One argument for the U.S. First Amendment

In a discussion I was involved with a while ago on Facebook concerning the merits of free speech, I posited an idea that surprised me a little as it occurred to me. It's probably not an especially novel view - I'd imagine it's an argument libertarians would be fond of making - but I think it's worth expanding on and defending the thesis here.

Free speech is far more fundamental to a democracy than voting.

How can that be? Democracy is about the people exercising collective self-determination. The people express their will through votes, either directly on issues via referenda and the like, or indirectly via a layer of abstraction, namely electing representatives. (In fact there is more than one such layer in Australia's Westminster system, since the elected representatives themselves then go on to elect the cabinet and prime minister/premier that compose the core decisions makers of the executive government.)

A plethora of other rights ascribed to citizens are seen as critical to the modern idea of democracy - the right to impartial trial by jury, freedom to associate and peacefully assemble, and so on. Sometimes this is framed in terms of a trade-off, between more or less the Democratic and Republican ideals for which the two major American political parties are named - the collective right of the majority to make decisions about how society should be run, versus the individual rights of citizens to self-determination free from the interference of other parties, including the State.

Never mind that particular balancing act. Free speech is not just an important right for the individual person, it is a necessary precondition for the collective right embodied in voting to be meaningful.

Of course, nearly everyone accepts that you need free speech to have a proper democracy. My point goes beyond that, though. First, try and imagine a society in which there is free speech, but no multi-party democratic elections - a benevolent dictatorship of sorts. Not so hard to do, right? I can picture autocratic government that is perfectly tolerant of pro-democracy rallies, allows private citizens to own newspapers and publish editorials that advocate their own political views, etc. Of course, few if any such governments tend to exist in the real world, because inevitably open discussions of a government's failings (and in the long run, any government will have failings) result in sustained and coherent pressure for it to change, so real world dictators keep a tight reign on civil discourse, acutely aware of how critical it is to maintaining their grip on power. Still, its not an inconceivable arrangement.

Now, consider the converse scenario - a country where it is perfectly legal to form and join political parties, and genuine elections are held once every few years to decide which members of which parties should form the government. Except, its illegal for any of those parties to publicly disclose their criticisms of the existing leadership, or advocate their alternative views on policy.

On election day the ballot boxes aren't rigged, the candidates on the paper really are different, and no one is going to punish you in any way for voting for the opposition. You just have no access to any of the information needed to make an informed political decision.

Which society would you rather live in? Which society do you think would be better governed?

At least when you're free to criticise a regime, there's a chance, however small, that the leaders will take your ideas on board, even when you have no ability to hold them accountable. How much hope do you have though when at best you can vote arbitrarily for an unknowable alternative, on the random chance it will prove a better option?

To draw an analogy. The people of a nation without elections lose the right to self-determination; much akin to the individual case of a human slave, they possess no real control of their own joint destiny. But a slave at least retains one key freedom, that of conscience.

Whereas the people of a nation without free speech may be perfectly able to make collective decisions, subject only to the constraint that no ideas are exchanged amongst them in the process - like a person who is free to do whatever she wants, after merely having had certain beliefs forcibly prevented from circulating within her brain.

Congratulations Google

Just a quick shout out to Google for taking what must have been a tough commercial decision to end its controversial compliance with Chinese government censorship in response to attempted cyberattacks on human rights activists' gmail accounts.

Of course many detractors will argue this is simply the reversal of what was a heinously unethical decision in the first place. Keep in mind, though, that this is the world's largest search engine effectively pulling out of the world's largest internet market; hard to justify to shareholders on a matter of principle, which is why this new security angle is probably helpful to the corporate leadership in adding more solid-sounding business reasons - on top of what was previously just a manageable PR problem - for making the call.

In honour of what will hopefully be a step forward for the cause of free speech in China and ultimately around the world, this blog will soon return properly from its holiday slumber via a post on free speech I'd half written some time ago.

Oh and while on the topic of free speech and China, I'd just like to personally express my desire that the Chinese Government (technically, its judiciary) go fuck itself for summarily trying and executing a man who was almost certainly manipulated by criminals while suffering from delusional psychosis due to Bipolar Disorder, without assessing his mental health, or allowing access for foreign psychiatrists to do so. Just one more instance of appalling disrespect for human rights in a long, long list - hopefully

More thoughts on carbon

In light of all the brewhahaha at Copenhagen still finding its way into the news, and having faced an accusation my views on this topic follow from my heart and not my head, I thought I'd expand a little on my views about carbon emissions.

Environmentalism

I am far from what most people would consider an environmentalist, as perhaps readers of my first ever blog post might have inferred.

I am strongly in favour of nuclear power (with costs such as waste management duly internalised) as part of the strategy to mitigate climate change.

I support the farming of GM crops and livestock and continued research into genetic engineering techniques.

I think most anti-whaling sentiment in this country is fuelled by sheer racist hypocrisy - there is a legitimate case to make against the practice, but most Australians aren't in a position to make it.

As far as limited resources I am a relatively radical Cornucopian - I don't believe we will run out of any material economic inputs for a very long time, for reasons that are best left for explanation in another post.

I believe the lives of all other animal species are worth significantly less than human lives (which is a distinct proposition from animal suffering being less important than human suffering, for me a far murkier issue.)

More generally I think nature and the biosphere are wondrous and precious things in their own right, but human civilisation is overwhelmingly more precious. The universe in which humanity destroys every other living species on earth but survives to colonise another star system is infinitely preferable to one in which humanity itself goes extinct but life goes on for the rest of planet Earth.

Anyway, that is probably enough ranting to establish my non-green credentials.

Why I support a price on carbon

If I'm not an environmentalist, why on earth would I support reducing emissions?

Well, in spite of how some may read the above, I do care about the environment, for both its own sake but especially to the extent that damaging it is bad for humanity. And to be extremely generous to the climate skeptics, lets measure such damage to human welfare chiefly by reductions to global GDP - so this becomes pure economic number crunching and never mind moral abhorrence of so many impoverished Bangladeshis dying.

There are lingering (although small and diminishing) uncertainties over how much of the climate change is anthropogenic. Likewise concerning exactly how much warming we can expect. Most crucial to my mind are the oft neglected economic benefits of the world heating up - and I'd say there are more of these than most people are admitting. Weigh all this up in a hugely complex and uncertain cost-benefit analysis, and you might come out with carbon restrictions reducing the expected value of global GDP in say 2100. I tend to think you don't, but I'm really not well versed enough in the science or economics of it to have a solid idea.

However, I will openly admit that in this context I am quite risk averse, and also what you might term volatility averse.

The former is a concept with wide currency in economics. It means I am very happy to lose 1% of GDP guaranteed, to avoid a 1/20 chance of losing 20% of GDP, even though probabilistically this is a neutral trade off.

By the latter, I mean that I'd rather see 20 years of flat 2% GDP growth, than 17 years of 3% growth followed by 3 years of 3.5% decline, even though the resulting GDP level after the 20 years is the same.

I think these are utterly reasonable positions to take concerning the global economy, and that strong carbon reductions now are sure to minimise both the risk and volatility associated with potential economic change that follows from what's happening in the atmosphere.

So that's how you can be a filthy planet hating economic rationalist bastard, and maintain reservations about the probability of global catastrophe from a changing climate, and still be very firmly in favour of a carbon price.

An equitable solution

What would a genuinely fair and workable globally binding agreement look like, if it were actually politically possible to come up with such a thing (which is clearly not the case at the moment)?

Since the effects of emitting are truly global - my carbon ends up in every other person's atmosphere and heats every other persons' planet - its incoherent to view the problem on the scale of nation states. The climate is the equivalent of a commons for our entire species, and we are trying to instil some market forces to prevent a classical tragedy.

To me, the only just way to do this in a morally justifiable fashion is more or less to partition the resulting property rights equally, between every single person on the planet.

So there should be a global emissions market, initially with as many permits as our current total emissions. These should allocated to each government on a per capita basis - it being impractical, even within this idealised world I am imagining, to assign them directly to individuals - to do with as they wish. (There are a few countries where the government is simply too corrupt or powerless for this to be a good idea - but they aren't significant to the carbon picture. The permits for the populations of such countries can accumulate in trust until they get better governments.)

Most developing countries would sell the bulk of their permits to the developed world, as they don't need them. This would amount to a massive "wealth transfer", as Tony Abbott has put it, but I am no opponent of wealth transfers as a rule.

Would this amount to too radical a shock to the structure of the global economy? Perhaps. Certainly I don't think the U.S., to take an obvious example, is in a financial position at the moment to buy all the carbon permits it would need to sustain its current levels of economic activity. Now, shocks are bad, as I hope we agreed earlier when I was making arguments concerning volatility. To halve the real wealth of the top 10% of the worlds population and spread it amongst the remaining 90% is not bad thing - in the long term. Occurring instantaneously, though, it would likely prove disastrous.

So, to temper my thought experiment scheme with some pragmatism, I would say countries should also have the option of buying additional carbon permits at a fixed price. This would act as an upper ceiling on the price of permits, which mitigates one of the major disadvantages of an ETS with respect to a tax. The money spent purchasing these "excess" permits would be invested into a fund that countries having to adapt to negative effects from climate change could make claims against - much less messy, politically, then the small Pacific island nations having to beg for the odd billion here and there from their rich counterparts. Of course, what body could be left in charge of stewarding and dispensing all that money is itself a vexatious political question - can you say One World Government, conspiracy theorist nutbags?

Back in the real world

All the speculation above is of course ridiculously idle. No such scheme is likely to come into existence for decades, if ever, as the farcical arrangement decided upon recently in Denmark shows all too clearly.

So how do I see the course of events playing out? I don't think climate change, directly, will be responsible for wiping out human civilisation. My generation, or the generation to follow us, may end up paying dearly for humanity's current folly. But eventually, pay we will - the hotter the planet gets, the clearer and more precise the science comes, and the richer we get (making carbon reduction comparatively cheaper), the more political will to actually do something about the problem should grow. Perhaps there will be a horrible runaway positive feedback cascade via sea bed deposits of ice-trapped methane or some other mechanism, but I take liberty to doubt it, given all the evidence we have suggests the biosphere has survived through significantly higher temperatures and carbon concentrations than what the foreseeable future holds. It is the shock of the change occurring so rapidly that is the problem, but while this no doubt spells doom for many species, humanity should survive, in some form, in nearly any conceivable scenario.

What bothers me more are the possible indirect effects of climate change. Consider the Middle East, where scarce water is already a cause for conflict in an area that hardly needs more excuses for war to break out; where one nuclear power already exists, surrounded by enemies, and where another state, already an international pariah, may soon come into possession of the atomic bomb. If Iran and Israel are close to the brink of war now, as many observers believe, and unrest grips many of their Arabic neighbours, how much worse will the situation be when the only fresh water to be found in the region is that manufactured in desalination plants?

Or what of China and America? Although the current global deal is in truth the agreement these two countries reached bilaterally, the negotiations fell far short of success, and the world's two biggest carbon emitters both seem keen to manoeuvre so that the blame falls upon the other. The world desperately needs these two countries to establish better relations, not find new grounds for conflict. We have enjoyed such a remarkably peaceful era over the past 20 years in part because of the dominance of a single, unchallenged super power. The transition back to a world more akin to pre-1914 Europe, where multiple entities vie for supremacy, is fraught with danger. We, as a species, can afford to pay a carbon tax, and we can even, probably, afford to pay the costs of living in a world that is 3 or 4 degrees warmer. I doubt we can afford to fight World War 3 over the issue, though.

The Witching Hour

It's been a while
Since four a.m.
Things have happened
While you slept soundly

At four a.m.
I'm still not sleepy
Where do I go, now?

Have you been to Lothlorien?
I could give you
The full guided tour
It is never four a.m. there
Or it always is
I can't quite tell

Once at four a.m.

I journeyed to Oxford

And sought after Truth

From a silver tongue

And truly, I found It

It was not to my liking

Do you remember

That time at four a.m.
We were on the fourth round
Of long island iced teas
And all laughing
And I wished I didn't know the punchline
We drowned our mirth
But I walked on water
You couldn't see it
I'd walk to Andromeda
Fence singularities
Ascend the arithmetic hierarchy
And then some
Would you have followed
If I'd have asked?
Then again, I don't ask

A little while later
And it's still four a.m.
It's funny like that
No one has been here
I can smell their footprints
They didn't linger
I can see why
I could tell the ones left
I could answer their questions
I'm not yet that cruel

I dragged you to four a.m.
On a rip tide of conciousness
What were we still doing
On that bench in that place
At that time in that dream?

We should know better

By now, you would think

We'd have learned not to think, there

Where the wild shining notions

Haunt the lives we can't reach

What have I been up to

All this time that has passed?

That's a very good question

I've been asked it, before

I have stared long

At the burning gates of heaven
And listened, close, and deep,

To the seductive song of hell
Things I've learned
That I'd never tell you
And if I told you
You'd never believe me
And if you believed me
You'd scream yourself silent
And under diamonds you'd dance naked on a hill

And not care
As much as you'd never cared before
But you wouldn't want that
And neither would I

I keep coming back here
I play tricks with clocks
I'm drawn by the beauty
So says my attorney

How long since you wandered
Through the streets at four a.m.
And how long since you've wondered
What waits round the corner
You never realised
No one ever does
Where that terror abides
To roam unafraid
It was not worth the price

At four a.m., for a drunken hour or so
I'd say more than you'd hear
In a lifetime

If only

You'd catch me

Its four a.m.
Dawn will be here soon

What they should teach you in school

I anticipated a post along these lines long ago, didn't I?

So let's say tomorrow, I get sworn in as NSW Minister for Education. Hey, given the theatrics of the State Cabinet lately, its not entirely beyond the realms of possibility. Enough of that though, as I promised they'd be no politics this time around.

Well, there are some basic steps I'd take. I'd decouple the core English curriculum of reading, writing, and speaking from the study of literature, for reasons Paul Graham has explained better than I ever could. I'd make mathematics compulsory through to year 12, although with a reworked syllabus; few people really need to know what the derivative of tan is, but I recently got into a Facebook argument with a well-educated, science-literate person who couldn't tell the difference between a positive feedback loop and negative feedback loop. Software design and development needs to be redone, from scratch - high school age kids are more than capable of doing real programming and real computer science.

All this is merely tinkering, though.

Civics really needs to be core to the curriculum. It used to be, I'm lead to believe, but now, its not, for some bizarre reason. See, in a democracy, school isn't just vocational training, much as everyone seems to want to pretend otherwise. School is where you learn what a citizen of a society needs to learn. This includes knowledge and skills that help you become an economically productive individual, sure. Citizens aren't merely consumers and employees, though. They are voters, and members of political parties. They are plaintiffs and defendants in law suits, not to mention jurors. They are, ultimately, sovereigns, and to leave school and attain majority with absolutely no real knowledge of the government they are both members of and subject to is absurd. I could crap on about this for ages, but really I think its a pretty straight forward point. Hell, if I recall correctly there currently isn't an HSC course in Politics or Government you could take, even if you wanted to! Ridiculous.

OK, some changes to existing subjects, and the introduction (or perhaps its reintroduction) of a subject. Nothing too revolutionary there.

Do I have any grander schemes? Any more radical proposals?

Well, education is hard to do well, and there are lot of interesting theories floating around with little hard evidence to support them, and a lot of criticisms of existing arrangements and dreams

I'd like to say I'd like to teach teenagers to be good critical thinkers, but probably most educators would say the same thing. I could say that it'd be nice if there was less focus on specific factual content like who won the Battle of Thermopylae or the name of the law which ended no-fault divorce, and more focus on applying reasoning skills to those facts. Except, besides from pragmatic issues like the greater ease of measuring factual knowledge, as a rule people aren't innately good at generalising, and so giving someone a lot of information and then asking them to analyse it is quite possibly a better way to teach them abstractions then actually starting with the abstractions themselves.

What is critical thinking? It's focused on the idea of criticism, in its substantial sense - to consider something carefully, and find any weaknesses or flaws. Specifically, a good critical thinker is a strong critic of ideas - they are able to spot errors in people's arguments and theories. Most importantly of all, a critical thinker learns to criticise their own ideas, to see the holes in their own arguments - either with a view to papering the holes over, if they are a professional advocate like a trial barrister, or, hopefully, with a view to aligning their beliefs more closely with reality.

Can you teach this? Well, some people can teach it, and some can learn it, without a doubt, since it is clearly an acquired ability in particular to be self-critical of one's beliefs - by default we are overwhelmingly not rational so much as rationalising, forever finding reasons to justify our intuitions and behaviours. How to reliably and practically teach such skills to every school child is another question entirely.

Again, I think there is an extent to which it is futile to start in the abstract. Everyone learns abstractions at first via examples, even the deepest thinkers - the axioms of group theory were discovered by mathematicians interested in the common properties of integer addition, permutation composition, geometric transformations, matrix multiplication and the like.

So schools should have lessons about the most well know and comprehensible cognitive biases. It is just as easy to explain the sunk cost fallacy to a bunch of year nine school students as a bunch of first year undergraduates in Economics. Framing isn't just something psychology majors should learn about, its something everyone should learn about.

This stuff doesn't require any prior knowledge, nor an indepth understanding of the causes of the biases or any of the rest of the surrounding science. It is not, conceptually, that difficult; certainly its comparable in intellectual rigour to asking teenagers to write about the causes of World War I or to prove something by mathematical induction.

The best part about it is, you can very easily do the relevantt experiments, in the classroom, and then explain them. Here's why you all answered this way, and here's why you're wrong. And here's a ton of examples from real life about how this kind of utterly commonplace mistake in your thinking can lead you into trouble.

Now, would there any point to all this? Well, I believe, the jury is still out on that question; studies indicate some cognitive biases can apparently be corrected for by telling people about them, while others can't; and I'm unaware of anyone trying to explain them to children and then checking five years down the track if it helped them as adults.

At the very least, though, it should give the kids a thorough sense that they can be mistaken. If school were to have only one lasting influence on their reasoning, that would be a good pick. Even for the smart kids; in fact, especially for the smart kids - most of histories worst ideas came from smart people.

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With special thanks to Nonchalant Adventurer, or whatever his blogging pseudonym is these days, for the long hours of philosophical exchange about critical thinking that helped shaped my current views, and of which this post is but the smallest of appetisers.

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.

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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.

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* 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.