to the human equivalent of 'GC'.
I am meaning to use this as evidence that electoral democracies have evident features that developed over time counter to what majoritarian ruthlessness would suggest.
Then I threw a jab in at the end suggesting that this altruism can itself be a weakness if it is maintained in an increasingly resource-scarce environment (harder to develop/sustain complexity).
I generally agree with your political assesment. Humans are fundamentally seperate individuals, and thus have incentive for selfish strategies, but there are a lot of us and we compete in team because that too is a dominant strategy. Riding the line between group size, group cohesion, resource to power conversion efficiency, and individual vs collective interest is seemingly an eternal task.
On your GC analogy: the principle objection I have is that the barriers Runciman describes don't remove the poor / uneducated / old, they disenfranchise them.
What you're describing sounds far more like eugenics, which has proved quite problematic. In the context here, one additional problem is that removing the young eventually removes the population, as they're where old people come from (eventually).
I'll also push back on the poor being unproductive. Often the poor are productive but have limited compensation negotiating power, and as contrasted with, say, the wealthy inheritor class living off rentier income and/or trust funds, probably compare quite favourably in actual economic productivity.
Those lacking formal education may also be quite productive or capable (another podcast I'm listening to just mentioned Michael Faraday, whose formal education ended early; he was apprenticed to a bookbindary by age 14), and the young are typically at the early end of both their productivity and wage-bargaining curve. So a few of your premises may require revisiting.
Again, what Runciman is describing isn't a culling of portions of the population, but of deciding whose voices are heard and/or influential politically.
I'm also thinking of the long history of the spread of the electoral franchise over time, in multiple countries. Typically from propertied males (often restricted by ethnic or cultural origin) which dates back to the original democracy in Athens, then typically more inclusive classes of cultural-majority males, women, and finally various ethnic / cultural minorities. Even in what's generally considered an advanced democracy, the United States, there are current attempts to exclude specific groups from the franchise, either by law (e.g., convicted felons, even after their sentence has been served), or through other restrictions (limited polling places and times, restictions on vote-by-mail or other remote / early voting options, registration limitations and requirements, etc., etc.).
I first want to clarify that I'm not advocating for social Darwinism. I'm using it as a foil to show how our society is NOT darwinist, as we have well established institutions who's entire purpose is to prevent death as a result of fitness failure.
My point with the poor(referring to the welfare class, not the working poor)/young/uneducated being unproductive is to point out merely that they are. WHY they are is for a much larger discussion.
That said, I wouldn't be overly concerned about people being temporarily disenfranchised. As you mentioned, the overall trend is for it to expand regardless of obstacle. A trend not to be taken for granted, but one which can be comfortably taken as faith.
Population and demographics matter far more over time. They represent the upper and lower bounds of the groups that can be enfranchised at all.
In short, even if some elections are bent by some actors to make victory more likely for their side, if they aren't cementing that victory in the form of future generations of whatever they define as their ingroup (biological, cultural, creedal, etc.) then their gains are temporary and will erode with time as they are simply replaced and new group interests take over.
And yes, if humans engaged in the social equivalent of memory garbage collection that would look an awful lot like eugenics. The tricky thing is that eugenics, when applied to actually heritable traits as opposed to merely associated traits (think Crohn's disease or sickle cell anemia vs something like income), does 'work' in that it reduces the % composition of whatever negative factor is being targeted. People are upset about the word 'eugenics' because it was so closely associated with racism. That made it morally repugnant, but unlike, say, phrenology before it eugenics is far more 'correct' in that it's predictions are accurate over time. The real heart of the remaining valid controversy over it is what traits are targeted for expansion or removal and how/if that is enforced in practice.
For example, in almost all developed countries, pregnant women have samples taken to do genetic screening on their children early on in pregnancy. These can detect things like aneuploidy, NTDs, heritable conditions (like sickle cell), and even facial features if you check for them. While facial feature results are uncommon, it is very common for women to be recommend a termination if their child will have some major genetic condition. This is eugenics, yet we have found it more help than not.
Among my own objections is that deliberate negative eugenics seems to me to be a case of evolutionary self-selection, that is, endogenous rather than exogenous evolutionary pressure, which ... seems particularly prone to various feedback effects. Self-selection is not entirely excludable ("mate selection" is a well-known example), but it seems strongly associated with nonfunctional-though-indicative features (the peacock's tail, moose antlers, stotting) in non-human populations. Numerous cases of pro-eugenic policies seem to be based on at best specious "fitness" indicia.
The question of disenfrachisement and its ill effects presupposes the larger question of what the purpose of democratic governance is, as well as what possible alternatives might exist.
Runciman's essay is interesting to me beyond the "poor / uneducated / young" aspect, in that it also addresses the option of sortition, which is a fairly fascinating concept I've been looking at for about a decade now, see "If You Can't Choose Wisely, Choose Randomly" <https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...>. Runciman directly notes that this still tends overwhelmingly to favour representation of the poor and uneducated, which is probably non-ideal.
If we consider polity as the process of achieving collective decisionmaking, and see among the multiple goals of such systems not only effective and good decision outcomes, but social buy-in, fairness, broad consideration, and minimisation of self-serving corruption, then the arguments in favour of democratic processes (over oligopic or autocratic forms) seem more evident, though there are also failure modes of democratic forms. That many of those tend toward oligarchic or autocratic (electing a strong man, outsized influence of campaigns and/or media by a small high-wealth / high-power cohort, for example), bears reflection.
There's also the question and problem of effective representation. A member of the US House represents about 760,000 people. Over a two-year term of office, this means that each constituent can on average claim 1m 23s of their representative's time, assuming the representative is available 24/7/365. Congressional staff and household aggregation assist somewhat with this, but calling the circumstance "representation" seems a stretch. At the same time, increasing the size of the House by the 10x or 100x which might better suite effectual representation would make that body even more ungovernable than it already is. In other contexts, notably both military and corporate organisation, multiple spans of control, each typically addressing 4--20 or so individual units, is common. This of course leads to strongly hierarchical organisations at large scale, but these typically do have effective communications and command flows. Military hierarchies tend to be fairly stable over years and decades, whilst commercial organisations tend to see frequent (and often incomprehensible to those involved) reorganisations, shuffling those relationships.