We always strive for the best outcomes. To do this in politics, we need a radical new way to vote.
Do you want white bread or whole grain bread?
The decision depends on what your expected utility from the bread will be. How much do you like the taste? How much does it cost (i.e. what is the opportunity cost of buying the more expensive bread)? How healthy is it (i.e. what is the health cost)?
We combine the answer to these questions to make decisions all the time, without even realising it most of the time.
The correct answer is whole grain bread.
The fact that people make purchases based on their own rational self-interest is the core tenet of economics. How can we apply this to politics?
How We Vote Now
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”
Not Churchill
What is (modern day) democracy? We vote for one person and we vote for all their policies. How is this optimal? Why is it that if we know someone’s views on abortion we can predict, with a fair amount of certainty, what their views are on climate change action, immigration and, for the US, gun laws?
Vote on Single Issues
If you want to buy Avocado on toast for breakfast. You don’t have to buy Beyond burgers for lunch and the Napoli for dinner. This is one reason a market is more efficient than current political systems. In a market, we allow for more combinations of opinions, desires, and products. We allow for a modular, product by product approach to our eating habits.
If the Napoli ran out, you could no longer buy the other items if they had to be sold as a group. Or even they could sell the group, what if you only wanted the Beyond Burgers?
This is absurd. Yet, this is how our current political system works. We can’t vote for one candidate’s advancement of higher education funding but not her anti-climate change policy. They’re all bundled into one.
The solution is to vote on individual issues. We could have a system whereby politicians propose 10 issues and everyone has a vote on each.
While this is better, there’s still a problem. We can now choose between Beyond Burgers or avocado toast if the Napoli runs out. Or buy just one (vote for) and not the other (vote against). The decision is easy if we want the Beyond Burger and not the toast. Though, what if we have a positive preference valence to both (we like both), but know we can only consume (buy) one?
We need some way to describe degree of preference. Unfortunately, we can’t have both all the time.
Vote for Strength of Preference
Markets already contain a measure of how much someone wants something. Price.
Consider an auction. He OR SHE who wants the house the most, must pay the most. A simple and efficient way of distributing resources.
“Wait, so you’re saying we should start buying votes? The rich will just get to create all the rules! You capitalist pig, die in a hole!”
Ok, calm down.
Quadratic Voting (QV)
Quadratic voting is a beautiful idea presented by Glen Weyl and Eric Posner in their book Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society.
(The specifics in the following are not important)
Imagine you are allocated 100 voting credits per year. Politicians put forward a number of issues for referendum each year. You choose to spend voting credits to vote for or against any or all of the issues (or none). You exchange votes for credits, quadratically. If you cast 1 voting credit, it is 1 vote. If you cast 4 vote credits, it’s 2 votes. For you to put 10 votes in, you’d have to spend all 100 of your credits. Not spending all your credits means they carry over to the next year.
Why is this such a good idea? Consider two of the problems in the current system.
Minorities are outvoted on issues that matter to them most. A majority may have a very slight preference for minorities not to have their public transport subsidised. But the minority may seek it desperately. In our current 1 person 1 vote (1p1v) system, the minority is outvoted. However, in a quadratic voting system, the minority can cast many more votes depending on how much they believe in a public transport subsidy.
People vote about things they don’t know or care about. Most people haven’t opened a book this year. Why should we trust them with decisions relating to Western intervention in the middle east? We shouldn’t. But we do.
In QV people are incentivised to vote on the issues they know the most about and are therefore more confident that the direction they are voting is correct. This is because the cost of putting more votes towards an issue increases exponentially.
You said something about buying votes…
I did.
Firstly, the companies buy policy today. Lobbyists, and campaign funding just two of the ways the wealthy set policy where poor people can’t.
Buying voting credits in a QV system is better for everyone.
- The money the rich must spend to win against many others increases drastically. Let’s say people are willing to sell votes for $1 each (quite cheap if you ask me). Then for 10 votes they would pay $100, for 100 votes they’d pay $10,000. For for 10,000 votes a whopping $100 million. That is one reason a quadratic, and not linear, function is used.
- If someone does have that sort of money and decides to purchase that number of votes (which by the way, isn’t that many in the grand scheme), who is the money going to? It’s going to citizens. Wealth is redistributed. It’s not going into the pockets of politicians.
- The more people care about an issue, the more they will keep their votes, and the more people that will vote against the rich vote buyer (if he/she is voting against popular opinion). Thus, it’s unlikely we will restore slavery.
Final Note
This system is obviously not perfect. We don’t have perfect knowledge. We don’t even know what makes us as individuals happy.
Theoretically it’s a great idea. But as many political theories of history have shown, what works in theory doesn’t necessarily work in practice.
Thus, Glen Weyl has formed RadicalxChange to start developing some of these ideas in practice, on smaller scales such as within businesses. The data so far is promising.
Very cool idea. I wonder how the collection of votes based on what people care about would affect the macro factors that let them happen like the budget. Seems like there are lots of decisions to make when you let people make the decisions.