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Quadratic Voting (2014)

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Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#71

Post by jacques_chester »

smsm42 wrote: post #68
jacques_chester wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're speaking hypothetically, but the experience of countries with mandatory voting bears out that mandatory voting drives parties towards the median voter, not the fringes. It's called Hotelling's Law. America and Australia have a lot in common, including that of people of eligible to vote, those who have religious aims are in the minority. One of these countries is dominated by the politics of trying to enforce t…

USA and Australia are very different politically. I have no idea what you mean by "the laws of herders from thousands of years ago", but if I venture a guess I'd assume you refer to the Judeo-Christian principles. That ye olde "do not murder", "do not steal", "do not perjury" stuff. If so, I'm pretty sure, unless I missed some recent developments, that both USA and Australia are still on board with enforcing those. A…

> the Judeo-Christian principles

It may shock you to learn that legal systems other than the Mosaic law have that "don't kill or steal" stuff. I was thinking of the more tasteless parts of Leviticus. In fact it was worked out and written down thousands of years before anyone was thinking about leaving Egypt.

Another name for it is "Judeo-Greco-Persian-Roman-Christian-Celtic principles", given the roots of the western culture which Britain transmitted to the colonies.

> Why this is a good thing?

Because it leads to a Benthamite political culture. Australian politics is either boring or depressing, American politics is either exciting or depressing. But the boring-or-depressing option leads to occasional outbreaks of good policy. Australia is one of the less-worse governed countries in the world over the past 30 years.

Neither side of politics needs to pander to a narrow base, except as mild lip service. So they tend to be centrist managerialists. Boring but sometimes effective.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#72

Post by sukilot »

torthrw wrote: post #16
ekurutepe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theoretically, this could be fixed by making the cost of votes expressed as a percentage of your income and/or wealth. Some european countries like Switzerland are applying this principle to traffic tickets. It's not uncommon for rich people in fast cars paying few hundred thousand dollars for a speeding ticket.

Really? I'd argue 1% of my income making minimum wage is far less disposable and than a 1% of the one percents salary. And so I would be far less inclined to buy more votes. Then taking your Euro analog, is it right/fair to make someone pay more (even say in proportion to their salary) than any other person for a vote? Who decides how much I should pay for my vote? Is it based on current salary? Because if it is ther…

Approximate solutions are better than clearly wrong solutions.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#73

Post by ryanthejuggler »

smsm42 wrote: post #62
pavel_lishin wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have value when it's time to vote for something.

If voting tokens do not perish between votes, that leads to the similar inequalities if I abstain from voting for a number of cycles. If old tokens do expire, then it doesn't matter when everybody else gets the same - up to the limit of the quantization of tokens, how many tokens you have is less important than how much more tokens than your opponents you have . I.e. if there is a yes/no question, the important thing…

> if I abstain from voting for a number of cycles

The whole point of the system is to railroad people into only voting for what really matters to them, by "saving up" their votes. I think this isn't a flaw but a feature.

I'd expect that there'd be a fairly large number of tokens so that quantization wouldn't come into play too much.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#74

Post by jmckib »

Tyranny by majority is important, but I wonder if quadratic voting would address another important issue: if enough people are participating, then the cost of voting (research + going to polling station) outweighs the benefit (changing the outcome). The cost of voting is roughly fixed, while the benefit decreases rapidly as the number of participants grows.

Maybe if quadratic voting was used, then only people that truly care about an issue would vote, giving the individuals that do care enough influence to make voting worthwhile.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#75

Post by glenweyl »

jmount wrote: post #64
glenweyl wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not an equilibrium; the down-winders would not vote unless they thought that vote mattered. In any case we have a nominating process to avoid this sort of manipulation; see http://ssrn.com/abstract=2321904 or http://ssrn.com/abstract=2343956 .

My point is: it is a bad situation, equilibrium or not. And some down-winders have to vote if the factory votes a little bit each time. Or even if the factory threatens to vote (and then doesn't). If all the magic is in the nominating process- then we really don't need the voting mechanism.

Agreed, but what I mean is it can't happen.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#76

Post by jmckib »

glenweyl wrote: post #22

The equity issues you all are raising are very important, but death with in detail here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956 . The simplest solution is just to use an artificial currency that everyone is given equal amounts of but can spread over the decisions most important to them. In this piece with Rory Sutherland we discuss this: http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9512322/humans-are-doing…

Hi Glen, I mentioned this in another comment, but copying here because I'd like to hear your thoughts on it:

> If enough people are participating in a vote, then the cost of voting (e.g., research + going to polling station) outweighs the benefit (possibility of changing the outcome). The cost of voting is roughly fixed, while the benefit decreases rapidly as the number of participants grows.

Does quadratic voting address this, or are there other ideas you've heard of that address that problem?

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#77

Post by learnstats2 »

cwp wrote: post #30
eridius wrote: post #3

Just reading the linked summary (and not the paper itself), it seems like this doesn't take wealth disparity into account. If the cost for your votes is the square of the votes you want to cast, then that means people with a lot of money can trivially buy significantly more votes than people with very little money, even if they don't necessarily care more about the issue than the people with very little money. It see…

The thing is, we already have the tyranny of the wealthy. The Tullock paradox is basically that the cost of lobbying is dwarfed by the returns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tullock_paradox I'm still getting my head around it, but it seems that Quadratic Voting would actually increase what wealthy people pay to influence public policy. Edit: Just as an example, the largest "outside money" spender in the 2012 election…

To reiterate kybernetikos's point:

if Crossroads can get more than 7,550 votes today for their $57M, they can get more than 7,550 votes tomorrow for the same $57M without skipping a beat, by pre-bribing the electorate to make 1 vote each.

So this doesn't seem to change much from Crossroads' point of view.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#78

Post by eridius »

cwp wrote: post #30
eridius wrote: post #3

Just reading the linked summary (and not the paper itself), it seems like this doesn't take wealth disparity into account. If the cost for your votes is the square of the votes you want to cast, then that means people with a lot of money can trivially buy significantly more votes than people with very little money, even if they don't necessarily care more about the issue than the people with very little money. It see…

The thing is, we already have the tyranny of the wealthy. The Tullock paradox is basically that the cost of lobbying is dwarfed by the returns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tullock_paradox I'm still getting my head around it, but it seems that Quadratic Voting would actually increase what wealthy people pay to influence public policy. Edit: Just as an example, the largest "outside money" spender in the 2012 election…

It doesn't look as though Quadratic Voting should have any effect on lobbying.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#79

Post by jamesrom »

jmount wrote: post #52

With all due respect, it sounds like while it might fight flaws common to other voting systems, pay-back based voting will have its own gamesmanship. Consider 1,000 voters upwind of a factory and 1,000 more voters downwind. Suppose the factory wants to stop scrubbing its exhaust for a savings of $1,000 (to itself) and cost of $10 to each down-wind voter (in health costs). All the factory has to do is propose the same…

Yes, but every time the factory proposes that initiative the 1,000 downwind voters can also counter-propose that the factory continue to scrub the exhaust AND for the factory to pay $1,000 to some initiative they do support.

The 1,000 downwind voters collect 1,000 votes of the counter-proposal and the factory has to either make up the cash for 1,001 votes or implement the counter-proposal. Whichever is more economically viable for the factory.

Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)

#80

Post by eridius »

tlholaday wrote: post #20
eridius wrote: post #3

Just reading the linked summary (and not the paper itself), it seems like this doesn't take wealth disparity into account. If the cost for your votes is the square of the votes you want to cast, then that means people with a lot of money can trivially buy significantly more votes than people with very little money, even if they don't necessarily care more about the issue than the people with very little money. It see…

The paper has examples with dollar amounts starting around page 30. If ten thousand poor people buy one vote each for $1, the wealthy would-be tyrant needs to buy 10,001 votes to win, at a cost of $100,020,001. If the tyrant goes ahead and does this, after the election all the poor people will receive $10,001 each.

Two wealthy would-be tyrants taking the same position on a view would only require a combination of 10,001 votes, at a combined cost of $50,010,001. And it only goes down as more wealthy people decide to vote in the same way.

It also seems really quite repugnant to tell people "your vote was overruled by one wealthy person, but it's ok because here's some money!" Why should being given some money automatically be assumed to make up for the fact that someone else was able to overrule your vote?

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