the time-horizon of (self-interested) older voters is short so perhaps this biases the political system towards short time-horizon policies such as deficit spending or kicking the can down the road on global warming. Philosopher William MacAskill offers an alternative, age-weighted voting.
The post covers many obvious objections, and Tabarrok is not endorsing the scheme to give younger voters more weight.
But I want to suggest that the people with the longest time horizon are grandparents. Grandparents love our grandchildren, and we concern ourselves with their future. If you want an electorate with a long time horizon, give more weight to the folks with grandchildren.
I do not really believe that only grandparents should vote. But I wish that our perspective on life were better known.
Instead of “liberal democracy” I like to think of “orderly liberal meritocracy”. The main feature of democracy is a form of “orderly succession” that acts as a viable alternative to primogeniture as practiced by monarchies.
Adding complexity that diminishes the average person’s trust in “orderly succession” is not a good thing. The only tweaks required in a stable/mature democracy are those to guard against demonstrable gaming of the system.
People correctly trust in corporations to have very orderly successions. Tweaks of shareholder voting rights including privilege hierarchies and class-based weighting schemes and the role of the board of directors and other selection committees and processes to choose new senior leaders vary a great deal and tend to deviate substantially from universal franchise on the one-man-one-vote model, or even the one-share-one-vote model.
But who really cares about the theoretical analysis? Nobody.
The big joke here is that people will tend to support whatever modification of the electoral scheme they think will benefit their own party’s chances of winning elections. Everybody knows that in most places, younger people tend to vote lefter than older people, and that’s all there is to it. Brazil, Cuba (which, when it comes to voting, is a joke upon a joke), Nicaragua, and Argentina lowered the age to 16, with predictable results.
In Iran it was down to 15, but then up to 18, then back down, and then back up again in just a few years, not because of some wisdom or justice regarding long-term horizons, but because of who everyone knew the 15-17 year-olds would vote for.
And so my proposal. Anyone married couple with 2+ biological children will get a double vote. That would end leftism fast.
Related
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D-KeI-5W4AU2Y5g.jpg:large
Uh huh, how does that fit with your views on “brown people”? Or are you hoping for the mass expulsion of high-fertility brown people before giving white nuclear families greater voting power?
Careful what you wish for.
“Any married couple with 2+ biological children will get a double vote.”
Brown people don’t get/stay married. How many black people get married and stay married till their kids are 18?
I’d like to reward chosen fertility, not too impulsive to put a rubber on fertility.
I’d also like to reward people who actively raise their children the way you are supposed to (married).
It would be good if you could only get the extra vote if you were a net tax contributor, but since so many of the poor don’t get/stay married its more or less the same effect.
And having to have 2+ kids will knock out all this upper middle class progressives that only have one kid.
It’s tailor made to enfranchise middle class white/asian families. Within the brown subgroups, those that act most “white” and vote the furthest to the right of their groups will be the ones getting the bonus.
asdf,
Why do you want to force married couples to have more children that they might not be able to afford?
One reality of the falling birthrates since the GR in 2008, have been:
1) The fall of single motherhood from 45% to 38%.
2) The fall in Hispanic-Americans that of FTR of 2.8% to 1.95 babies/female.
(Yes there is definitely correlation of these two.)
Actually Hispanic-Americans have lower rates of divorce than White Americans! (Yes single motherhood higher although shrking.)
https://divorcescience.org/2012/06/29/351/
The other thing about discussing IQ and behavior differences, I always wait to hear how well Asian-Americans behave and how high their IQs are.
Maybe we should let Asian-Americans vote!
First generation Hispanics have a lower divorce rate, but that isn’t surprising. It’s generally true of all people who immigrate from non-OECD countries. It increases in the second generation, due to assimilation.
As I said, there is a lot of assimilation going on. But they aren’t assimilating to middle class norms, rather to underclass norms. Once they’ve been here for awhile, their behavior on every metric is about what you’d expect based on their average IQ. I would suspect white people with Hispanic level IQs probably have the same divorce rate as second+ generation Hispanics.
This is true of Muslim immigrants to Europe as well. Sometimes people say they are assimilating because become less religious, but that’s mainly just because they are assimilating to underclass thug norms and underclass thugs don’t do the restrictions and discipline required by religion.
The only exception I can think of is Puerto Ricans, who have pretty bad social statistics in the first generation already. But this may be because they are already tapped into USA subsidies and welfare back in the homeland (also why they sometimes aren’t counted as immigrants). So the extent Charles Murray observations of the welfare state apply perhaps that is a validating case. Of course there is also the confounder that Puerto Ricans genetically distinct from say Mexicans due to a different history.
Collin,
I’ve discussed in the past how Asian countries are my idols politically.
asdf, please leave a valid email address or send me one (to arnoldsk@us.net). Otherwise, I cannot continue to allow you to comment.
So what you’re saying is get rid of all the voters who vote differently than you. That is like the antithesis of the American experiment.
The American experiment began with a bunch of white male property owners voting.
If you want an example of people trying to disenfranchise anyone who might vote against them, check out Elijah Cummings gerrymandered 7th District. It’s quite a site to behold. Of course none of this take a cake to Marylands 3rd district.
https://newrepublic.com/article/109938/marylands-3rd-district-americas-most-gerrymandered-congressional-district
Marylands legislature has stated publicly that their goal is to completely eliminate all republican representation from the state to whatever extent they make that possible, and they have created the worst gerrymandered districts in the country to do it. These people don’t give a shit about voter rights, why should I.
Handle,
In corporate voting schemes there is usually some recognition that ownership share weights your vote. This aligns authority with responsibility, aka “skin in the game”.
Universal suffrage breaks that alignment in my opinion. There should be some attempt to align responsibility with the authority that comes with the vote. I would propose weighting by annual tax payment to accomplish that. I would scale the weight nonlinearly, so Bill Gates’ vote would be weighted at say 50 or 100 median taxpayers.
The main power of the board of directors is hiring/firing the CEO. Most of the complicated vote allocation mechanisms in corporate by-laws are only consequential when it comes to the once-in-a-lifetime (literal for the corporation) liquidation events.
I think handle’s corporate analogy backs my original point that “orderly succession” is a key if not main feature of democratic voting systems.
My comment applies equally well if the current stable system happened to be weighted by tax contribution. Don’t tweak the stable system if there is any risk of disrupting “orderly succession” or significantly increasing gaming of the system.
I agree that orderly succession is very important. I also agree that “one man one vote” is a strong Schelling point. I wish to live in a world where experiments in aligned responsibility and authority are possible.
Weighted voting proved pretty unstable, and people gamed the system a lot.
If you ever wanted to move way from one man one vote it would have to be some simple easily understood mechanism that in theory anyone could participate in.
For instance, anyone can get married and have kids. And we know that for society to continue we need people to get married and have kids. And we know parents are more in tune with supporting policies that will lead to a better society for their kids, so its like having them vote on their kids behalf.
Quebec has a much lower marriage rate than the rest of Canada. It is a unique cultural phenomena in a place obsessed with preserving culture.
Government incentives to promote marriage in Quebec based on your “goodness” assumptions are a recipe for “badness”, in my opinion.
In a lot of places cohabitation has replaced marriage for some people. Generally this is a bad thing (cohabitation is less stable than marriage).
But what of it? If people think the extra voting power is important enough, cohabitants already living together will find getting married an easy enough thing. If its not important to them I think little is lost in not giving them extra voting power.
Isn’t somewhat of this true? Older people vote the most and are the heaviest in smaller local elections.
Anyway, one reason why Matt Yglesias assumed Joe Biden would be the favorite is older voters dominate the Primary voting.
Of course older Republicans chose Donald Trump over all other Republicans as well in 2016.
I also believe the main supporters of regulating increased house building in local cities are older grandparent voters. In our city they also loudest to complain when a new housing projects are the older citizens in the area. Older voters are more likely to want to the neighborhood the same.
(FYI we do have a fair amount of house building but we still have brown areas.
We do have some areas that are mostly disorganized retirement communities. So there are areas that mandate the age of the buyers to be 55 and older.)
“I do not really believe that only grandparents should vote. But I wish that our perspective on life were better known”
But the elderly are the largest voting block in the upcoming election…?
“Keep your government hands off my Medicare.”
Just sayin’….
Obamacare raided Medicare to pay for itself, and I think people rightly understood this was a zero sum reallocation of their resources to someone else. Given that the someone else has a very specific profile (think of the kind of people that qualify for Obamacare subsidies) I think it’s a fair summary for someone to say this was nothing more then theft from one interest group to another.
Keep in mind too that people pay into Medicare their whole lives and view it as a kind of pre-paid retirement fund similar to their 401k (and they have had this idea drilled into them their whole lives). Perhaps that’s not accurate given the pay as you go system, but it would be awfully unfair to tax someone their whole lives and give them nothing in return.
How did the ACA raid Medicare? The only way I’m aware of was the plan to slow the rate of growth in Medicare spending by creating an Independent Payment Advisory Board to recommend services not to cover or to reduce reimbursement rates for, but the board was never even created:
On November 2, 2017, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation (H.R. 849) to repeal the provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that authorized the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB. Although IPAB was authorized under the ACA in 2010, no members have been appointed and currently the Board is not operational.
https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/faqs-whats-the-latest-on-ipab/
This is one of these things where if you Google hard enough, I think you will an answer. I worked directly on ACA and I remember distinctly the factors involved, even if I’ve forgotten program names over the years. Sometime you’ll see a $716B dollar figure thrown around, and that is only one part of the story.
It also raided employer health plans and imposed a number of costs on them to generate funding. And it added special taxes that hit the entire medical sector and drove up costs for all insurance.
Finally, whatever debt it generated is obviously something whose service will compete with Medicare for funding.
If you google search hard enough, you can find enough fake news to support any position you want.
This was my third Google search result (i.e., not “hard” at all):
http://money.com/money/collection-post/4537027/how-is-obamacare-paid-for/
Note the text re: medicare reductions
Not only didn’t Obamacare raid Medicare, but it was a big gift to retirees who are not old enough to qualify for Medicare. It imposed a reduced 3:1 max ratio between what insurers could charge the old vs young. And many early retirees can then hit the sweet spot for maximum Obamacare subsidies by tuning their annual income / 401k withdrawals:
https://www.kiplinger.com/article/retirement/T027-C000-S004-early-retirees-manage-income-to-snare-a-subsidy.html
Sure, but I’m not sure the young people’s desire to expand Medicare and social security to everyone is an improvement on that sentiment.
It’s a bit amusing that voter ID laws that have no discernible effect on minority turnout are apocalyptic voter suppression, but it’s thoughtful and totally in accord with the spirit of democracy to favor eliminating franchise based on a characteristic beyond one’s control for what I suspect is little more than a thinly veiled sentiment of, “look, that demographic group voted for Trump/Brexit, let’s take away their vote.” If we want a more responsible electorate, there’s a stronger (though not necessarily convincing) case that it would be better accomplished by restricting franchise by: employment status, taxes paid, IQ, number of children/progeny, or education level. But all of these would be regarded has terribly unpalatable for various obvious reasons.
That rant out of the way, there’s a better way that depends less on dubious speculation about which voters care most about the most important things: let Coase theorem apply to voting. Allow people to buy and sell votes. If young people really value the future more than old ones, the latter will be happy to sell their votes to younger people to buy more cruise trips; the younger may have to borrow money to buy them, but it’d still be worth it in the long run (which young people apparently care more about). To the extent that old people cling to their votes despite their financial interests, it suggests their voting habits aren’t motivated by self-interest but by what they believe is right in an altruistic sense, in which case their age is irrelevant then.
Alex Tabarrok seems to have forgotten his own wisdom. In an article he posted on Marginal Revolution in 2011 titled “The Negative Externality of Voting”, he quotes Jason Brennan:
How other people vote is my business. After all, they make it my business. Electoral decisions are imposed upon all through force, that is, through violence and threats of violence. When it comes to politics, we are not free to walk away from bad decisions. Voters impose externalities upon others.
We would never say to everyone, “Who cares if you know anything about surgery or medicine? The important thing is that you make your cut.” Yet for some reason, we do say, “It doesn’t matter if you know much about politics. The important thing is to vote.” In both cases, incompetent decision-making can hurt innocent people.
Commonsense morality tells us to treat the two cases differently. Commonsense morality is wrong.
…In The Ethics of Voting, I argue that…voters should vote on the basis of sound evidence. They must put in heavy work to make sure their reasons for voting as they do are morally and epistemically justified. In general, they must vote for the common good rather than for narrow self-interest. Citizens who are unwilling or unable to put in the hard work of becoming good voters should not vote at all. They should stay home on election day rather than pollute the polls with their bad votes.
Alex’s article is here: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/10/the-negative-externality-of-voting.html
The entire idea of over-weighting the votes of younger people because of the longer view of self-interest was simply stupid on its face- if younger people had a long term view of self interest, they wouldn’t be doing risky and stupid things like committing crimes, driving recklessly, borrowing themselves into debt to get degrees in English, having children out of wedlock, using drugs etc. To have any sort of mature, long-range view you basically have to be at least 35 years old- some get it earlier, some don’t have it then, but people under 25 basically don’t have it at all.