QV would work better than HN's mysterious points system. Give everyone who signs up 100 credits, replenished periodically, to allocate among posts in quadratic fashion.
Quadratic Voting (2014)
51–60 of 156 posts
Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)
#52With 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 $10 to each down-wind voter (in health costs). All the factory has to do is propose the same initiative (to allow the removal of regulation) again and again and not vote that much. Each time the down-wind people try to protect their selves they transfer money to up-wind abstainers. After enough rounds of this the down-winders are impoverished and the factory buys the election cheaply.
Edit: and instead of voting large the factory could try to bribe the up-wind voters or a faction of the down-wind voters.
Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)
#53People in North Africa have been doing this for a while now.
When I was kid we had a congressman where I lived in Morocco who win a election with a strategy similar to a quadratic voting. His team went to the poorest neighborhoods of the district and they distribute half (literally half the bill) of today equivalent of 20$ and you get the rest after the election, it had cost him roughly around 100k$ and he won. From the power he got he had made a lot more and been able to invest again in his own district and get two more districts for his son and brother in law in the next election... this is a bad idea at least for the poor.
The point is you need an independent third party to establish a fair market value for the votes otherwise the poor will be ripped of...
Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)
#54With 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…
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.
Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)
#55I feel like this could potentially work with "voting tokens" or something else that's not money. Maybe with some sort of crypto verification. You'd still have the scarcity that the system demands, but without the "inequality baggage" you'd start out with if the system were implemented with actual money. If you implemented this system using money to buy votes, then you'd end up... well probably with something like the…
I think one feature of the system is that the accumulated funds are then distributed equally after the vote. With tokens, this would not be very useful, as if everybody gets the same amount tokens, there's no difference between getting one token and getting one million, tokens themselves have no value.
They have value when it's time to vote for something.
Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)
#56Quadratic, exponential, or Ackermann - it's a terrible idea to exchange votes for money.
Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)
#57The 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…
Glen good to see you around HN.
One question that comes to mind is whether quadratic voting is the best improvement. I look forward to giving this a read.
Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)
#58How does this system deal with the logarithmic value of dollars, and the asymmetry in who has them? When you get ln(X) happiness from X dollars, you are sacrificing 1/X happiness per dollar spent. A billionaire buying a thousand votes is paying ln(10^9 - (10^3)^2) - ln(10^9) ~= 1 milli-utilon, but a thousandaire buying ten votes is paying ln(10^3 - 10^2) - ln(10^3) ~= 100 milli-utilons. It seems like billionaires, wh…
Billionares are vastly outnumbered by thousandaires. For example, in an FPTP election their ability to buy 31600 votes would, nationally, let them move the 50 yard line, towards which politics converges, 0.001% to the left or right.
> Billionares are vastly outnumbered by thousandaires.
While true, the billionaires' liquid and un-accounted-for dollars vastly outnumber the thousandaires'. If Joe Average has to choose between voting on something and paying his mortgage, while Jim Squillionaire is choosing between voting and buying another jet (yes, hyperbole; my point still obtains), guess whose votes you're more likely to see...
Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)
#59> Majority rule based on one-person-one-vote notoriously results in tyranny of the majority–a large number of people who care only a little about an outcome prevail over a minority that cares passionately, resulting in a reduction of aggregate welfare. Except in voluntary voting systems, where highly motivated voters dominate the apathetic majority.
Mandatory voting won't help as apathetic votes would be either distributed randomly or given according to preference having nothing to do with the issues, such as which candidate is better looking or which one appears more on a popular comedy shows.
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 the laws of herders from thousands of years ago. And the other is not.
Motivated voters -- such as folk with a religious bee in their bonnet -- are highly over-represented in voluntary systems. In a mandatory system, the median voter dominates. That's generally a better outcome, because the median voter is more interested in Shit Just Sorta Approximately Working, rather than ultra-serious micromotives.
Re: Quadratic Voting (2014)
#60Just 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…
> spent about $57M. I have no idea how many votes they were able to get for that money. With Quadratic Voting, they'd get 7,550.
Doesn't that make it seem likely that they would prefer to continue with their current strategy rather than use the money to buy votes then? It seems likely that they ended up with more than 7550 votes for their 57M, especially considering that 7550 votes would be a smaller proportion of total votes in a system where people could get more than one vote.
While very interesting, I don't think a system like this really addresses the main problems which are more to do with the need for an educated and informed populace than anything else.