Policies in 500 Words or Less

This is the next post in the “Policies We Should Be Talking About” series. For more information see the introduction (and other policies) here, but briefly, this series is about explaining policies that might be unpopular, unknown, or simply undeveloped that could still have large positive impacts. Some face specific political obstacles, and some may be too radical to gain enough momentum in the near term, but all deserve to have their signal boosted.

Approval Voting

The United States and many other nations use the worst voting system in the world: First Past the Post or FPTP. This forces voters to think strategically, voting for candidates they think will win rather than candidates they actually like. Combined with the “package deal” problem we’ve discussed before, voters have at best tangential input into the political system.  FPTP leads to a variety of bad outcomes, including static two party systems, wasted votes, ease of gerrymandering, minority rule, spoiler effects (where a third party causes the preferred major party to lose despite popularity, i.e. Nader voters preferred Gore, but didn’t vote for him and Bush won), and more.

The most common alternative discussed in the United States is Ranked Choice / Instant Runoff Voting, which is being used in Maine today. This allows voters to rank all candidates they like, supporting multiple candidates. If no candidate wins an initial majority, votes are redistributed from the least popular candidates based on voter rankings. The first candidate to accumulate a majority wins. However, this system still trends towards strategic voting and two parties, since voters’ second choices are only counted if their first choice is eliminated. If a smaller party is redistributed first, voters second and third choices may be ignored, with the winner being a candidate that fewer voters had as a second choice. There are other more mathematical objections, such as the lack of a Condorcet winner. It is nonetheless objectively better than FPTP.

An even better procedure is called Approval Voting. It is incredibly simple: voters vote for as many candidates as they like, and the candidate with the most votes wins. Voters can support the candidates they really like as well as the ones they think will win. In all likelihood, this will trend towards two parties, but the difference is that third parties can spring up and build support over time without voters fearing the spoiler effects. This incentivizes new parties with fresh ideas. Main parties may co-opt those ideas as they get popular, but that’s good news for voters anyways, as good ideas can bubble up outside of the two party system and nonetheless achieve mainstream success.

The main difficulty is that almost all politicians will not support a new electoral system if they know they have already won using the old system. To get around this, the Center for Election Science recommends ballot initiatives to bring this idea directly to popular vote rather than fighting politicians who want to stay in power. They are doing just that, starting small in Fargo, ND with a ballot measure this year. If successful, it can be pointed to as a real life implementation of a good idea and can be built upon in other polities.

Additional information:

Bail Reform

When someone is accused of a crime, they are charged and given a set of restrictions to ensure they show up for trial. In the United States, this usually includes a money bond that is deposited and then returned at trial. If the defendant does not show up, the property is forfeit. However, other common law nations, including Canada and the United Kingdom, usually do not require actual money, just restrictions on movement or activities (i.e. drinking).

In the US, this has given rise to bail bondsman, who will post your bail for a flat nonrefundable percentage of your bond, often 10-15%. If you fail to appear in court, they have authorization in most states to bring you to the court’s jurisdiction to recover their bond, which is known as bounty hunting, essentially legalized kidnapping. Even if bondsman were banned (and several states have done so) this system remains terrible. If you cannot afford the bail bond, you have a strong incentive to plead guilty. Sitting in jail until trial is not an option for someone in poverty who needs to be working and earning enough for their family. Combined with other criminal justice issues like overcriminalization and policing for profit, nonviolent poor offenders are trapped by a system where they never get a chance for a fair trial due to a lack of cash. Justice should be based on guilt or innocence, not wealth.

There are better ways; the Bronx Freedom Fund realized there was an excellent opportunity to help alleviate this problem. They bail out accused persons and help them make their court date, recovering a large percentage of their posted bonds. Poor defendants are thus able to contest their charges with a fair trial, and many charges are dismissed instead of forcing the accused to plead guilty or sit in jail unproductively. They’ve been so successful they are launching a nationwide project to establish charitable bail funds around the country. John Oliver has also talked about federal courts, where pretrial services assess if the accused is a flight risk. Many are not, and so are released without bail payment at all. Those who the services determine should be assessed a bond are never given one that cannot be paid by the defendant, and in fact in federal cases and the District of Colombia, there are virtually no people awaiting trial because they cannot afford bail, compared to the 450,000 state defendants.

What political challenges are there? The bondsman business has a strong interest in opposing any bail reform, and each state has to update their rules. There are good ideas though: Rand Paul and Kamala Harris introduced a bill that will provide federal grants to states who reform their bail system, although it will likely die in committee. It nonetheless lays the blueprint for how we might tackle this problem from a nationwide perspective in the future.

Additional information:

Organ Markets

Organ markets are extremely unlikely to be implemented soon. Nonetheless, organ market legalization would have by far the most concrete and immediate benefit to the world today, and black market organ markets already exist. Every year over 4000 people die awaiting a kidney in the US, and Medicare spends $89,000 per person on dialysis every year (that’s $34B/year for Medicare, $42B including private spending). The kidney supply is dwindling as cars get safer (many organs are donated by deceased car accident victims), but the vast majority of people do not need both kidneys while alive, and so could sell their kidney to another person with relatively low risk, given compensation. By far the most likely to sell their kidney would be people of lower income, and this is widely touted as a negative for this policy. It is not: blocking the poor from this avenue of income available to them, while simultaneously allowing people in need of kidney transplants to die, is morally wrong.

There is always concern when a transaction occurs between people of different wealth levels. Poor people may not be “forced” into the transaction, but if they have no good alternatives, it seems apparent there is a lack of choice. This is the difference between transactions that are “voluntary” and those that Michael Munger calls “euvoluntary“. Nonetheless, preventing the poor from participating in “voluntary” transactions that others would categorize as “exploitative” does not solve the poverty problem, and in fact makes it worse than letting them participate in the transaction.

Despite this argument, there is a simpler answer to legalizing organ markets: don’t legalize every possible transaction. Law can preclude people below a certain wealth level from selling their kidneys, enforce waiting periods for sellers, create delayed payments, or set prices via formula instead of the market. Yes, these restrictions will severely reduce the benefits that could accrue to the poor who want to sell their kidneys, but anything is better than the total ban we have now. Regulated organ markets could significantly increase the supply of kidneys available, while reducing demand on black markets.

On the demand side, regulation could leave in place the current waitlist structure and avoid rich people jumping the line entirely. This would require the compensation on the supply side to be fully government funded (would still likely save money given Medicare spending on dialysis). A market price on the demand side would have better systemwide benefits, as there would be incentives to improve the market, find efficiencies, etc. However, the potential gains are so large that even a heavily regulated market is worth creating, and relevant legislation already exists.

The political obstacles are clear. Organ markets could be exploitative, while transactions involving human body parts “diminish human dignity” according to the National Kidney Foundation (does death diminish human dignity?). Despite this opposition, there are significant gains to be had from an organ market that cannot be overlooked.

Additional information:

 


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Picture credit: Martin Falbisoner,  US Capitol at dusk as seen from the eastern side, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

Links 2016-5-30

Gary Johnson selected former Republican Massachusetts Governor William Weld  to be his running mate. This was pretty surprising for Libertarians considering Weld isn’t really a well-known libertarian guy.  Obviously, the Johnson campaign hoped not to repeat the failings of Jim Gray who was essentially unknown to the national media. During the Libertarian Party convention this weekend, the delegates selected both Gary Johnson and Bill Weld opting for pragmatism rather than party purity.  This is some election year when the libertarians are more reasonable than the Republicans and Democrats.

With 2 former Republican governors on the ticket, the Libertarian Party is now poised to be a real third party alternative. This could be a huge year for them, even if they don’t win. Remember, from our archives, if you reach 5% of the popular vote in a presidential election, you are entitled to real money in the next cycle (the irony of Libertarians accepting Federal handouts not withstanding).

Nicholas Kristof has a follow up to his column “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance” where he condemned the intolerance of progressives especially in the university. Apparently, the left universally scoffed at the thought of tolerating conservatives…which essentially confirmed his point.

The EFF is shutting down their canary watch program after a year. I have previously discussed the importance and usefulness of warrant canaries. It seems the EFF has decided it isn’t worth the effort to keep track of all the notices because they seem to change too much from post to post.  These aren’t bad reasons, but it is a little concerning. It seems likely that you’ll just have to stick to the default that any website you visit has received national security letters asking for information.

Jason Brennan at Bleeding Heart Libertarians on the difference between Ignorance, Misinformation, and Irrationality in democracies.  Essentially ignorance isn’t exactly the problem in democracies, since if everyone is equally ignorant, then the non-ignorant people will be able to make rational decisions; there is no bias for the ignorant people since they have no opinion. Misinformation can be a problem though, if most people are misinformed, they will make poor decisions. But even if people are misinformed, having a deliberative discussion will help as rational logic should triumph. But irrationality is a serious problem, since even discussions would just spread more misinformation. This relates to the thesis of Bryan Caplan’s book The Myth of the Rational Voter (Wikipedia, full text for free).  I look forward to reading Brennan’s new book, iconoclastically titled Against Democracy.

Tangentially related: John Oliver has a segment on the flaws of the primary system. Unfortunately, he sort of glosses over the assumption that they need to be more democratic, but do they? He says this time we “got lucky” in that the candidates with the most votes were the ones actually chosen, but we need to change things in the future. I disagree; the candidates we did choose are awful. If the system is working now, making it work better won’t help anything. Check out my previous post for more on this, and forward it to John Oliver if you get a chance. Better than reforming the primary system, let’s try making more parties more viable with some proportional representation in the House of Representatives!

Why Bernie doesn’t quit: Polisci 101 analysis of Bernie Sanders’ intentions. Basically, he wants to stop Hillary from turning towards the center, since he wants the Democratic party to be very a progressive Social Democrat party. This is also the reason that anyone who’s not a Social Democrat wants Bernie out of the race.

Ilya Shapiro at the Cato Institute, who knows his stuff pretty well, called Donald Trump’s list for replacing Justice Scalia’s SCOTUS seat “exceptional”. This is good news in that a Trump presidency would at least have this going for it. I don’t know if all this would make him a better choice than Clinton, but it is a big deal, at least to me.  Doubtful if this alone would be enough to unite all Republicans around him.

Nick Gillespie has two solid blog posts. One is a great overview of a recent Foreign Relations Committee Hearing and the constrasting views of Marco Rubio and Rand Paul.  Paul, we should note, won his primary to stand for reelection for his Kentucky Senate seat. This should largely guarantee his victory (PredictIt doesn’t have a market yet but PredictWise has it at 90% Republican).  The other post discusses how Obama’s new overtime regulations are going to harm workers by reducing hours, workers, or both.

Meta-blog post. Do you need more economics blogs? Here is a giant list of them. They’re vaguely ordered by popularity, and you shouldn’t just dismiss it because Paul Krugman is first; there’s a lot of good blogs I didn’t know about.

Dylan Matthews at Vox makes the case for getting rid of the TSA. Doesn’t even mention the financial cost savings (their budget is $8 billion, and cost of time is at least that).

Scott Sumner on the problems with government policy responses to crises. Scott also did a much better job predicting the economy than the Fed. Takeaway: please, please institute prediction markets for the basic macroeconomic indicators.

Cool YouTube video on computational complexity and the P vs NP problem.

Short summary of one of the best essays on markets: Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society”.

What are the components of airline ticket prices? Great YouTube video explanation.

All the Scott Alexander: Apparently good kindergarden teachers have massive effects on income decades later, but no lasting effect on test scores. There really bizarre studies and all I can tell is that education research is hard.

As part of his ongoing philosophy of niceness and tolerance in society, and relating to my post on tolerance, Scott discusses more on tolerance and coordinated vs uncoordinated meanness.

Scott also has a great post on his experience in the Irish health system, related to the UK junior doctors’ strike.  There are serious barriers to entry to the US medical system because the benefits are so high if you become a doctor. In UK, this is not true, since the state regulates how much doctors can make, so of course many doctors are leaving the UK and Ireland for places where the pay is less regulated. Scott says he’s not sure how to solve labor disputes, but if you have a freer market in hiring and payment, you don’t end up having labor disputes. The American system has problems as well, and if the barriers to entry could be reduced

And finally: Scott Alexander’s review of Albion’s Seed, and his analysis of the importance of culture in determining beliefs.

Apparently non-technical people don’t know this, but Craig Wright isn’t Satoshi Nakamoto. He had an “exclusive” interview with several media outlets discussing how he was really the inventor of Bitcoin. But if you read the story pretty quickly, you notice he doesn’t provide a signature with Satoshi’s private key (the reddit and Hacker News threads found he stole a signature from a transaction in one of the early blocks), and he doesn’t move any of Satoshi’s money to a publicly declared account. Those are very easy ways to prove he is Satoshi Nakamoto, and he didn’t do them, instead relying on some weird demonstration directly to a journalist. I would have guessed most people would have figured he was lying (he has a weird history as well), especially because Satoshi Nakamoto has gone to great lengths to protect his identity, and this guy is clearly trying to get attention. But several news outlets printed it as true. Gavin Andresen, the lead developer of Bitcoin, has declared that he has seen proof, but he hasn’t told us what the proof is.  But you shouldn’t need a really famous person to vouch for someone’s identity, that’s the whole point of Bitcoin; decentralized proof is easy and clear.

From Ars Technica: Death by GPS.

Bryan Caplan on global warming cost-benefit analyses.

The Fourth Amendment apparently no longer applies to the federal government. The FBI can access any data gathered from general warrants issued under the FISA court to the NSA, which is only supposed to be targeting foreign nationals, but which we know just grabs all data a company has.

Marginal Revolution discusses the issue of public bathrooms in context on North Carolina’s recent law.

Banning Unbreakable Smartphone Encryption is Stupid

At least two states, New York and California, have introduced legislation that would ban smartphones sold in those states if those smartphones could not be searched under request from law enforcement.  This would likely mean no phones would be sold with unbreakable encryption, although I suppose Apple or Samsung could manufacture two types of phones and then just sell all the encrypted ones from New Hampshire or something. These bills are still somewhat controversial, and as it has gotten press coverage, there has been a House bill introduced that would prevent state legislation like those bills introduced in New York and California. Continue reading Banning Unbreakable Smartphone Encryption is Stupid

Voting Rights Schmoting Rights

I.

“If you don’t feel like voting, don’t bother. It won’t matter. The statistical odds of your vote making any difference at all are infinitesimal.” These are the words of Megan McArdle in a sad, but amusing, piece telling you not to vote. And she’s right: your vote, at least in federal elections, is pretty worthless. Even in smaller House elections, over 80% of incumbents win.

But she’s not the only person that’s been talking about voting recently. The Left has been quite upset over new voter ID laws being implemented around the country. John Oliver even did a long segment on it.

I like John Oliver as a political commentator (and in Community). His sharp wit combines biting commentary with excellent humor, and the format of his show allows a deep dive on interesting issues. I try to watch as many of those segments as possible (they are available for free on YouTube) despite the vast differences in the way he and I view the world.  Oliver’s analysis provides great starting points for discussion, and he helps me understand many critiques of issues that I would never have thought of.

While I don’t really disagree with him on the basic issue of voter ID laws, I feel like he’s missed the more profound problem about American democracy: voting is just a gimmick.

How can this be? Voting is a fundamental right!  America was founded as a grand experiment in democracy! Yes, voting is very important to Americans, but why?  In fact, what is a voting right? Continue reading Voting Rights Schmoting Rights