Let's send everyone to college!

Clinton has picked up the fetish of the college-educated left -- let's make 4-year colleges free! What a fucking crock. Yeah, let's dump even more money into these bloated elitist bureaucracies than have been taken over by marketers and influence peddlers. Let's help all of our young adults continue to act like children -- just going with the flow and sitting in classrooms because that's what everyone is doing and it's easier than getting a job.

Don't get me wrong -- I love universities. I spent 14 years at universities, both as a student and a researcher, and I would love to be a professor if I thought I could make a living at it (given the other constraints in my life). But the worst experience in my time there was teaching kids who didn't want to be there. A university education is not for everyone. While I know that many people acquire valuable skills at universities, I firmly believe that the simplistic claims that a degree will give the marginal student a million dollars in extra income are pure bullshit (my university education taught me how to evaluate these claims).

I think formal education is a great thing, and I support any effort to increase the learning of our society, but 4-year colleges are not an efficient way to do so. Let's start with community colleges and free educational materials-- let's make sure everyone has the opportunity to access the fruits of intellectual efforts without having to dedicate themselves wholly to an institution. Let's focus on providing opportunities to those with the least money, least preparation, and the greatest obligations, rather than dumping money on the ungrateful heads of a bunch of pampered "first-world" kids.

What can we get from these candidates?

Nothing. That's what we can get from Clinton or Trump. Both candidates will make the government more intrusive, and neither will challenge the elitism of the state.

Neither of them offers a vision for a sustainable society.

• Neither can address the perpetual increase of the national debt. Seven years into an economic recovery, the debt should be growing more slowly than the economy...but it's growth exceeds the economy's. The political establishment has no clue about how it will deliver its fiscal promises. It's made up of short-term opportunists and partisan hacks.
• Neither will address greenhouse gas emissions.
• Neither will mitigate the growing social-economic stratification of American society -- which will create even greater political dysfunction and crime.

Of course, Gary Johnson doesn't have the answer either. I'm bugged that he wants to replace the income tax with a sales tax rather than a pollution tax. One "libertarian"  benefit of a pollution tax is that it probably would not be able to raise even a fraction of what a tax on livelihood (like income or sales) can.

Johnson's tax plan is not libertarian

A progressive rips Johnson for the regressive nature of his tax plan. He's criticizing from a progressive (Sandersnista) perspective, but the tax plan is not libertarian either.

It's disappointing that the Libertarian candidate would give so much weight to this sales tax idea (the "fair tax"). At best, it is a massive distraction from real libertarian issues. It can't even be justified as the price of winning financial support from the Koch brothers. I can only assume that Johnson, like many conservatives, has a savings fetish and thinks that "libertarianism" is synonymous with capitalism (i.e. rules that favor the owners of capital). But at the end of the day, Johnson is proposing to expend massive political capital just to play an accounting game.

Johnson is also banking on the fact that income tax enforcement is particularly intrusive, though I doubt a massive sales tax would be much better. On a more substantial level, I believe that progressive taxation (higher rates for the wealthy) is more libertarian than other tax systems that raise the same revenue. This is because a person with more money (all else being equal) faces fewer constraints from losing any given amount of money. This is true even for losing the same percentage of their income -- it is worse to take 10% from a person with a thousand dollars than to take 10% from a person with a million dollars, even though the later involves 10x as much money. With this reasoning, it's clear that reducing taxes on the poor should be the first financial priority of libertarians. Lest we are worried about being unfair to the rich, they are fully capable of advocating for themselves in government.

"Cult of Personality"

Tonight's debates have brought the song "Cult of Personality" back to my mind. While poking around YouTube, I found this interview with Vernon Reid, Living Colour's basist. He describes how the song developed, then gives a lesson in playing the music.

Failure of government: election tampering

One of the interesting things about democracy is that we all want it, but we don't agree on what it is. This isn't simply a matter of disagreeing about the ideal election system while acknowledging that all of the variants are essentially democratic. Instead, the most common disputes over the conduct of elections turn out to be power plays as various factions try to change the rules in their own favor. Today it's the manufactured hysteria over voter-fraud, yesterday it was a battle over gerrymandered districts, and then there's the incessant jiggering of the rules over payments for political communications.

It's bad enough that politicians are constantly campaigning for re-election, but it seems that even when they are passing legislation, they're just thinking of how they can retain power. When do they find the time to actually do the people's business? My impression is that they don't.

Elections are not worth our attention

"Conventional wisdom" holds that citizens of democratic states have an obligation to cast an informed vote for the leaders of the states (or referenda, if applicable). This idea forms the ideological foundation of a news culture where the actions of politicians are examined in excruciating detail, both while in office and while on the campaign trail. While I'm sick of hearing about the election horse-race and political theater, I am still sympathetic to the principle that voting is important, but I have not heard a convincing justification for this position. Without a good justification, I have no basis on which to approach the details of this decision -- just what am I trying to achieve by voting?

Some commentators take an emotionalist position on this topic. For instance:

Voting is a privilege and a right given to us by virtue of living in a free society — we don’t need a rational choice framework to provide a reason for participating in the process.

Of course, this doesn't answer the question at all. Why should I consider voting to be "a privilege"? Why would it matter if I didn't vote?

Other commentators have attempted to answer this question rationally, but I still find their arguments wanting. Here we focus on probabilities and expected payoffs.

The main problem to be overcome is that there is a very low chance of a voter influencing the election (about 1 in a million for the Presidential election, if the voter is in a battleground state). Sometimes people have more influence, such as pundits or multi-millionaires who can sway a substantial number of votes, or when the electorate is small. But most regular people -- no matter how smart and informed -- are not going to have substantial influence on the election.

The way to overcome this lack of influence is to focus on the scale of the benefit, should we sway the election. If we figure that one candidate is $1.5 billion more valuable than the other (i.e. $50 per American), then the one in a million chance of swaying the election seems pretty good. Based on these numbers, I figure my vote is worth $1,500;  I'd give up an hour of my time to get that lottery ticket.

My concern is that this "deal" quickly falls apart once we realize that buying that ticket is not as simple as walking to the voting booth, waiting in line, and casting my vote. There is actually a risk that I will vote for the wrong candidate, and end up costing America $1.5 billion. Yikes. In fact, a quick analysis indicates that I have about equal chances of getting it right or wrong in the Presidential election. Basically, since I'm not a partisan fanatic, I have to assume that most voters are just as smart and altruistic as I am, yet about half of them would choose the other candidate. Clearly, selecting the right candidate is not a simple decision. Ironically, the situations in which I'm most likely to affect the outcome of the election are the very situations when I would have the least confidence in my decision (i.e. when the vote is evenly split).

Having realized the responsibility that I bear as a voter, I could decide to collect more information about the candidates so that I am able to make an informed decision. Even if I cannot go into the voting booth with absolute certainty in my decision, perhaps it is enough to increase my confidence to 75%, or even 60%. Maybe it's worth voting even if I only have 51% confidence that I am choosing the right candidate (2% of $1,500 is $30).

But how can I make a reasonable choice about candidates. I can watch debates, read their ideological statements, and the policy proposals. How much will this help? Will I select a good President, or just the best con-man? Will the newspaper articles really reveal the character of these candidates, or will they just reflect which candidate has the best PR team and is the best at manipulating reporters? The final fact that I have to face is that all of these candidates are strangers to me, and I can only gain a very superficial understanding of them even if I dedicate all of my free time to investigating them. Is there anything better I could do with my free time?

On almost any criteria I can think of by which to evaluate the candidates (e.g. policies, parties), I run into the same problem -- the situation is incredibly complex and far removed from my direct experience. To top it off, and I can't really trust half of the information that I get since it is clearly being manipulated by the candidates and their supporters. I'd end up spending hundreds of hours studying just to get my confidence up by a couple of percent. There is some consolation in the fact that I'd likely do much of this studying anyway (I'm a news junkie), but I'm sure that I could spend my time more wisely than that -- I could spend time with my family, on my job, or volunteer with a charity.

After all this, I still have some hope that voting is worthwhile -- perhaps as a signal to the President that he does not decide when to leave office. But I'm not sure it matters who I vote for. Maybe if I am presented with a truly despicable candidate (e.g. Santorum), I would vote as if the election depended on it, but otherwise, I can't see the point in taking the decision too seriously. If I were to vote seriously, the best strategy that I can think of is to vote on a single issue.

Luckily, this mess clears up a little if we think about smaller elections: as things get more local, my influence increases and my information also increases, even if the stakes decrease. This reaches an extreme with my decisions in my personal life, where I confidently make plenty of low stakes decisions that cumulatively provide massive welfare benefits for myself and others.

The decision to vote or not (and how seriously to take it) is simple enough, but this attitude that voting is sacred permeates our culture and twists our institutions. This is most evident in the way that newscasters obsess over politicians: how much real news are we missing because the newscasters think that national electoral politics is the most important thing in the world? How many science and technology stories are going unreported? How many local stories are ignored? How much energy are we wasting on national politics?

The election horserace is not news

Once again, we have descended into election season and the news media will be full of campaign coverage. This is a damaging habit for our society; many important issues will be ignored, and these conversations will reinforce the pernicious attitude that electoral politics are of supreme importance. While many intelligent people have written rants against this sadly predictable shift in attention, I'm thinking that we can do more. I'm thinking that this could be the motivation for a movement to pressure the news media to maintain coverage of broad issues, and not dwell of the idiocy of the campaign. What do you think?

I don't have many ideas right now for how to organize this opposition, aside from writing a letter to my typical news station -- NPR. But I'll give a little outline of how much coverage is appropriate for the campaign.

The first consideration is whether campaign news is useful -- will it affect any of my decisions. I can see two possible uses: helping me decide which candidate (if any) to support; and helping me to anticipate policy changes that may occur over the next five years. However, most of this coverage is useless to the vast majority of people who will be voting for a candidate: either they have already decided, they aren't paying attention, or they will wait to see what the situation is as their own election-day approaches. I'm guessing that the only people who find this information useful are the big donors and party activists who are trying to figure out who has the best shot... but these political junkies will get their news from specialized publications, not mainstream outlets. As for predicting future policies, that's pretty useless at this point: elections are pretty unpredictable, as are the actual policies that will be implemented by the elected candidate. After all, G.W. Bush gave every indication that he was opposed to nation-building ("humble foreign policy" and all), and we saw how his Presidency played out.

So even if this reporting is not useful, it is still news. I'd still like to hear the results from the Iowa caucus, and that Bachmann dropped out. That would take all of 30 seconds to report; it does not justify an hour of "special coverage", plus all-day analysis the next day. Also, it is good to be informed about how our political system works, and so it's good to have an occasional feature story about how political campaigns are waged, but the day-to-day updates are just absurd.

So why do the news agencies focus on the election? Is it because they think it's important? These people do tend to be political junkies. Is it because it is easy? They can collect all their facts from election judges and campaigns (and polling data is common enough). However, I don't see how it's any easier for a talk-show to focus on this issue over any other -- there are plenty of other experts to invite on the show (but maybe political advocates are more eager and polished than non-political experts?). Finally, do they think this is what their audience wants? There are plenty of political junkies out there. This comes down to being a culture war of sorts (without the violence and harassment of the Republican's culture war) -- will news programming be determined by the interests of partisan hacks and those who have succumbed to the cult of the Presidency, or by the rest of us who realize that real life and real change is best found in places other than the campaign trail?

Pirate parties and the new economic power

A few posts back, I ruminated on a potential shift in the nature of economic power and how that could play out in the political realm. The rise of the Pirate parties seems to fit into the process that I was pondering:

the success of the Pirate Party cannot simply be explained away by saying it’s a symptom of social exclusion or ignorance. The supporters of the new party are anything but on the margins – they are highly educated and media savvy. And above all, they are young and in a position to attract like-minded individuals in cities all over the country. To a certain extent, they represent the future elite of Germany. For mainstream-party strategists, realising that they are unable to connect with this section of society must come as a kick in the teeth.

From How Germany’s Pirates might sink the mainstream parties | Matthias Heitmann | spiked

Anyway, this suggests that the "new power" may be centered on the ability to generate large ad-hoc communities around current issues, and motivate these communities to act. So the new power is based on social networking assets (including both old-fashioned "people skills", familiarity with those newfangled devices, and a reputation that encourages others to pay attention), as opposed to the old powers built on land ownership, industrial ownership, and institutional control. The funny thing is that the assets of this new power are pretty much identical to the assets of the financial industry-- the main difference being that these assets are now widely distributed, and the "clients" are not just millionaires and large institutions.