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The strange case of Britain’s demise

economist.com

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Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#451

Post by sph »

culi wrote: post #445
VK538FY wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your suggestions but would really need to see some simulations to digest the potential effects. Not that my opinion counts for much but it's always good to suggest alternatives when one criticizes. That said, the duopoly isn't always so bad historically. Many cases of individual candidates who broke party lines or walked the fine line. It depends to a great degree on party discipline or the lack thereof.

you're probably asking for historical examples. Tbh I lack the knowledge of the specific politics of Montréal to think of the best comparisons, but if you want a more abstract toy to play around with the large variety of different voting systems available, I've made a toy just for that: https://votevote.page/ sorry for the self-plug

You should do a Show HN for this actually

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#452

Post by sph »

blitzar wrote: post #414
iso1631 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corbyn got 202 MPs in 2019, Blair in his 3rd term got 355 Corbyn wasn't just deeply unpopular across the country outside of student areas. I spoke to life long remainer lib dems in the Tory/Lab marginal seat of Crewe and Nantwich who were voting Tory to stop Corbyn. Across rural areas in Cheshire people were voting Tory because they were scared of Lib Dems backing Corbyn. Due to the way that FPTP works, his concentra…

> I spoke to life long remainer lib dems in the Tory/Lab marginal seat of Crewe and Nantwich who were voting Tory to stop Corbyn. I spoke to many who similarly voted to stop Corbyn - they were stopping Corbyn because of his vow to reintroduce gas chambers and exterminate every Jew in the land. I am not sure that was his actual policy but many were adamant it was.

I'm no fan of Corbyn but there was a politically motivated character assassination leading up to the election, where all major newspapers reported him and his party for anti-Semitism. The media all parroting lines fed by the Government with no critical analysis is complicit in Tories, and whoever wants to play the dirtiest, to remain in power and do whatever they want.

The naive elector sees Corbyn pissing off the Jewish groups on front pages everywhere, and or course they do not want to associate with people of that ilk. The majority trust newspapers and politicians too much, so get routinely played like a fiddle, and the best liar always wins.

The similar shit show is going to play out next election with Reform UK if the liar extraordinaire Nigel Farage decides to front it.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#453

Post by culi »

sph wrote: post #451
culi wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're probably asking for historical examples. Tbh I lack the knowledge of the specific politics of Montréal to think of the best comparisons, but if you want a more abstract toy to play around with the large variety of different voting systems available, I've made a toy just for that: https://votevote.page/ sorry for the self-plug

You should do a Show HN for this actually

awh thanks :)

Maybe I will, but I've had this update pending (see preview here[0]) that adds some major algorithms that any self-respecting voting theory nerd would expect to see. I started my first software job right as I was wrapping that up though and never fully got through with it. Maybe this winter break I'll have time tho... I'd like to have that update out before sharing it more loudly

[0]: https://dev--votevote.netlify.app/

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#454

Post by mattlondon »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #79
skippyboxedhero wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Labour isn't a popular vote. It is a popular vote AND a union vote (and the PLP, although they have never mattered in practice, they tried to oust Corbyn three times iirc...didn't work). Corbyn had popular support but, like Miliband, relied relatively heavily on unions...and one union at that: Unite (and btw, his popular support was always overstated hugely...in late 2019, you had a sizeable minority who thought…

Corbyn and McDonnell were essentially communists and therefore unelectable. Blair took the realistic route: Socialism does not work, let's have a market economy create wealth that can then be used to finance social programs. A flavour a social democracy. I think a reason Corbyn was so popular among the young is that enough time has passed so that this generation has no idea what socialist countries in Europe were act…

The young like it because they don't have much skin in the game.

"Tax the rich!" Is great when you are not rich, and most young people are not (yet) rich. Coming out of uni saddled with debt and doing entry level jobs etc, it is easy to just think selfishly and say "The rich should pay for more! Not me!"

Eventually you run out of other people's money though.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#455

Post by roenxi »

pasabagi wrote: post #450
roenxi wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, ouch. Hopefully that is a lesson to me in phrase my questions more carefully. However, I don't think that is quite enough to show that Jevons' paradox has been avoided - you'll find that with the savings from paying less for heating and your car you have a bit more money left over - what happened to it? Because it represents the energy that was freed up. It isn't enough to say "Well I spent less energy on heatin…

The problem with your argument is that the energy cost of, say, charging a phone, is multiple orders of magnitude less than heating a room, and that in turn is many orders of magnitude from producing steel through recycling, and so on. Comparable objects (a steel section produced in an arc furnace vs a steel section smelted from ore) have radically different energy requirements. If you legislate away the worst offend…

Here is a chart [0] of the UK's coal production over the last century+. And here is their oil production [1] forming the nice bell-curve-like plot of a country burning through their reserves. I'm sorry to be the one breaking the news to you, but trends like that have nothing to do with energy efficiency and everything to do with exhausting reserves.

In my opinion, they could probably have resisted this outcome by some judicious investment in making nuclear cheaper rather than getting distracted by the climate change nonsense. Maybe not, who really knows? Regardless these charts are the realities they face. The theory says they're running out of cheap energy, the stats indicate their running out of cheap energy. The decline in political quality suggest they're running out. Grumpy Brits flailing with things like Brexit suggest they're feeling some serious pressure to make changes. And unless something changes fairly radically, the UK has in fact become energy poor since circa 2008.

It could be worse, they'll probably survive. But coincidentally (), their GDP/capita has run in to a brick wall [2] and the effects from that'll be politically rocky. Democracy can cope.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_Coal_Production.png

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_Oil_Production.png

[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#456

Post by mytailorisrich »

cauch wrote: post #274
mytailorisrich wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a deeper problem than simply being in power for too long. They have been in power that long because the alternative offer was worse as you mention.

Judging what is "worse" is tricky. Of course, if the alternative is proposing policies that don't fit with your ideology, you are going to judge them badly ("how can they be good politicians, they haven't even understood what is obvious to me"). But it does not mean they are worse, it just means that they are not representative of your ideology. In a healthy democracy, the community should accept that there will be p…

Except pretty much everyone agrees, even within Labour, that Corbyn was unelectable... in part because his team and policies where squarely on the far left. A repeat of the Micheal Foot days in the 80s.

So, yes, in the end people may have had issues with the sitting government but they concluded that they were the "least bad" option.

A healthy democracy needs a credible opposition.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#457

Post by ekimekim »

wizofaus wrote: post #422
phatfish wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mandatory voting in a proportional representation electoral system feels like the best way to me. You can't force people to vote when their vote can end up worthless like with first past the post. Not sure if you have PR or FPTP in Aus.

Neither, it's essentially a type of ranked voting that is often referred to as "two party preferred" on the assumption that for any seat, it will go to one party or the other, and it's likely to be one with the highest first+second preference count (not exactly how it works, but you can find the details online easily enough. A fairly typical scenario is that the ALP might have something like 40% of the 1st preference…

It's simply ranked choice voting (aka IRV) for the house. "Two-party preferred" is a system used by polls and news to try to convey how they think the runoff voting will play out, by picking the two candidates most likely to come first and second and showing their expected final tally.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#458

Post by Lio »

matkoniecz wrote: post #152
recuter wrote: post #38

Ben Page, the boss of Ipsos, a global research firm, points to what he terms the “loss of the future”, common across the West but acute in Britain. In 2008, as the financial crisis struck, only 12% of Britons thought youngsters would have a worse quality of life than their parents, Mr Page notes. Now that figure is 41%. As elsewhere, people worry about immigration and feel threatened by globalisation. All this makes…

> Like lemmings off a cliff. I just want to mention that actual lemmings are not doing this. This was faked by Disney employees throwing lemmings out off a cliff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming#Misconceptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Wilderness_(film)#Contro...

I once went to a very posh Disney themed fancy dress party dressed as a lemming.

When explained why the host’s family were not amused. :P

Never. Trust. Disney.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#459

Post by lambertsimnel »

captaincrowbar wrote: post #374
pantalaimon wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a minimum quorum a party has to reach before they can enter parliament? In Germany they need to get at least 5% of the votes. This was introduced because many small parties had made the parliament of the Weimar Republik unstable.

When New Zealand went shopping for a new electoral system in the 1990s, we ended up with one based closely on the German model, including the 5% threshold. The Israeli parliament was frequently pointed to as an Awful Warning of what would happen if we din't have the threshold.

Until 1992, Israel had a threshold of only 1%. Since then it has been repeatedly increased, and is now 3.25%. The parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe (CoE) recommends such thresholds be no more than 3%. [0] (Many member states defy this recommendation. Israel is considered non-European for the CoE's purposes, and therefore isn't a member state, but it is an observer. New Zealand is neither a member state nor an observer, but it does participate in some CoE conventions.)

The aforementioned thresholds are "formal" thresholds, but there are also "effective" thresholds, arising from district magnitude. In the absence of a single "at-large" (nationwide, in this context) district, districts need to be large to bring the effective threshold down even to 5%. (It depends on the seat-allocation method, but it could be about twenty representatives per district for a 5% effective threshold, and over thirty for a 3% effective threshold.)

Where the effective threshold is higher than the formal threshold, the latter has no effect. But where a parliament has districts with different numbers of representatives, districts can have different effective thresholds, so any formal threshold could have an effect in some districts and not in others. I believe this is the case in Czechia, Poland and Turkey (but I don't know whether the formal thresholds there apply nationally or at district level). On the other hand, the Netherlands has no formal threshold and a uniform effective threshold of only 0.67%. The effective threshold of Israel's Knesset would be less than 1%, but still greater than the Netherlands'.

[0] "58. In well-established democracies, there should be no thresholds higher than 3% during the parliamentary elections. It should thus be possible to express a maximum number of opinions. Excluding numerous groups of people from the right to be represented is detrimental to a democratic system. In well-established democracies, a balance has to be found between fair representation of views in the community and effectiveness in parliament and government." http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-en.asp?fil...

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#460

Post by gerbler »

raincom wrote: post #407
monero-xmr wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is low corporate taxes a bad thing? I want countries to compete on efficient government and low taxes. Otherwise it’s an endless cycle of stealing from private enterprise until there is nothing left.

Low corporate taxes on profits made NOT in Ireland--a special name for it: The double Irish Dutch sandwich

This was true, it no longer exists
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