Oh, Hideous Trilemma

Tony Abbott, by announcing he will not support any form of ETS or Carbon Tax, has essentially signalled to the electorate that one of three things must be true.

1) The Liberal Party no longer believes in Free Enterprise and Free Markets

This one would be a bit of a shock, since Free Enterprise is supposed to be at the core of what Liberals believe in. Indeed a lot of supposedly small government, pro-capitalism advocates both here and other places like Europe are opposing putting a price on carbon, as a big socialist, environmentalist conspiracy, a power grab by centralised decisions makers.

Au contraire. If as a political party you propose to do something to reduce Carbon Emissions, and its not taking money off Carbon Emitters, you're the commie pinko in the debate.

If you put a price on carbon, aimed however imprecisely to try and match the amount of damage it is doing, the market then comes in and solves global warming for you. This is the whole damn idea. Entrepreneurs figure out how to make profits from cleaner sources of energy, because they are competitive with coal and oil now that the externality - the economic damage done by burning these things that no one buying or selling coal pays for - is corrected.

Any other government policy, instead of being a "terrible new tax" on carbon, instead becomes a terrible new tax on the entire rest of the economy.

Going to give bureaucrats a whole bunch of money for subsidising solar panels? To pay for them you will have to tax people's income, and profits, and other productive economic activities. And if it turns out the bureaucrats' picked the wrong solution, and some smart 22 year old engineer could have given you tidal power for half the price with some capital to back him and no subsidy to compete against? You've outright wasted the taxpayers money. Right wing people are supposed to hate that.

Going to mandate cars become more fuel efficient? What if as a result it then becomes more profitable to just burn the oil for main grid power? Hell, greater energy efficiency can increase energy consumption, in some circumstances - this is known as Jevin's Paradox.

Invest in Smart Grid technology? Al Gore's gotten rich doing this, largely because of the expectation that energy will get more expensive globally when carbon starts costing more. As the conspiracy theorists are all too quick to point out. If you were to actually put such taxes in place, why, even more private parties would probably sink billions into such research! Who needs a government grant when your idea is already profitable?

The fact is that any and all such government policies presume that government can fix the problem better than the market; that bureaucrats and politicians come up with better ideas than business people. I personally happen to think that's true, some of the time, but Liberal party folks sure aren't supposed to.

Unless....

2) The Liberal Party do not believe in reducing carbon emissions

This one is credible. Nick Minchin certainly doesn't, and I begin to wonder whether Tony Abbott does, now that he's admitted that even an international framework in Copenhagen won't actually make a difference to his stance after all. The government and Malcolm Turnbull are both fond of the phrase "do nothing on climate change", in reference to the new leadership corps, and you've got to give more than a little credence to the idea.

What this means though is that when the Liberals say they will have a policy to fight climate change, just not a tax or an ETS, they are essentially lying; and not just a distortion of facts or a false promise to try and stay in power, but an outright fabrication of what they actually believe and stand for on a core election issue. Whatever they propose to do, it will amount to taking no action to actually reduce emissions. Oh sure, they might deregulate Nuclear Power - which would be a great start - but that's not nearly enough to fix the problem, or else nuclear would be the most dominant source of energy in America today, and not a niche sector. Absent a carbon price, even nuclear is not yet competitive with coal.

So the Coalition's full policy, when finally revealed, is likely to be nothing more than elaborate window dressing piled on top off their current position, which is "Deregulate Nuclear, and say it would be nice if emissions went down, knowing full well that saying so is in absolutely no conceivable way actually going to cause emissions to go down. But we'll run a campaign of misinformation that might confuse people into thinking we're going to do something, because we certainly don't have the guts to fight an election over the science itself."

If they were willing to come out and dispute the science, openly, as their party platform, then we'd have a genuine debate on our hands. The Liberal party conservatives simply don't have the minerals, so to speak, to own their convictions; or rather, their take on the polling, or the moderates in the party, have convinced them they can't win over the public in an open argument.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Except, this wasn't a dilemma. What other possibility am I entertaining?

3) The Coalition honestly don't have a clue that they're not making any sense.

They haven't renounced their core ideological principles, and they're not just lying outright. In fact, they are utterly economically illiterate, never mind what you think of their scientific credentials. Misunderstanding isn't just going to be pumped out to the electorate, it lies at the core of the Coalition non-policy. Partly they are dishonest, and partly they are divided, and partly they are wavering, but mainly, they are just confused.

Now that Malcolm Turnbull and Peter Costello are both out of the picture, there is, perhaps, not a single person left of influence in the parliamentary party who is capable of following why economists who accept climate change are nearly universally in favour of either a tax or an ETS. Or, they don't even care.

Don't some of them have economics degrees? Surely that's what Liberal members of parliament study at university. Were they paying any attention in class?

One thing I've said in Abbott's favour a lot lately is even if I disagree with him on most things, at least he has some intellectual muscle. Now, I'm beginning to have very serious reservations.

The Opposition are, for the moment at least, an absolute disgrace.

--------------------------

I promise the next post won't concern the Liberal Party, or politics, in any way, shape or form.

I have to get this one out quick, because its ridiculously topical

The recent Liberal party spill was a fantastic example of how, when an electorate is strongly polarised, a preferential voting system* can massively disadvantage a compromise, "moderate" candidate who's position lies close to the median.

Lets assume for simplicity that all the Liberals who voted for Turnbull preferred Hockey to Abbott, and likewise all the Abbot voters also preferred Hockey to Turnbull. Its likely a pretty fair assumption given the rancour between the two camps.

So can infer that the preferences of the partyroom were then:

35 x {Abbott, Hockey, Turnbull}

26 x {Turnbull, Hockey, Abbott}

And thanks to the subsequent "redistribution" in the second round vote, we know we had

7 x {Hockey, Abbott, Turnbull}

15 x {Hockey, Turnbull, Abbott}

1 x {Hockey, no second preference} - the notorious informal "no" vote.

Note something here. 49 to 35 voters prefer Hockey to Abbott - a substantial majority. And likewise a massive 58 to 26 voters prefer Hockey to Turnbull, all of the "right" faction and a fair portion of the "left" faction too.

So Hockey "beats" both Abbott, and Turnbull - pairwise, he is more preferred than either of his opponents. In a Hockey vs Abbott or a Hockey vs Turnbull election, Hockey wins.

What's going on here? Sure in America and Britain with their crazy first-past-the-post systems you can get spoiling effects, where Nader costs the Democrats the election by siphoning off their supporters, but preferential voting prevents that! That's why we have it. Family First or the Nationals can run for a seat safe in the knowledge they won't split the conservative vote, because their preferences will go to the Liberals (assuming of course voters are sensible and rational and order their preferences properly, which they don't... but lets optimistically assume that such confusion is a small effect.)

Well, nonetheless, their is a spoiling effect in play. While you might be tempted to say Hockey has split the moderate vote, that's not really true - Turnbull failed to attain a majority with Hockey out of the picture. Actually, Turnbull has split the moderate vote; if he'd stood aside, Hockey would have won, and the liberals would still have a relatively centrist leader. Instead of an unelectable one.... but lets not go into that now.

The lesson - preferential voting prevents some arguably undesirable election effects - Nader would not hurt the Democrats if that Presidential election happened in Australia - but not all of them. And so the question, now, is: can we do better?

Another system

Lets look at those votes again shall we?

35 x {Abbott, Hockey, Turnbull}

26 x {Turnbull, Hockey, Abbott}

7 x {Hockey, Abbott, Turnbull}

15 x {Hockey, Turnbull, Abbott}

1 x {Hockey, no second preference}

Is there another way to determine a winner? Well sure there's lots, we could draw them out of a hat. But, another sensible seeming way?

Let's make one up. For every first preference, I will give a candidate three points. For every second preference, two points; and for every third preference, one point. The person with the most points, wins. Seems kinda fair, right? Its similar to the way they score motor racing, I believe.

This gives us:

Abbott: 35 x 3 + 26 x 1 + .... ah I won't clutter things up with all the figures here. Easier to check in a spreadsheet, like I have, if you don't believe my arithmetic.

Abbott: 160

Turnbull: 150

Hockey: 191

Hurrah! Hockey wins! I successfully invented a new way to run elections to rig the Liberal leadership for the candidate I prefer.

Well, actually, I'd prefer Abbott to lead the party - Hockey hasn't the intellect for the job, while Abbott is quite smart - he'll at least hopefully make for an effective enough opposition to pressure the government - and even though I vehemently disagree with him on many issues there's no chance he'll get elected, so that's all good. Turnbull would be my choice, but I'm not in the Liberal caucus let alone rigging their elections.

Much more to the point, I can't take credit for the system. Its a well-known idea amongst voting theorists, called Borda Counting, although its very little utilised in the real world to my knowledge. I can't name a democracy that elects public officials this way.

So.... if its so great, why isn't it more popular in the real world?

Poor marketing, probably. Also, it doesn't... feel quite right. There's some intuitive sense that we shouldn't be giving away points like this. After all if I'm to distribute points, I should be able to choose to distribute them in any fashion I want, in which case, as I'm a regular voter who doesn't like all this complication I'm likely to distribute them all to my favourite candidate.... and then we're right back to first-past-the-post land.

Well, that intuition (which is mine, you might not share it) is wide of the mark - Borda count does have some quite desirable properties. We've already seen evidence of a possible advantage in this election over the distribution of preferences - it picked out the more consensus, middle of the line candidate from the Liberal leadership ballot.

Will it always? Can Borda Counting, like preferential voting, fail to pick the consensus candidate?

What do we mean?

To ask these kinds of questions about voting systems I need to be more precise. What do I mean by the consensus candidate?

Actually, I've already given a pretty robust definition of what I mean, what the heart of the original concern is:

So Hockey "beats" both Abbott, and Turnbull - pairwise, he is more preferred than either of his opponents. In a Hockey vs Abbott or a Hockey vs Turnbull election, Hockey wins.

This is a mathematically precise idea, and an important one in voting theory. A candidate who, based on people's stated preferences, would have beaten any of his or her opponents in a one on one election is a Condorcet Winner.

It might seem like a pretty abstract concept, which is why I spent so many damn words there building up to introducing it by motivating it with a real life example.

An election may have either one Condorcet Winner or no Condorcet winners. While you might think its an unusual situation except in maybe a tight three horse race like our example, actually many real worldelections do have a Condorcet Winner.

Another definition (And no, I don't care if I'm boring you :P Can you tell I was once a mathematician?) A voting system that is guaranteed to elect the Condorcet winner, when there is one, is, funnily enough, called Condorcet.

We've already seen our preferential voting system is not Concordent. Our question is now is the Borda Count system Condorcet?

The answer is perhaps surprisingly no. Even though Borda Count would have given victory to our Condorcet winner, Joe Hockey, it doesn't always do so. Proof left as an exercise to the mathematically inclined readers. For those who'd settle for a counterexample, wikipedia is your friend.

So do any Condorcet voting systems actually exist?

Yes! Here's one:

1. Check if any candidate is the Condorcet winner (which is easy)

2. If so, they win.

3. Otherwise, pick the winner out a hat.

Ooooh. That's not so good. For a start, it fails a nice little property called determinism: the same set of votes should always give the same result. Under a non-deterministic system like this, any candidate could call a recount, and most likely get a different result each time.

How about instead we try:

3. Otherwise, the winner is whoever's name comes first by alphabetical order

Still not very good. It isn't random, it's deterministic... but.... step 3, well, it's ignoring the voters wishes. In fact there are a wide variety of properties that reasonably try to embody the idea that an election should respond to what voters want; that the only thing about a candidate that matters for the outcome should be the voters preferences. This system fails miserably to satisfy all these ideas.

Nonetheless, there are Condorcet systems out there that aren't crazy, and do make sense, and they are used in the real world - not for electing politicians, but for running private organisations - the ones that give us Wikipedia, and Debian Linux, and the Free State Project. There might, perhaps, be some correlation between the fact that seemingly only associations of nerds use these systems, and the fact they are very mathematically complex relative to the others we've discussed here.

But, if they give the right result, why can't we use them?? Does it matter if they're complicated, so long as we get the person who truly deserves to in?

Well, in some sense it does. The less the average voter is able to understand their voting system, the less empowered they are to exercise their sovereignty, and a less open and transparent a democracy results. This is a bad thing in and of itself.

But the fundamental issue is much worse than that.

The crux of it all

Here's where people who were shouting disagreement way back at the beginning get a see in. Maybe I've been going about it all wrong. Maybe its not important that the Condorcet winner wins an election. Often such a candidate is a kind of a "least of all evils"; indeed, this is more or less how I've depicted Hockey. The compromise candidate, that no one especially wants to win, but that no one objects to very strongly, so they're preferred by (distinct!) majorities over the candidates that provoke strong feelings and polarise the debate. Is such wishy-washy middle of the road stuff really what we want, from political leaders? Maybe we want someone who stands for something, anything, even if its not always going to be what we stand for.

Well OK, lets we can let that criterion go. Damn, that was a massive waste of blog space no?

I'm only putting it to one side though for the sake of exploring the issues. In fact, I want to finish up here by briefly looking into some other properties. If we're going to design the perfect voting system, we should look for more basic features that we all know we definitely want to see. We've already seen a couple of obvious ones, like determinism. Well, here's another I hope you can agree to:

We call a voting system monotonic if voting for somebody can't make them lose.*** If a voting system is not monotonic, we call it batshit crazy.

OK right, all voting systems need to be monotonic. Agreed? Good.

Ours isn't.

"Huh?" you say. "Surely you're not serious?"

Sadly I am. Elections in Australia, from the Liberal Party caucus, to the lower house by-elections the Liberal Party will be getting thumped in because of their caucus, are not monotonic. You can hurt a candidates' prospects by ranking them higher.

Some political scientists have argued that in most real life political system violations of monotonicity would be rare. Still, the fact it can happen at all bothers me. It should bother you.

All these properties voting systems fail to satisfy, jeeze louise. Obviously, we've got to send voting system people back to the drawing board, and get them to invent new systems that work!

If you've got a good sense for where I'm going with this, and why I'm parading mind numbing details of elections and too much maths style arguments than is healthy for a blogger who wants people to actually read what he's written, you might guess what the response is.

They can't invent such systems; they simply don't exist. At least in the sense that, for a lot of really reasonable sounding sets of criteria, it can be proven mathematically that no voting system can possibly obey all of them.

I love impossibility theorems in mathematics - not such a thing doesn't happen to exist, like pink unicorns; such a thing, which sounds quite reasonable, a voting system that makes sense, can't possibly exist, no matter how hard you look, you'll never find one, any more than 2 + 2 will ever equal 5.

Arrow's impossibility theorem is probably the most famous single thing in voting systems theory, and was the first substantial impossibility result. Indeed Kenneth Arrow, an economist,was one of the pioneers of applying theoretical mathematics to what has turned out to be the quite deep and subtle question of how to decide the results of elections when more than two options are available to choose from (although the first person to do so at all pre-dated him by centuries - a certain Marquis de Condorcet, who's name might seem familiar if you've being paying attention. )

Perhaps some may take heart in the fact that there is quite a bit of dispute about whether all of Arrow's criteria really are reasonable or necessary, or whether perhaps we can think out side the square and use systems that don't conform to Arrow's assumptions about what voting looks like. And yet, surely enough, there have also been other key impossibility results established in the field, that show we're seemingly pretty stuck with certain quite undesirable imperfections.

So while we can be thankful to live in a democratic society and indeed an increasingly democratic world, it's not all happy sailing. Even before you consider vote rigging, or corruption, or a biased media, or any of the other countless real world problems that can plague an election, there is a far more powerful force resisting the democratic will. The very laws of mathematics, inescapable even in a perfect world, ensure it is always debatable whether any election was ever really fair.

------

* Throughout the post I treat a system with multiple rounds of voting in real time, like the Liberals leadership ballot, as equivalent to a system where you write down your entire list of preferences in advance, like when we vote for our MPs. If your preferences don't change over the course of the election, these should be equivalent systems. They won't actually be equivalent, due to tactical voting considerations - you can sometimes be better off voting in a manner that goes against your actual preferences, and the additional information available between rounds when the process happens in real time increases gives increased opportunities to do so - but that's an additional technical complication that doesn't really effect the substance of my main point, so I didn't go into it.

** Actually both Borda Counting, and the Australian system, are preferential - you vote by making a list of preferences. The correct technical term for how we vote in Australia is Instant Runoff Votig, (IRV); it is merely one of a variety of ways of voting using preferences. However this isn't a very widely used term in this country, and only a very few voting system geeks, who I don't think read this blog, would have a clue the hell what I talk about. Since those who understand the mechanics of our system tend to think of its distinguishing feature as being the use of preferences, in contrast to the first past the post systems of the U.K. and the U.S., I have stuck with the incorrect but comprehensible terminology.

*** The mathematicians might want more rigour. Properly speaking, a voting system is monotonic if changing one vote so that Candidate X is higher on the list, but all other candidates are kept in the same relative order, can't change the result from Candidate X winning to Candidate X losing.

How can our voting system possibly fail punish a Candidate for someone preferring them? Basically, the problem is that if you put your preferred candidate Lisa Simpson in say second place, the candidate you have in first, say Duff Man, can knock out rivals in early rounds of voting, but then ultimately the flow of preferences can give Lisa the win in the last round against Duff Man. However if you instead swap your first and second place and put Lisa first, Duff Man might get eliminated early without your crucial first preference. With Duff Man gone earlier, his voters' preferences now get distributed, and those preferences might let say Mr Burns limp all the way to the final round picking up lots of second, third, etc. preferences from every eliminated candidate as he goes and finally triumphing over Lisa.

I'd construct a numerical example, but, I can't be bothered.

Prose's abatement

Blogging under

Deprivation of slumber

Hypomania's many hyper

Tendencies tend to be

Exacerbated, precipitated

A mist of words

Becomes a deluge

A news article has confirmed

The world's gone as mad as you'd heard

The only response possible -

Outraged loquacity, tumbles

Forth, unconstrained, with only the steady rattling

Of the Eee PC's battered keys to protest at the prattling

An aside, a brief build-up, mere foreplay to the climax of self-righteous indignity

Becomes much more of, shall we say, a tangent, gaining nuance, losing brevity

Til the point is reached, at which distraction from the judicial theme is wrought insufferable
Of course, such artistry must not be abridged - but mayhap, it is shuffleable?

So then, the post, once, in outline, contained sufficiently, by the ample boundaries of a mere few paragraphs

Is now possessed of parts - one and two - each more substantial than nigh any article to be found within the Daily Telegraph

But now stop the press, what's this? It surely cannot be true - that part two, too, asserts its "right to be serialised?"

Can we burden readers thus, when even part one, solus, is proving far too long for mine own weary old eyes?

This madness must cease! (Not the world's now, take note)

It's the blog that's diseased! (Not the way people vote)

An introductory sentence (Of the linguistic sort)

Now spans three separate entries! (Makes those gaol terms seem short....)

How does one conquer

Such prolific prose?

Could a poem deliver?

Grant salvation?

Who knows?

.........................

Please forgive the attempt at such an unaccustomed and ill-suited form, but my incompletable, uneditable blog ranting was really giving me the shits ;-)

I do plan to proceed with the original posts, eventually... once some substantial editing has taken place.

Also, a few other things

If anyone is in the market for a worthy charitable cause to donate to, may I commend to you the idea of deworming the world, which the evidence seems to indicate is ridiculously cost effective - perhaps the most cost-effective way of doing good for humanity, depending of course on your utility metric.

Personally, I'd like to see a charity that funds studies on the costs effectiveness of various forms of charity and aid. Would that count as a meta-charity?

Should your preference run to philanthropy more localised in its effects, and you are a fellow Sydneysider, then ROAM communities are an excellent choice. I have previously mentioned them in relation to Mental Health First Aid Certificates. ROAM's main focus is helping the chronically mentally ill, through traditional mental health nursing services like psychotherapy, but also in other ways such as brokering accomodation, educational and vocational placement, lifestyle advice and assistance, such as exercise classes (which are known to be a highly effective), and other such practical and effective aid. The organisation started as a project to find housing for some mentally ill homeless people, and has grown from there. Disclaimer: I am a client of ROAM, via my doctors at the BMRI. Toby and James are awesome guys, for whatever that's worth.

I'd like to formally welcome two excellent additions to my blog roll. Over at the insipring Meteuphoric, I may get around to posting a response in the ongoing debate on vegetariaism - or I may not, since doing so smacks a little of petty "Someone is Wrong on the Internet" oneupmanship. As for Capers of the Mind, I trust it will go from strength to strength after its promising introductory post, because I am intimately acquainted with the author's status as a philosopher of the first-rank (despite, or perhaps because, he has never come close to anything resembling the study of philosophy in a formal academic context).

On the topic of my blog roll, are you all reading Marginal Revolution yet? It's really very good - in fact it may well be at its best the more it strays outside the economics professors' natural home territory of the GFC and real aggregate demand shocks and the like. As a non-expert it's a little hard for me to say.

OK, enough sucking up to my fellow bloggers. I'm off to draft yet more posts of my own - hopefully, I can build up a buffer and thus get a regular schedule going here.

Possibly even more interesting than it seems

What could I be talking about? Well, really, a lot of things. As it happens, today I am talking about synesthesia.

Tyler Cowen over on MR recently linked to a study into time-space synesthesia, which stuck me as sounding even cooler than your more garden variety letter-colour synesthesia.

Well, judging by the abstract, its not signficantly cooler after all, but then maybe it's more adaptive. After all, we devote substantial educational resources teaching people to visualise time as space, anyway: this is how to read a clock, this is how to read a displacement-time graph, and so on and so forth. In fact, it'd be nice to see some research done with young kids, or on heritability - to try and see how much of the effect measured in this study is genuinely "hard-wired" neural diversity, and how much is an acquired cognitive skill, akin to driving, or doing abstract algebra, rather than part of a person's genetic heritage. For that matter, if it is an acquired or at least acquirable ability, can we, and should we, set out to turn toddlers into synesthetics, of any variety? I'd say the possibilites are worth investigating, at the very least.

"OK, that's all great," you might be tempted to interject at this point, "but your post title implied that your subject was somehow more interesting than it seems, and yet you've just remarked that this fancy schmancy form of synesthesia is 'not significantly cooler' than the kind I already knew about. So what's so damn interesting about it then?"

Thanks for the interjection! It conveniently allows me to return from a tangent to the point I wanted to make.

Time-space synesthesia isn't all that exotic, perhaps. However, this study is yet another piece of the mounting evidence the synesthesia is actually rather commonplace in the general population. Which is really surprising, when you think about it. Surely mental differences of this kind that strike us as unusual can't be common - or else we'd grow up knowing about them, and they therefore wouldn't in fact seem unusual anymore than some other mild deviation from the norm, such as left-handedness?

Except synesthesia is such a pervasive part of a person's cognitive framework, that many synesthetics presumably grow up assuming everyone sees the world the way they do. Why wouldn't they? And, since they don't behave radically different from your average member of the population, why would anyone else think to ask the kind of questions and perform the kinds of tests necessary to detect synesthetics? Well, no one really has, until modern psychology took a a scientific interest in the phenomenon.

So, then, imagine a truly exotic synesthsia - just as difficult to detect as the regular kind, but rarer, and stranger. Given how long it has taken the "boring" synestheisas to gain serious attention, it is surely not beyond the realms of possibility that a truly rare version might exist which modern science does not yet have any knowledge of whatsoever?

It is fair to ask, at this point, just how exotic could it be? There's a limited set of senses to combine, right?

Actually, overlapping sensory perceptions here can be broader than the senses that might immediately spring to mind - as the time/space example shows.

Consider, if you will, what you might call the empathetic sense - a person's intuitive reading of other people's body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, and so on. This is an incredibly complex data source that the brain has evolved to devote many resources to detecting and processing; it sits at the threshold of may people's conscious awareness.

Now imagine a potential colour-empath synesthetic. They might look at an angry parent, and their brain would present that mood as a visible red colour. Or a distressed colleague might appear purple - perhaps with a green tint to indicate mild sleepiness. Or whatever.

You doubtless see where I'm going with this.

Of course, most people who claim to see auras are probably just cranks, or wishful thinkers. Certainly anyone who claims to see a person's aura through an opaque wall, for an example, is probably just as likely to claim to see the aura when no person is on the other side at all - as repeated experiments have shown.

There is an appeal, though, to the idea that in this case fact might be, if not stranger than fiction, than at least strange enough to surprise us.

Stay tuned for a later post in which I try to tie this into ideas about other forms of cognitive atypicality (most especially that staple topic of mine, psychosis....)

Attention Tim Flannery. Immigration is good for the environment.

Apparently there was an IQ2 debate at the City Recital Hall last night, on whether Australia should decrease its immigration rates. Attentive readers would already be aware my answer is a resounding no.

Those who are opposed to increased human population due to its effects on the environment, such as our esteemed 2007 Australian of the Year, have attained the honour of provoking a response from me today. (I might get around to applying a blowtorch to the even more terrible arguments about the labour force or social cohesion on another occasion.)

Its one thing to argue that the Earth can't sustain more people or indeed even our current population. I happen to think it is absurd to argue this; I won't respond to it, though, because the stated case I am refuting is even weaker.

Why? Because immigration does not create more people, magically, out of thin air (as of 2009 there is so far only one technologically mature process for doing so.) It simply moves them. And it doing so, it actually reduces the projected future population of the world. So if we really are approaching the limits of our finite carrying capacity, immigration is actually a Good Thing (TM).

How can immigration reduce future population? Despite popular stereotypes to the contrary, descendents of immigrants assimilate to the culture of their adopted home. Actually the culture also assimilates to them, but this effect is much smaller when immigration is low relative to the size of the population.

Now Australia is in the 5th phase of what's known as the demographic transition. Our natural fertility rate is negative. People immigrating here are typically from countries in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th phases of the transition. If they stayed in their home countries, they would ultimately have far more descendants than if they move here, where many of their great-grandchildren are likely to end up childless.

Of course, Australia's natural resources will end up a little more strained, certainly relative to the rest of the planet. I hope it goes without saying, though, that we all care first and foremost about the global environment, and aren't just seeking to keep our own little island free from populaion pressures. It does go without saying? Excellent.

"Ah", the environmentalist now argues, "but rich people - such as immigrants in a first world country - are far worse for the environment than poor people, such as their cousins left behind."

This rebuttal, for the time being, is true. It is morally abhorrent - it implies that to protect the environment, we should actively seek to prevent the world's poorest people from becoming any richer, while it is implied Westerns be allowed to continue to enjoy tremendous wealth (even the most eco-concious Australian is both far richer and more polluting than most Ethiopians) - but it is nonetheless grounded in fact.

Except the rest of the world is steadily becoming richer, regardless of whether we let people migrate here or not. China and India will eclipse the West's ecological footprint relatively soon, and other developing nations are sure to follow. Meanwhile, the West has actually started to wake up to the issues facing our environment, and furthermore has the luxury of being able to sacrifice some of its vast wealth on attempts to try and save the planet from oblivion.

What is more likely to save the world from climate change? An argument to convince the populations of third world countries that they don't need electricity? An enlightened political consensus leading to enforcable international laws that constrain our carbon emissions? Or scientific breakthroughs, funded by Western economic growth, that lead to both cheap, clean energy sources, and the ability to extract exisiting anthropogenic greenhouse gases from the atmosphere?

You don't have to believe technological progress is a panacea for the world's problems; just that it has a better track record than self-righteous moral preaching or complex political compromies.

Without loss of generality the argument holds for shrinking bio-diversity, loss of arable lands, etc.

Sadly, Malthus remains an influential voice in today's public policy debates, despite more or less 200 years of consistent empirical evidence refuting his ideas. I guess all that's left to be said is: Bring on the next lot of people to add yet more nails to his theories' coffin, and maybe one day people will get the picture.

Here's hoping they include plenty of Indian computer scientists developing smart grid technology for Google in California, Brazilian geneticists engineering algae to convert C02 and sunlight back into fossil fules for the CSIRO in Canberra, and Ghanian economists at the LSE publishing solidly researched papers backing up the case made here with scientifically rigorous evidence.

Some things you might not know about my political views

I've been toying around with my draft first political rant, and find I can't bring myself to post something inspired by anger that no longer seems entirely fair or measured... so instead, since you were all promised politics, here's an arbitrary set of opinions on some issues. Yay!

Abortion: I'm Pro-Choice, but not militantly - my moral intuition fails so poorly on abortion (once I start to reason about it in any detail) that I default to letting the mother's conscience take primacy over mine, since its her body and all. Incidentally I believe Roe vs Wade is appallingly terrible law - there is a gaping hole in the U.S. constitution concerning exactly when a human obtains rights, but I don't think it was the Supreme Court's job to fill it.

Political Hero: Is, these days, Thomas Jefferson. I'm by no means a libertarian, I'm just in awe of his intellect and convictions. How he put his ideals into practice in the messy world of real politics is a truly fascinating topic - having only really read his Wikipedia page, I'm keen to get my hands on a biography or two. Australian political hero - I'll go for Bob Carr, because nerds have to stick up for one another, no?

In the next Federal election: I don't especially want to vote for Labor, largely because Rudd is overreaching with certain elements of his socially conservative agenda - the main bugbear for me being the appalling internet censorship scheme. I could vote for Turnbull - regardless of his less than appealing personal qualities - but certainly not for the Liberal Party, who to add to mynatural inclinations against their right wing politics, have recently presented an appallingly incoherent and often frightningly irrational policy plaform. The Greens are even worse than the Liberals on policy, and will never win my vote until they purge their party of the influence of ideologues who are so deluded they are capable of opposing things like Nuclear Medicine isotope production at the Lucas heights reactor. If the Democrats were still a viable force with actual political talent, I'd consider voting for them, although it'd involve spending a lot of time figuring out what they actually stand for, since that part always seemed a bit murky.

So at the moment, the ALP wins my vote by default. I'd like to see the Labor left pushing internally a bit harder on issues that matter to me, and not on protecting the thugs in the CFMEU who give the Australian union movement a bad name.

Free Markets or Planned Economies? Both. Our current best knowledge of both economic theory and practice seems to point towards best results from a mixed system - something like we have in Australia. There are without a doubt better ways to run economies, but we haven't discovered them yet. However the dawn of the Information Age is promising in this regard (IMO the massive, distributed computing power of the Internet, product of the Silicion Valley entreupener, may quixotically be the Marxist's last great hope for signficiantly more centralised economic decision making becoming truly viable.)

Taxes - up or down? The level of taxation as a proportion of GDP is a matter of fiscal policy, and rightly changes depending on economic circumstance. As a rule I think we should be redistributing more wealth from the rich to the poor, but I believe we should do so via fewer mechanisms - higher but fewer taxes, and higher but fewer forms of welfare. In fact, if I were in power, my main economic agenda would be to simplify - and probably even merge - the tax and welfare systems, in a revenue neutral fashion. Of course that's far from easy to do, but I'd like to see it nonetheless.

Immigration rates: Should go way, way up. Mainly in the form of unskilled labour and refugees, not just poaching the few doctors the third world has (skilled labour from the first world is fine.) Its an economic, demographic, and moral imperative - with our massively aging population we desperately need more young people, and bribing our own middle class to have babies just isn't that cost effective. The added bouns here its freer immigration is basically the best means of global wealth equalisation, since the immigrants will get richer by being here - not because they end up taking our wealth but because they benefit from our positive externalities, so essentially, they get wealthier for free. Also, they tend to send a fair bit of the money they make back to their home countries where it is usually desperately needed.

People like trot out the usual, largely flawed objections to this one. Society has coped before and can cope again, and so can the enivornment. Really.

ETS: Yes, there definitely should be a price on carbon. The science is kinda shaky - we're almost certainly making the Earth warmer, but by exactly how much and with what effects is much more open - but the economic modelling that is the best argument against acting is even shakier. In the face of this much uncertainty, play it safe and cut emissions. We know we can afford the hit to GDP - civilisations have never ended because the government introduced a moderate tax hike. As a bonus, it'll lesson the economic shock when we actually do start to run out of fossil fuels (which isn't for ages, but hey its nice to be prepared.)

Criminal Law: Soft on crime! Ha. I'll advocate purely selfishly in this matter, in favour of whatever minimises the likelihood that I ever end up a victim or perpetrator of crime - and to hell with the rights of current victims or criminals ;-) This involves weighing up, more or less, the deterrence value of strong punishments, the recidivism reduction of rehabilition, and the option of spending public funds in the broader productive economy instead of the justice system - which reduces the odds myself or my neighbour will ever have to steal to eat, become drug dealers and addicts, etc.

Evidence seems to point to spending more money on rehabilitation for criminals, and less on building new gaols. Perhaps the government should outlaw the media's lying portrayal of crime being out of control due to weak-willed judges, when in fact we live in a remarkably safe and peaceful society by any historical or global standard. I mean freedom of speech is all very well and good but what about my freedom to live in a society goverened by reason rather than the hysteria that happens to make newspapers more profitable?

Actually, I don't have to renounce my values quite that much, because I'm confident the internet will, sooner rather than later, send newspapers and television stations in their current form out of business. Good riddance. Whether what ends up replacing them is any better is an open question. I'm an extreme optimist about the future, though.