Comment by xnull2guest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xnull2guest | Hacker News Reader

While this mechanism may seem as though it may work for minority groups with strong preferences, it's important to point out the implicit assumption of class equality between majority and minority voters. That is, the example of gay rights works because homosexuals are spread evenly across the wealth distribution (and in fact are more financially and socially successful in the aggregate than non-homosexuals).

But compare this to transgender peoples, who are marginalized, disproportionately homeless, almost universally imprisoned, and make up a very disproportionate percentage of the lower class (usually they 'fall' to this class rather than being 'borne of it'). It is unlikely that transgender people could buy the votes to achieve policy measures they felt necessary just as it would have been impossible for slaves and poor indentured whites and immigrants in the 1700s and 1800s, Native Americans pushed from their land and made to walk trails of tears, children working in factories, or women for these same centuries (who in addition to having effectively no political voice also had few reasonable financial options) to 'buy' freedom.

Additionally, entrenched interests within classes - and in disputes between them - make it easy for the upper division of the wealth distribution to buy political power to block the opposing classes vote, this exacerbated by high wealth inequality. That is to say so-called Quadratic Voting also depends on the wealthier class having no strong opinion - yet its very easy to find examples both today and historically where this is easily shown not to be the case.

So its suspect whether today's working poor, child laborers, blacks and latinos, immigrants, or members of small (or no) unions would benefit from a system like this.

Finally, these market based solutions to voting would be yet another way to trade financial power for political power. The history of all governments show how strongly political power already responds to wealth. Is it smart (and ethical) to make votes market commodities?

I don't think that this is a meaningful complaint.

Let's say that a minority population has a strong preference and a majority population has a much weaker opposite preference.

So first of all, regardless of the socio-economic status of the two, note that in pure representative systems, the majority wins. If, in the quadratic voting system, the majority still wins, it's not like that's any worse than the status quo. There's no rule of super-losing a vote.

And the entire point of the quadratic voting system is that it allows fairly large minorities with strong preferences to triumph over fairly small majorities with weak preferences, without allowing a few billionaires to buy up all the votes.

If the situation is that there are two minorities with strong preferences, and then a majority with weak preferences, then the QV system will quadratically favor the larger minority over the richer one, but if your point is just that there are minorities with strong preferences that you don't think are just, well, that's more or less Cowen's point. As he points out, a minority with a strong preference includes the pro-life lobby.

Right now minorities win against majorities without strong opinions by vote mobility within a base. There seems to be some weird underlying assumption in this QV stuff that everyone is forced to vote on every issue? That is to say I take issue with sentence three. I don't see how sentence four or five really add much - but I guess I get the argument you are attempting to make ("It's not worse").

I do think it is worse. Wealth distributions essentially everywhere in the world from the third to the first and from all data we have of all nations from all times historically have an exponential distribution, i.e. the wealthy have exponentially more wealth than those beneath them, and in fact fractions of countries today own the vast majority of wealth (in America, I've seen estimates of 1% or less owning 70% or more when shares, stocks, bonds [financial holdings], land ownership, and foreign investments are taken into account along with income).

Not everyone comes out to vote (in America, for example, it is pitiful, sometimes barely two digits), voters are obscured from real issues and the 'wealthy' class is not necessarily the 'aggressor' or scenario we're talking about. Consider the examples I gave before: the working poor (who are often deeply in the red, meaning that they own 0% or less of national wealth - in America this makes up about a quarter of the country), transgender folk, child laborers, small unions, immigrants, or to the historical point similarly disenfranchised groups such as slaves, indentured servants, women, Native Americans, and poor Europeans.

Clearly there is a function in which an impassioned minority can overcome an apathetic majority in America right now (indeed, gay marriage, kind of the poster child for QV right now, was pretty much exactly that scenario). Presumably if you're the kind of person who wants QV, you regard the current method as insufficient or inefficient or both. (Personally, I think that QV is interesting, but I don't ultimately favor it).

Again, though, you're kind of weirdly trying to talk about situations with impassioned majorities. They already win. If they really want to pay extra to win by tons more, well, they're wasting their money.

If your ultimate point is that quadratic functions don't increase fast enough ("the wealthy have exponentially more wealth"), then just choose a faster-increasing function. As I pointed out in another sub-thread, 2^n means that the 20th extra vote you buy would cost 1,000,000 times as much as the first extra vote you buy, and the 100th vote you buy would cost more money than anyone has ever or will ever have. That should pretty solidly allay concerns that the top 5% or top 1% will ever buy a majority that way, while still leaving open some interesting things that happen with a minority of 20% or higher. (Personally, I doubt that an exponential function would be necessary, though a polynomial function of higher order than quadratic might).

I'm not exactly sure what to say. From my point of view I've made a large number of arguments and points that haven't been addressed - and many that haven't been acknowledged at all...

A niggle on the term "transgendered" (via http://www.glaad.org/reference/transgender), specifically the final point:

Problematic: "transgendered"

Preferred: transgender

The adjective transgender should never have an extraneous "-ed" tacked onto the end. An "-ed" suffix adds unnecessary length to the word and can cause tense confusion and grammatical errors. It also brings transgender into alignment with lesbian, gay, and bisexual. You would not say that Elton John is "gayed" or Ellen DeGeneres is "lesbianed," therefore you would not say Chaz Bono is "transgendered."

Thank you for the education. Fixed in comment.

Can I ask a question? It seems surprising to me that we should compare transgender to lesbian, gay, and bisexual. Shouldn't we compare transgender to male, female, and other genders? It seems to me that being transgender is about an inward-facing personal identity, whereas lesbian, gay, and bisexual are about an outward-facing sexual preference. But these issues can be sensitive and sometimes not intuitive, so I'm never sure what to do except to try and learn the right thing.

The difference is a person is born gay, they don't need an operation to become gay. The Ed reflects this process. Hence you cannot be gayed, but you can become educated, indoctrinated, experienced, and transgendered.

Transgender does not mean having a sex change operation. Statistics say that somewhere between 66 and 90 percent of transgender people do not get sex change operations[1][2], and 40% have any no medical treatments at all (hormonal, surgical... anything) related to transitioning their gender[1].

[1] http://www.thetaskforce.org/static_html/downloads/reports/re...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/nyregion/23gender.html

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