Podcast Recommendations October 2019

Last year I wrote up a post discussing my recommended podcasts, and I figured it was about time to update my list. Podcasts have grown significantly in the last 10 years to the point where I honestly haven’t listened to terrestrial radio stations for several years. Podcast distribution is decentralized, and the barrier to entry is low. We live in a world where if you have a niche interest, there’s going to be a podcast and several YouTube channels covering it.

But since podcast discussion is decentralized, my most common method of hearing about podcasts is through other people. In that light, I have created this list of recommendations. It is loosely grouped with podcasts I have listened to longer and/or enjoy more at the top, with more recent podcast discoveries or podcasts whose episodes I have found hit or miss towards the bottom.

I’d also like to take a second to recommend a method of podcast listening: have a low barrier to skipping an episode of a podcast that you otherwise enjoy. This was actually a recommendation by 80,0000 Hours podcast host Rob Wiblin. He encourages his listeners to skip podcast episodes if they find it uninteresting because he’d rather they continue to enjoy the pieces of content from the podcast that they do like, rather than feel like they have to slog through parts they don’t. Moreover, there is just so much good content out there, you should never waste your time with something you don’t find interesting. And now the (slightly sorted!) list:

Reason Podcast

First up, the Reason Podcast includes several different types of excellent content. My favorite is the Monday Editor’s Roundtable which usually includes Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman. It’s well-edited, sharp, witty, and always tackles the latest news of the week from a libertarian perspective. In the last few years I often find myself wondering if the political world has lost its mind, and on Mondays I’m able to get the message that yes, everyone has gone crazy, but you’re still not alone, there are these four libertarian weirdos who are right there with you. Moreover, Nick and Matt’s obscure 70s and 80s pop cultural references and cynicism play well off of Katherine and Peter’s more techno-libertarian science fiction vibe.

However, that’s not the only content here! There are many interviews from presidential candidates to authors and professors. Audio from the monthly SoHo Forum debates are also posted, and I always listen to at least the opening statements (audience Q&As are less interesting to me). Overall, I almost never skip an episode of the podcast and they produce a ton of great content!

80,000 Hours

80,0000 Hours is an effective altruist organization researching how people can do the most good with their careers. The effective altruist movement does great work, and I think anyone seriously interested in making a difference in the world should be aware of it and the approach with which effective altruists analyze the world. But more than that, this podcast is just more awesome than other interview shows. Rob Wiblin, the host, is excellent at interviewing. He presses the guests on issues but is also willing to accepting strange concepts about the world and follow them to their interesting conclusions.

The interviews are also long, sometimes resulting in 3 hour episodes. This is on purpose, as they can cover in depth why people have the beliefs they do, and what specialized knowledge they have accumulated working in niche roles. Sample episodes include Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum) on ways to revamp public goods, blockchains, and effective giving, Paul Christiano (AI alignment researcher at OpenAI) on messaging the future, increasing compute power and how CO2 interacts with the brain, and Philip Tetlock (author/inventor of Superforecasting) on why forecasting matters for everything.

This one is perhaps a bit more intense than some of the more chill “people hanging out” podcasts, but I listen to every episode.

EconTalk

EconTalk is centrally an economics podcast hosted by Russ Roberts. It’s funded by the Library of Economics and Liberty and Roberts leans libertarian, but he is a courteous and thoughtful interviewer. He knows his biases and acknowledges them during discussions. The podcast strays into many related fields, not just economics; Russ is interested in personal philosophy and introspection as well.

As of late, Russ has particular concerns about the economics field and how free market policies fall short of what we might hope for. In particular, he has discussed themes of societal disillusionment and isolation that simple “material” concerns that dominate economic metrics cannot capture. I wouldn’t say I always agree with Russ and certainly not with all of his guests, but I can say I listen to almost every episode because there are so many good insights discussed.

The Fifth Column

I recently heard the term “Dive Podcast”. This is an excellent description of The Fifth Column, a talk show hosted by Kmele Foster, Matt Welch, Michael Moynihan, and Anthony Fisher. All lean various degrees and shades of libertarian, and discuss the news and/or critique the ever continuous stream of takes in print media, television, online, Twitter, etc while in various states of inebriation. This is much less of a cerebral lecture and more of a “rhetorical assault” as Kmele calls it.

I find the show incredibly entertaining, often informative, and very funny. I listen to all episodes as soon as they are posted.

Hello Internet

Hello Internet is another talk show, hosted by YouTubers CGP Grey and Brady Haran. It isn’t really related to any topics we cover here on the blog, but it is nonetheless entertaining and charming. Unlike The Fifth Column, there is no alcohol involved in the making of this podcast, but it does have an amusing self-grown culture and language.

For example, there is an official flag of the podcast after a referendum of users was held, but one of the losing flags is occasionally taken up by rebellious listeners. There are also unofficial official birds of Hello Internet (the Reunion Swamphen with limited edition t-shirts). Topics covered include YouTube, technology, but also the various interests of Brady and Grey, such as mountain climbing or Apple products. There’s no simple way to convey this podcast, but I do recommend it, and I do listen to every episode.

Rationally Speaking

Rationally Speaking is an interview show hosted by Julia Galef, founder of the Center for Applied Rationality and who I’ve heard described as one of the major pillars of the rationality community. Like Russ Roberts of EconTalk, Galef is an excellent, fair, and thoughtful interviewer. However, the subjects of these interviews are much broader than EconTalk’s admittedly broad discussion of economics. There is a general focus on the philosophy of why we believe what we believe. I do tend to skip more episodes of Rationally Speaking than I do of previously mentioned interview podcasts, but I estimate I still listen to 90% of all episodes, and I would absolutely recommend this very accessible podcast to everyone.

The Economist Editor’s Picks

This one is pretty straightforward. In a world where we tend to get news continuously from the internet or our smartphones, this podcast is a short, ~20 minute weekly selection of important topics from a global perspective that you might not know much about, and that may have gotten swept away in the torrent of your daily information deluge. The Economist is certainly opinionated, but I think does a good job of promoting moderate, liberal ideas that would improve the world. This podcast is an excellent way to expose yourself to some of those simple important concepts in a global context.

Anatomy of Next

From Founder’s Fund, this is a bit of an outlier podcast on here. It’s much more of a series of scripted journalistic pieces or lectures rather than recorded unscripted discussions between people. However, it is quite ambitious in its ideas. The latest season, entitled “New World” which finished up in early 2019, is about how to build a human civilization on Mars. Anatomy of Next explores everything, most of which does not exist yet, but perhaps could. There is terraforming, genetic engineering, sci-fi launch concepts, etc.

I wouldn’t say this podcast is for everyone, but if you feel like you are missing out on human optimism, where people talk about settling Mars with technology that doesn’t exist and yet remain incredibly compelling, this is a podcast you should definitely check out. Also, thanks to Nick Gillespie and Reason for interviewing Mike Solana and letting me know about this podcast in the first place!

Building Tomorrow

Building Tomorrow is a podcast about technology and innovation, and how that is leading to and interacting with individual liberty. It’s hosted at Libertarianism.org which is a project of the Cato Institute. I only recently discovered this podcast and thus it is lower down on my list only because I haven’t had a chance to listen to as many episodes as I would like. Nonetheless, every episode I have listened to is really great! Of course, this program is the perfect niche for me to enjoy, but I would definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys this blog.

Conversations with Tyler

Tyler Cowen co-hosts one of the most popular econ blogs in the world, Marginal Revolution, and, of course, he is quite an accomplished economist and author. I have recently discovered his podcast, and it’s pretty wonderful. I admit, I don’t listen to every episode, as it turns out Cowen’s and my interests diverge somewhat, which is quite alright. On the episodes that I do find interesting, Cowen is an excellent, although unorthodox interviewer. I rarely go into an episode knowing much about the interviewee or even thinking that I’d really enjoy the topic, but I am always impressed.

There are some additional podcasts I listen to sporadically, but either don’t fit the context of this blog, or I haven’t listened to enough episodes to recommend them here. Nonetheless, it’s worth mentioning that I have listened to a handful of episodes from the Neoliberal Podcast, and I hypothesize that if I wrote this list again in 3 months, it would likely be here.

If you have any podcast recommendations, please tweet at me or leave a comment! I’m always interested in more podcasts.

The Immigration Tariff in 500 Words

Immigration liberalization is one of the policies this blog has described as highest impact. It could have massive benefits to both immigrants and native born citizens in the United States and other developed countries. Immigration bypasses the need to solve the extremely difficult problem of “building good institutions” which is a mercurial and sparsely solved goal in development. By moving people directly to societies where good institutions already exist, we don’t have to make them. OpenBorders.info also suggests free movement of people could double world GDP, with smaller migration seeing proportionally smaller but still substantial growth.

The United States is uniquely positioned to absorb immigration. It is the largest developed country by both population and GDP by significant margins (developed country referring to either OECD member or country with HDI > 0.8). By nominal GDP the US economy remains the largest in the world, and by PPP it is second only to China. Unlike China, the US is the only large country with a large foreign born population, and indeed the US has the largest foreign born population in the world at over 46 million. The US also has a long history of immigration contributing to its excellent position as an immigration destination.

Given this blogs inclination towards the benefits of markets, self determination, and individual rights, our default position should be in support of more liberalized immigration. Current immigration policy is geared towards family connections despite much of the potential benefits of immigration stemming from economics. The U.S. also takes in less immigrants as a percentage of its population than other developed nations, despite the previously mentioned advantages the U.S. has in absorbing immigration.

Originating from economist Gary Becker, an immigration tariff would allow prospective immigrants to pay a tax or fee to enter the country and work. We have a somewhat similar although highly limited current system with H-1B visas which are sponsored by companies for employees. Expanding this and accounting for age and level of education, Congress could create a tariff schedule for various immigrants based on potential costs and tax revenue from these immigrants. They could also simply sell off additional green cards after the current legal green card approaches were filled in the current year. The Cato paper linked goes into more detail.

The benefits of any such system would be to guarantee that immigrants with the skills and ability to work productively in the United States would be able to do so, with additional monetary compensation provided up front to the U.S. to avoid any potential risk of those immigrants becoming a net cost on society. This would see benefits in terms of additional labor, entrepreneurship, and economic growth.

The issue with this approach is that immigration is a highly divisive political issue. Republicans would be unlikely to embrace this proposal due to their base’s opposition to apparently all immigration. Democrats may be more interested, but may balk at the notion of people “buying” their way to the front of the line.

Further Reading

For more on why immigration is generally a positive policy:

Presidential Power Should Be A Top Election Issue

The midterm elections are a month away, and while I have expressed my feelings on voting and the electoral system generally, I have also made several posts trying to boost specific policy ideas that should be more discussed.  In the same vein, I’ve been thinking about which issues are top priority in this election, and whether any of them are actually as high impact as their popularity warrants.

The recent Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process, which I think everyone agrees was pretty circus-like from start to finish regardless of political inclination, seems to have sparked more voter enthusiasm in the midterms. And while I’ll grant that Supreme Court nominations have grown in importance, it doesn’t follow that SCOTUS nominations should be a major issue in this election. The oldest justices are left-leaning, and so unlikely to retire in the next two years. Perhaps if there is a fear that Justices Ginsberg or Breyer (aged 85 and 80 respectively) will be forced into retirement due to medical problems, then this election would matter. But the chances of that seem less than 50%.

There are other issues, like immigration, that are highly impactful and also well discussed. If there was a decisive turnover from Republicans to Democrats in Congress, we’d expect some of that to be realized in immigration policy, but unfortunately not that much. Even if Democrats took both houses, this election is still largely being discussed in terms of being pro-Trump or anti-Trump.

This is a problem. Only one party can control the Presidency. Moreover, there are competing ideologies within parties, with many fiscal conservatives frustrated with George W. Bush, many neoconservatives frustrated with Trump, and yes, even some liberals frustrated with Obama on foreign policy. So really it should be said that only one ideology gets to control the White House as well. If the Presidency controls so much about policy, then this is disastrous for representative democracy. Depending on how ideological or political people are, the majority of people will not feel represented by the President, even if the President wins a majority of votes (something that has only happened 3 times in the last 8 presidential elections, going back 30 years).

The solution is clear, but we have no incentive to achieve it: Congress should be the most powerful branch of government. Its membership is large so as to draw from a wide range of views and geographical areas. When it acts, it must find compromises and alignments of interests, unlike the President which acts as a single unit. That was the design in the original constitution, and technically, if Congress worked to assert its control, it could retake such a position in government. However, congressmen have little incentive to do so; going on the record for votes and standing on specific principles is politically dangerous. Better instead to move questions of policy to the executive branch, and leave Congress to simply grandstand politically, never having to be tied down to specific votes.

For example: Barack Obama unilaterally decided to grant legal status and eligibility for federal benefits to millions of illegal immigrants in the United States. I happen to think this was a good policy idea, but if the President can decide what laws to enforce and make his own laws with executive orders, then Congress is vestigial. President Trump actually took a pretty constitutional position and decided to end the DACA program and told Congress to pass the DREAM Act (would have crystallized the DACA program into law). He gave them six months, and they did not make the deadline, despite such action being pretty popular. This is unbelievable. Maybe too many people were playing politics. Maybe Donald Trump is incompetent in getting the legislation passed (he torpedoed a bipartisan bill), but that shouldn’t matter. Congress should be able to pass a bill that a majority of legislators agree with, but the will didn’t exist. No one wanted to be on the wrong side of the political divide of the Trump era, and so no bipartisanship could materialize, guaranteeing further partisanship in the future.

This cycle also delegitimizes Congress, making people look more often to the Presidency and to the courts. Congress is fundamentally tied to winning elections, so if people see Congress as unhelpful or unpopular, Senators and Representatives have even less incentive to do anything that might frustrate voters. That in turn also makes the courts increasingly important, which likely fuels additional democratic frustration, as the courts are still fairly removed from direct democratic influence. But if they are viewed as partisan extensions of the presidency, that just makes even more things rely on a single election where only a single ideology can win every four years.

I think there may be a way out of this mess if political parties made the midterms about Congressional vs Presidential Authority. It’s not always been true that Congress can only define itself in relation to the President, but it may be a useful way to couch constitutional authority in political terms. Reducing presidential power would be a concrete way to oppose Donald Trump, and perhaps even reach alleged small-government conservatives.

The Cato Institute lays out a platform for a resurgent Congress to run on: requiring votes on executive rule changes that will impose costs of $100 million on the economy (already introduced as the REINS Act), updating the Administrative Procedures Act to require courts to interpret administrative authority de novo or independent of the agency’s claimed interpretation (I’m horrified this isn’t already done), and require all fees and penalties collected by the government to be appropriated and spent by the Congress (right now, fees and profits are then spent by the collecting agency, with little oversight).

We don’t have to limit this approach to libertarian wishlist items. Kevin Kosar in Politico details additional approaches (and adds many more words in National Affairs), including an improvement to the robustness of congressional staffing; the executive has armies of bureaucrats working to provide the best information (and sometimes self-aggrandizing propaganda) to the branch (the Executive Office of the President alone includes some 4000 people). Congress has seen shrinking staffing for its oversight and accountability offices like the GAO. Congress should be the most powerful branch and so it should have access to the data and expert information on how best to oversee the actual implementation of policy the executive branch undertakes. Instead what we often have is Congressional staffers directly trying to research regulatory agencies, who are providing their own oversight information to non-expert politicians who often defer to the self-interested agencies. Kosar’s suggestion of a Congressional Regulation Office is also intriguing.

However, just because there is a way to do this, there is no reason to believe Democrats ever had an intention to follow this path during this midterm election. Nor does it mean Republicans will consider it in 2022 if the tables are reversed. Neither have an incentive to discuss constitutional authority when culture war issues are more likely to encourage their base to turn out. Understanding these public choice incentives doesn’t mean we have to live with them though. There is a nebulous role for real ideas in democracy, and it starts with having a discussion about the state of our politics.

The Broken Electoral System: 2018 Edition

This blog voices a lot of frustrations with the American electoral system, and with election season coming up, it’s worth talking about again. The United States is a republic, but voters tend to significantly overestimate the importance and impact of their votes.

To reiterate some of what I said in 2016, your vote in November is unlikely to matter. Most Congressional elections are not close. There may be uncertainty in other, less well polled elections for lower offices, but there’s also a much higher cost to finding out who the candidates are and what they stand for. I consider myself pretty interested in the political process as I write about it often. Nonetheless, I know almost nothing about my state representative and state senator. I can (and will) look them up, and see where they stood on votes, as I can with my Congressional representatives, but this will also require looking up which state votes were important to the topics I care about, something which I may not be able to find out easily and which I’m sure other people do not have the time to do. Moreover, it’s pretty common at the federal level for legislators to try and avoid going on the record and opt instead for voice votes, and I suspect similar incentives dominate at the state level.

If I can find good information on their voting record which reflecting beliefs I find objectionable, it is not clear that I can find information on their electoral opponents. Party affiliation does help, but not every candidate from a party holds all party positions.

Additionally, even close elections that you can find information on do not necessarily map well onto issues you care about. I care about promoting free trade, liberalizing immigration and/or worker visas, ending the war on drugs, and addressing issues in the criminal justice system. Many politicians only side with me on some issues but not others, yet I only have two options for any election that is actually competitive (and again, most are not).

Moreover, most politicians not only don’t share all my positions on important issues, they have really terrible positions on other issues that weren’t even on my radar. Now I have to worry about Republican politicians looking to deport immigrants through abusive crackdowns of civil liberties. I’m also now concerned about Democratic promises to vastly expand Medicare, already the largest entitlement in the federal budget and contributor to runaway healthcare spending. I freely admit that many people do not feel this way; they feel that the “progressive” or “conservative” positions pair well on a wide range of issues, and they can identify with many others who share an overlapping set of beliefs. In this view, the inability for libertarians to find someone who shares their core issues is a function of libertarians having bad or unpopular ideas and that’s why they have no support.

I disagree for several reasons: one is that many people do not vote at all. They may not think much about politics, or if they do, perhaps they realize, as is my thesis here, that there is very little benefit to voting. It seems quite plausible that they hold ideas that differ from party orthodoxy and don’t see a reason to vote when you can only choose between party orthodoxy. Another is that a plurality of registered voters do not have a party affiliation, something that has only been true in the last ~20 years or so. It’s also true that when surveyed, many Americans express rather moderate views on a variety of issues. Finally, it’s worth noting that there is obvious intra-party tension and factionalism. There are serious groups of Republicans who do not like Trump. There are libertarian critics like Justin Amash and Mark Sanford, neoconservatives like Lindsey Graham and John McCain, as well as just stalwart conservatives like everyone at National Review. It also seems to me that there is some strong disagreement in the Democratic Party between neoliberals and progressives, and so it seems absurd that the political system only allows two parties when there is so much diversity of opinion and no way to express it electorally.

Worse still, our current two-headed system promotes partisanship and tribal extremism instead of nuance. I know several people that, when pressed, don’t really believe that the government would do a great job if we had a Medicare-for-all system or had government paid college. Yet these same people feel that if they don’t embrace these left-wing ideas, their only alternative is to be a fan of Trump, whom they reasonably despise. I’ve also experienced the reverse: conservatives that didn’t like Trump, but clearly preferred his tax policy to Hillary Clinton’s and figured Trump might not be so bad. Many now are so concerned at what they perceive as a “Trump Derangement Syndrome” takeover of the Democratic Party, they have nowhere to go but to embrace Trump. If we had a system that promoted the creation of several different groups and smaller parties, we’d have a much easier time finding a diversity of opinions and ideas.

Unfortunately, our current system also takes issues that many people generally agree are bad and just ignores them. There are policy positions I would consider to be completely disqualifying for any public servant, such as approval of a vast warrantless domestic spying program costing tens of billions of dollars a year or the murder of children through drone strikes by the president with no authorization of war from Congress. Nonetheless, there is no point to disqualify candidates from my support due to these issues because they have been widely ignored by all candidates in the major parties. Complaining about the two party system is the classic archetype of the crazy libertarian going off the rails again, but I hope others are genuinely saddened that our electoral system doesn’t offer a way to utilize our vote to oppose the murder of children by our government.

And for non-competitive elections, there may be competitive primaries, which aren’t really great systems either, as I’ve discussed before. If the primary is deciding the eventual winner of the election, it doesn’t make sense that a plurality of voters of a single party should determine the winner of a general election seat in a primary election where 90% of possible voters didn’t vote at all. For example, in the notable dethroning of high ranking Democrat Joe Crowley in NY-14, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won with less than 16,000 votes, in a district where some 690,000 people live, presumably with some 300,000 possible voters. PredictIt currently gives the Democrat a ~85% chance to win, although the market isn’t very liquid.

In less democratic countries, there is overt voter fraud and intimidation. The United States doesn’t really have that problem. It nonetheless does have odd echoes of a “rigged” electoral system like one you would find in low-trust corrupt authoritarian countries with poor rule of law. For example, having one side consistently win a landslide, non-competitive election (like most congressional seats) seems like something you’d find in a “fake” democracy. Having a “competitive” election between two candidates you didn’t pick and you don’t know well which doesn’t allow you to express dissatisfaction with important government programs sounds like a “fake” democracy too.

I should admit that I don’t love the idea of hyper direct democracy either. Even if voters had a reason to learn about the political system, I’m unsure if they would promote good ideas. In all honesty, I probably side with political elites over average voters on a lot of issues. That doesn’t mean I believe there is no room for reform. I’ve discussed many different possible ways to improve our system, and in fact a few weeks ago I mentioned the important opportunity Approval Voting is getting this year. Yet none of those ideas will be seriously discussed this election season.

To summarize, our election system has a variety of important and fundamental flaws. Candidates are picked in nonrepresentative primaries, many elections are noncompetitive, voter information is scarce, while voter choices are limited to two candidates who do not represent the broader electorate’s views on many issues. Other important issues are just broadly ignored while the system promotes discord and extremism. Yet there will be a significant amount of discussion about how important it is to vote in November. With these flaws I’ve outlined, I apologize in advance if I’m unimpressed by such claims.

If you believe that you see a large difference in a particular race for office that you think might be competitive, that’s great, and feel free to vote. But don’t feel bad if you believe voting is a waste of time. Maybe you don’t like Trump, but you also wish all the Democratic candidates weren’t just talking about deficit busting economic policies with poor fiscal outlooks. That’s fine because there are ways to engage politically that are more important than voting. That includes addressing our broken electoral system and raising awareness about how this doesn’t have to be the way things operate; approval voting offers a real alternative that’s being attempted right now. It’s also worth mentioning that Congress’ decline in power relative to the President means that partisan politics is now more infectious; only one of a very few competing ideologies can control the White House and the immense power it has been ceded. Meanwhile, a powerful Congress is made up of hundreds of individuals, allowing for diversity of opinion, broad coalitions, and compromise. Congress should be taking back power it has ceded to the executive branch; I would hope readers would want to make this the major election talking point it should be, instead of the libertarian-rant-footnote it is now.

In conclusion, civic engagement is important; political awareness is vital to a thriving democracy. Nonetheless our electoral system is broken in such a way that voting is not the vital civic duty it is often claimed to be. If you are concerned about the partisanship that created Trump, if you feel like a world where facts don’t matter ought to be changed, then voting isn’t enough to change these trends. That does not mean there is nothing to be done; on the contrary, reforms are needed on a more fundamental level, including changes to our voting system, primary system, and party system. Discussing and promoting those ideas is the best way forward.

Policies in 500 Words or Less

This is the next post in the “Policies We Should Be Talking About” series. For more information see the introduction (and other policies) here, but briefly, this series is about explaining policies that might be unpopular, unknown, or simply undeveloped that could still have large positive impacts. Some face specific political obstacles, and some may be too radical to gain enough momentum in the near term, but all deserve to have their signal boosted.

Approval Voting

The United States and many other nations use the worst voting system in the world: First Past the Post or FPTP. This forces voters to think strategically, voting for candidates they think will win rather than candidates they actually like. Combined with the “package deal” problem we’ve discussed before, voters have at best tangential input into the political system.  FPTP leads to a variety of bad outcomes, including static two party systems, wasted votes, ease of gerrymandering, minority rule, spoiler effects (where a third party causes the preferred major party to lose despite popularity, i.e. Nader voters preferred Gore, but didn’t vote for him and Bush won), and more.

The most common alternative discussed in the United States is Ranked Choice / Instant Runoff Voting, which is being used in Maine today. This allows voters to rank all candidates they like, supporting multiple candidates. If no candidate wins an initial majority, votes are redistributed from the least popular candidates based on voter rankings. The first candidate to accumulate a majority wins. However, this system still trends towards strategic voting and two parties, since voters’ second choices are only counted if their first choice is eliminated. If a smaller party is redistributed first, voters second and third choices may be ignored, with the winner being a candidate that fewer voters had as a second choice. There are other more mathematical objections, such as the lack of a Condorcet winner. It is nonetheless objectively better than FPTP.

An even better procedure is called Approval Voting. It is incredibly simple: voters vote for as many candidates as they like, and the candidate with the most votes wins. Voters can support the candidates they really like as well as the ones they think will win. In all likelihood, this will trend towards two parties, but the difference is that third parties can spring up and build support over time without voters fearing the spoiler effects. This incentivizes new parties with fresh ideas. Main parties may co-opt those ideas as they get popular, but that’s good news for voters anyways, as good ideas can bubble up outside of the two party system and nonetheless achieve mainstream success.

The main difficulty is that almost all politicians will not support a new electoral system if they know they have already won using the old system. To get around this, the Center for Election Science recommends ballot initiatives to bring this idea directly to popular vote rather than fighting politicians who want to stay in power. They are doing just that, starting small in Fargo, ND with a ballot measure this year. If successful, it can be pointed to as a real life implementation of a good idea and can be built upon in other polities.

Additional information:

Bail Reform

When someone is accused of a crime, they are charged and given a set of restrictions to ensure they show up for trial. In the United States, this usually includes a money bond that is deposited and then returned at trial. If the defendant does not show up, the property is forfeit. However, other common law nations, including Canada and the United Kingdom, usually do not require actual money, just restrictions on movement or activities (i.e. drinking).

In the US, this has given rise to bail bondsman, who will post your bail for a flat nonrefundable percentage of your bond, often 10-15%. If you fail to appear in court, they have authorization in most states to bring you to the court’s jurisdiction to recover their bond, which is known as bounty hunting, essentially legalized kidnapping. Even if bondsman were banned (and several states have done so) this system remains terrible. If you cannot afford the bail bond, you have a strong incentive to plead guilty. Sitting in jail until trial is not an option for someone in poverty who needs to be working and earning enough for their family. Combined with other criminal justice issues like overcriminalization and policing for profit, nonviolent poor offenders are trapped by a system where they never get a chance for a fair trial due to a lack of cash. Justice should be based on guilt or innocence, not wealth.

There are better ways; the Bronx Freedom Fund realized there was an excellent opportunity to help alleviate this problem. They bail out accused persons and help them make their court date, recovering a large percentage of their posted bonds. Poor defendants are thus able to contest their charges with a fair trial, and many charges are dismissed instead of forcing the accused to plead guilty or sit in jail unproductively. They’ve been so successful they are launching a nationwide project to establish charitable bail funds around the country. John Oliver has also talked about federal courts, where pretrial services assess if the accused is a flight risk. Many are not, and so are released without bail payment at all. Those who the services determine should be assessed a bond are never given one that cannot be paid by the defendant, and in fact in federal cases and the District of Colombia, there are virtually no people awaiting trial because they cannot afford bail, compared to the 450,000 state defendants.

What political challenges are there? The bondsman business has a strong interest in opposing any bail reform, and each state has to update their rules. There are good ideas though: Rand Paul and Kamala Harris introduced a bill that will provide federal grants to states who reform their bail system, although it will likely die in committee. It nonetheless lays the blueprint for how we might tackle this problem from a nationwide perspective in the future.

Additional information:

Organ Markets

Organ markets are extremely unlikely to be implemented soon. Nonetheless, organ market legalization would have by far the most concrete and immediate benefit to the world today, and black market organ markets already exist. Every year over 4000 people die awaiting a kidney in the US, and Medicare spends $89,000 per person on dialysis every year (that’s $34B/year for Medicare, $42B including private spending). The kidney supply is dwindling as cars get safer (many organs are donated by deceased car accident victims), but the vast majority of people do not need both kidneys while alive, and so could sell their kidney to another person with relatively low risk, given compensation. By far the most likely to sell their kidney would be people of lower income, and this is widely touted as a negative for this policy. It is not: blocking the poor from this avenue of income available to them, while simultaneously allowing people in need of kidney transplants to die, is morally wrong.

There is always concern when a transaction occurs between people of different wealth levels. Poor people may not be “forced” into the transaction, but if they have no good alternatives, it seems apparent there is a lack of choice. This is the difference between transactions that are “voluntary” and those that Michael Munger calls “euvoluntary“. Nonetheless, preventing the poor from participating in “voluntary” transactions that others would categorize as “exploitative” does not solve the poverty problem, and in fact makes it worse than letting them participate in the transaction.

Despite this argument, there is a simpler answer to legalizing organ markets: don’t legalize every possible transaction. Law can preclude people below a certain wealth level from selling their kidneys, enforce waiting periods for sellers, create delayed payments, or set prices via formula instead of the market. Yes, these restrictions will severely reduce the benefits that could accrue to the poor who want to sell their kidneys, but anything is better than the total ban we have now. Regulated organ markets could significantly increase the supply of kidneys available, while reducing demand on black markets.

On the demand side, regulation could leave in place the current waitlist structure and avoid rich people jumping the line entirely. This would require the compensation on the supply side to be fully government funded (would still likely save money given Medicare spending on dialysis). A market price on the demand side would have better systemwide benefits, as there would be incentives to improve the market, find efficiencies, etc. However, the potential gains are so large that even a heavily regulated market is worth creating, and relevant legislation already exists.

The political obstacles are clear. Organ markets could be exploitative, while transactions involving human body parts “diminish human dignity” according to the National Kidney Foundation (does death diminish human dignity?). Despite this opposition, there are significant gains to be had from an organ market that cannot be overlooked.

Additional information:

 


Leave a comment on the reddit.

Picture credit: Martin Falbisoner,  US Capitol at dusk as seen from the eastern side, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

Policies We Should Be Talking About – in 500 Words or Less

What policies should be undertaken to improve society? I would hope that would also be the fundamental question of politics, but it often seems to take a backseat to “how do we obtain and hold political power?”

Nonetheless, I like to push back against that worldview, and I hope this blog has somewhat succeeded at doing so. Efficient Advocacy is a way to answer the question of what policies should be undertaken to improve society, while Artificial General Intelligence and Existential Risk analyzes why we might be concerned about extremely high impact, although unlikely, events. There’s also a good discussion of the various aspects to consider when choosing where to expend resources and effort: is the policy widely known or discussed, is it popular, do candidates take a position on this issue, should political processes themselves be reformed before the policy can be implemented?

This post is going to be the first in a recurring group of posts discussing various good policies. For the most part, these posts will discuss policies that are outside of the main political discourse, but ought to be discussed more. I’ll try and note why they may or may not be politically tolerable, but I’ll also try and keep each policy discussion very brief, to 500 words or fewer, with three policies in each post. I’m not ruling out that policies will repeat, but that will depend on the frequency of posts and how good the policies are. Many of these policies may be new or incomplete, but all discussions start somewhere.

Nominal GDP Futures Targeting

The Federal Reserve is the most important institution for macroeconomic stabilization policy. It is not particularly political, it can react quicker than Congress, and it controls the money supply for the most widely used currency in the world. The 1977 Federal Reserve Reform Act gave the Fed the goals of price stability and maximum employment in what is known as the “dual mandate”.  However, these particular goals are often at odds, which means the “correct” policy the Fed should be taking isn’t obvious.

The 90s saw the rise of the Taylor Rule, although Milton Friedman had argued for a rules-based policy regime long before this. The Taylor Rule isn’t an exact rule, but it is an attempt to codify monetary policy to stabilize prices, increasing the real interest rate in response to inflation, and thus targeting a specific inflation level.  Nominal GDP targeting, on the other hand, doesn’t target specific interest rates, but levels of spending in the economy. Scott Sumner, and others at the Mercatus Center have argued that the Taylor Rule is inferior to Nominal GDP targeting because the Taylor Rule relies on retrieving more information, specifically both inflation and the “gap” between real and potential economic output. It’s argued that Nominal GDP is much simpler to get data on in real time, allowing the Fed to apply monetary policy with better understanding of the economy’s current state.

Additionally, NGDP targeting can be enhanced with futures markets, allowing the Fed to have direct feedback from the market on the expected levels of NGDP growth. This helps to solve the Hayekian knowledge problem, by pulling as much data as possible into a single market price. NGDP is also beneficial in that it doesn’t target specific interest rates, just spending levels, so in a low-interest rate environment, like the 2008 recession, the Fed would have had a rule to help guide the level of quantitative easing, instead of just shooting in the dark and hoping it would work.

So what is the political status of this policy? Well it’s pretty technical and so I doubt any voters have or could be persuaded to have much of a view on this. That also means it doesn’t have much political opposition, although conservatives interested in monetary policy don’t love it. The actual legislation that would need to happen would probably revolve around the legalization of NGDP Futures markets, which would essentially be speculative gambling on government data collections. Luckily, from the Fed’s perspective, policy change requires no legal hurdles; the Taylor Rule is a self-imposed policy goal that could be exchanged for NGDP targeting as soon as Fed officials are convinced of its benefits.

To convince them, here is some further reading:

Social Security Identity Theft Reform

Social Security wasn’t meant to be a national ID program, but because it is the only national program everyone is guaranteed to be enrolled in, it has become the de facto national ID number. SSNs can’t be revoked easily like credit cards, they weren’t assigned randomly until 2011, and they are used for authentication despite being universally stored, subjecting them to serious security issues. Identity theft is thus a major problem.

The solution is to make SSNs a public/private key pair. For a 5 minute intro on Public Key Cryptography, check out my post on encrypted communication apps. The basics of SSNs wouldn’t need to change. This cryptography system would utilize a particular type of Public Key Cryptography called Elliptic Curve Cryptography; the only reason this detail is important is that in ECC, any number can be a private key (as opposed to only prime numbers) and keys can be relatively short and human memorizable. I would recommend new SSNs with at least 12 digits to make them harder to guess. SSNs don’t have a checksum digit, so I’d recommend adding that as well.

The technical details of how people would use this number to authenticate themselves would be with the application of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm. For an average person, all that needs to be known is that this algorithm is standardized, like sending a message to an e-mail address; any computer can send a message without it mattering what the message says, since “sending an email to an address” is something all computers know how to do. When a person has to prove who they are to a company or the government, instead of the organization checking their SSN against a database, the person will type in their private SSN, the computer will compute a digital signature, and that will be sent to the organization. The organization would compare the signature to the public key of the person to validate they are who they say they are.

How will they know the public keys? Unlike private keys, public keys can be published freely, so the Social Security Administration can maintain a public database of public keys without issue. Digital signatures can only be computed with private keys, which should be kept secret. The benefits arise because organizations can hold signatures in their databases instead of private keys. Stealing a signature in a data breach would do nothing; today losing SSNs is equivalent to losing your private keys. Problems that could arise involve lack of knowledge on the part of organizations, which could mistakenly store private keys instead of signatures. However, this is already the problem today, so things can only get better.

Potential political pitfalls involve people believing this would be a national ID number, even though SSNs already are, and that it’s difficult to update systems for better security.

Increase the Housing Stock in US Cities

This idea was taken from the Niskanen Center’s Wil Wilkinson, in his response for the single best policy to reduce inequality in the United States. Wealth inequality doesn’t concern me too much, but this policy would solve inequality by improving the options of those least well off, allowing them to move to high productivity cities where high paying jobs are. Wilkinson’s piece is already pretty short, so I’ll be quoting it a bit here.

Wages have barely budged in decades, yet housing costs have soared in the bigger cities in which most Americans live, because restrictive municipal zoning and land-use policy have prevented housing supply from keeping up with demand. When rent takes an ever-larger chunk of workers’ paychecks, savings and wealth accumulation rates go down.

Additionally, the restrictions on housing have caused massive losses in productivity. Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti suggest in this paper that the inability of labor to relocate to high productivity cities has significant effects on GDP growth rates, leading to pretty massive losses in potential productivity. Andrii Parkhomenko suggests that federal policy that incentivizes localities to deregulate housing supply would have a pretty sizeable impact on growth rates. Going back to Wilkinson, he details what this policy might be:
If I were king for a day, I would dangle a huge pot of federal infrastructure money in front of states, and then condition those delicious, fat federal grants on big cities in those states hitting growth targets for housing supply. If big cities fail to add new housing stock fast enough, they and the states they are in will lose many, many, many billions in federal funds for new and upgraded infrastructure.
So why isn’t this happening now? Wilkinson continues:
The political power of NIMBY-ism (“not in my back yard”) has made it nearly impossible to tackle rising housing costs, and the wealth inequality it produces, at the municipal level. But a federal lever can offset the self-seeking forces of NIMBY-ism by giving city and state governments a strong incentive to cut the red tape that keeps housing supply lagging so far behind demand.
I’m skeptical that it will be straightforward to get a federal bill like this passed, although it will probably be easier than in local municipalities. The potential benefits here are far too great to be ignored, but it’s disappointing housing policy isn’t a major issue for most voters today.

 


Leave a comment on reddit.

Narrow Your Gun Debates

This is an update from my post two years ago, since gun debates are in the news again and have yet to be narrowed.

My position on most issues leans towards the ability of individuals to operate without restrictions and thus on firearms, I’m open to robust gun ownership, but I wrote this post to explore the issue more thoroughly. I’m by no means a gun purist, to the dismay of many more intense libertarians I know. If there were more stringent regulations on firearms purchases, changing those laws would not be among my policy priorities.

Nonetheless, many people do feel strongly about gun ownership in the United States, and I wonder if this is a position where efficient advocacy could help us understand whether those feelings are warranted. Unfortunately, gun ownership and gun control are complex issues with many different parts. Continue reading Narrow Your Gun Debates

Free Market Arguments from National Security

Libertarians are not fans of wars or government spending, often for overlapping reasons. Consequently, libertarians often remain uninterested in foreign policy, writing off the entire area of study as something not worth engaging in. Given the current administration has found a way to be both not interested in global affairs (“America First“), while also highly anti-market and pro-government spending (especially defense spending), I believe there might be an alternative that both retains a small government approach to the economy, as well as an important role for American leadership in the world.

The overarching theme here is that China is a rising power, whose outlook is distinct from that of the U.S. and the liberal world order generally. We might have expected China to continue its trajectory towards a freer economy and perhaps even a freer political ideology even 10 years ago, but no longer. Economic reforms touted by Xi Jinping have not materialized, and in fact the Chinese Communist Party and the state have strengthened their hold on the economy and the role of state owned enterprises within it. The Chinese state has maintained a highly nationalistic ideology; American foreign policy has created plenty of messes, but has also done some good in promoting free trade and at least stated goals democracy and respect for human rights. China is looking to offer an alternative to the current American-dominated world, and it is likely one that is worse for the world. American policymakers need to do better. Here are ways they could do so.

Institute Fiscal Discipline

The first point is that any potential policy that looks to achieve American goals vs Chinese goals will cost money. The U.S. government had a deficit of $665 billion last year. This year it will probably exceed $1 trillion. Entitlement spending will cost money, military R&D will cost money, cybersecurity will cost money, projecting power near China will cost money. Yet, we have passed a massive tax cut with no way to pay for it. From a libertarian perspective, unfunded tax cuts could be argued either way; they reduce the tax burden on citizens, but they crowd out investment, don’t actually change the amount of government interference in the economy, and they could lead to higher taxes later on. But from a national security perspective, this fiscal policy is terrifyingly irresponsible.

I find it uninteresting who owns the national debt. Much has been made of the fact that the Chinese government owns large portions of our debt. So what? They will receive future interest payments, but the federal government received cash from outside the U.S. economy it could spend immediately.  That kept interest rates low in the U.S. while Chinese savings and taxes were taken by the U.S. government and used to pay for Medicare, Social Security, and the War in Iraq. This is just a trade and doesn’t even seem like a great investment from China’s perspective. China could dump its American debt holdings onto the market, pushing up interest rates in the U.S., but by flooding the market, they’d also be selling the debt at a discount, writing off the losses. Moreover, China only owns a bit over a trillion dollars of debt, compared to the national debt’s total size of almost $21 trillion.

China could have put that capital directly into infrastructure investment or education or buying off communist party officials to implement more complete market reforms or even malaria nets in sub-Saharan Africa! But instead they bought low yield American government bonds. Seems like a waste of capital in my opinion. Had China not purchased that debt, the federal government still would have issued it, but interest rates would have been higher. On the other hand, the fact that the treasury owes some of this debt to other entities in the government isn’t super comforting. Those government agencies need the cash too; if they aren’t paid, they won’t be functioning, and their employees won’t be working.

No matter who owns our debt, increases in interest payments, whether through interest rate rises or increases in the underlying total debt will make accomplishing any policy goals, including foreign policy, that much more difficult.

Stop Military Counter-Terrorist Interventions

Predictable point of any libertarian foreign policy critique? Yes, but it’s unfortunately unavoidable. The cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars are hard to calculate exactly. Direct appropriations costs were over $1 trillion, but the Afghanistan War remains ongoing (are you sick of winning?). Long term costs including veterans benefits will probably be more than double the direct costs.

The U.S. has a long history of Middle East interventions, and they just don’t have much to show. There are still almost no democracies, Libya, Syria, and Yemen are still divided states living under various governments, Iraq has been suffering under a war with the Islamic State which has cost a hundred thousand lives and displaced millions. The Iranian nuclear deal prevented a theocratic autocracy from obtaining a nuclear weapon, which was said to be only a couple years away.  This would be one of the only bright spots in U.S. policy in the Middle East, yet the President has threatened to tear up the deal.

If China is to be the focus of an American foreign policy, we can no longer afford to sink resources into fighting small terrorist groups that kill 10 times fewer Americans per year than police officers. And despite Trump’s so-called “America First” approach, we are most certainly still wasting resources in the Middle East. The President has carried out operations in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Libya. There are also U.S. forces apparently in Niger, Chad, and Cameroon. Perhaps it’s too late, and China’s expanding influence means the U.S. has to maintain a military presence in developing countries around the world to offer an alternative, but it would have been nice to save those expenditures in the intervening 30 years between the end of the Soviet Cold War and the ratcheting up of whatever this new one is. As it is now, these interventions have left American foreign policy broke.

Reform the Military Budget

As (grudgingly) stated earlier, we will need to fund the Department of Defense if our goal is to geopolitically confront China. Nonetheless, the DoD budget needs serious reform, and perhaps should be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up. The Government Accountability Office (the best government office) has never been able to audit the DoD in over 20 years (see page 3). In 2010, Congress told the DoD it had seven years to get its act together and finances in order. It missed the deadline. This year, the Department will allegedly finally undergo an audit, the report to be released November 15. This is, of course, a step in the right direction, but we need so much more.

The procurement system in the DoD is a complete mess.  The F-35 fighter is way behind schedule and already $400 billion in. Last year, Lockheed Martin produced 66 planes. This exposé from 2014 is deeply disturbing. When the military isn’t pouring money into contractors who are making out like bandits, or paying for tanks it no longer wants nor needs, or blowing up perfectly usable munitions because it can’t keep track of what is needed and where it should go, it dumps its extra assets, including leaving thousands of humvees in Iraq that were eventually captured by the Islamic State.

This military budget needs a reckoning and I’m unsure Trump is up to the task.

Promote Free Trade

China is jumping off the free market ride, and the U.S. needs to pick up the slack. The best way to expand the benefits of markets is to expand markets themselves through trade. More to the point of this post, countries that have a stake in global trade and free movement of goods are much more likely to have economic goals and values that align with the U.S. and its allies. During the Cold War, there was a strong alternative to capitalism and trade, and while most countries didn’t have a “choice”, many countries did exist outside of the free trade liberal market order pushed by the West. After the fall of the Soviet Union, that alternative largely dried up. Today, if you want to have a successful, rich country, freer trade and openness to foreign investment are vital steps to take.

China is much more open to trade and markets than the Soviet Union ever was. Nevertheless, any policies or goals where their motivations are less market oriented and more nationalistic would be exactly where they would differ with that of western values/free trade/liberal markets. This is evident in their extensive protection of Chinese industries and even in non-tariff barriers such as the Great Firewall. To the extent that China seeks to offer an alternative to the United States’ world order, they support protectionism and oppose free trade.

This means increasing trade and integration into the global economy of an allied (or possibly allied) country is the national security interest of the United States. A hypothetical Cuba that was highly integrated into the U.S. economy would be much less likely to be flirting (metaphorically I think) with Chinese dignitaries. The Trans-Pacific Partnership played exactly this geopolitical role, integrating Pacific countries’ economies with the U.S. and its allies, while leaving China on the outside. Yet Trump declared that we should leave the TPP as soon as he entered office, effectively siding against American national security and promoting China’s geopolitical goals.

Tying U.S. policy to free trade and global markets is powerful. It’s very difficult for a country to become rich and successful without at least selling their products on the global market. Access to the global market is thus in every country’s national interest. If U.S. policy is to have open trade, then the American economy will be highly integrated into the global market, meaning it is in the national interest of other countries to gain access to the American market. U.S. trade policy has been to offer access to the American market as part of bilateral and multi-lateral free trade agreements, thus offering foreign countries’ national interest goals if they conform with American goals of free trade and free markets. Integration with the U.S. economically necessitates geopolitical alignment with the U.S. That’s why it’s not just obviously economically stupid to oppose free trade (like crazy stupid), it’s against American national interests.

Allow More Immigration

All of these points have been critiques of the current administration. Some of these might also be critiques of conservative positions generally, but that will depend on to what extent current Republican positions are defined by historical conservative positions or by Donald Trump. This final point may still be the most difficult for conservatives to hear.

As a matter of national security, the U.S. needs more immigrants.

Immigrants are more entrepreneurial. Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes. Economists widely agree that high skilled immigration would benefit the average American, and tend to believe that even low skilled immigration would benefit the average American (although they are more split on the second). If we are concerned about the political effect of immigrants, we should take Rush Limbaugh’s (fairly progressive) approach and allow immigrants to work and live in the U.S., but not vote for a long period of time. Perhaps that’s more politically difficult than I imagine, but it seems like a good compromise from a national security perspective (and voting is sort of worthless anyway). That’s also not the only solution; if today’s political climate means only highly skilled labor can be let in, then at least that should be done. This administration has instead made the H-1B visa process more arduous. Trump’s immigration allies in the Senate have also introduced a bill to reduce legal immigration, including high skilled immigrants.

Immigration is an important engine for economic growth, an engine that nationalistic Chinese policies will have a hard time replicating. America is better able to absorb and benefit from immigration than any nation on Earth; it should apply this strength.

The final point relates back to deficits; entitlement spending is projected to continue to grow and consume the federal budget. The ratio of workers to retirees is dropping. Immigration can help change that tide, keeping our working age population growing, when fewer Americans are entering the workforce, often because families are just having fewer children. It won’t be enough, entitlement reform is important as well, but immigration is tool that must be utilized.

Conclusion

I don’t know how much of a danger China really poses to the U.S. Xi Jinping’s recent power grab is a bad omen though, and a large highly nationalistic protectionist country led by a dictator is certainly worth keeping an eye on. But if Sino-American relations get worse in the next decade, U.S. policy is in a poor position to adapt. Trump has claimed to want to confront China, yet his policies are actively harming our national security.

 


Leave a comment on reddit.

2018 Predictions

Untestable knowledgeable cannot be scientific.  To avoid the problems of retroactively placing events into your narrative of the world, predictions must be laid out before events happen. If you try to use your model of the world to create testable predictions, those predictions can be proven right or wrong, and you can actually learn something. Incorrect predictions can help update our models.

This is, of course, the basis for the scientific method, and generally increasing our understanding of the world. Making predictions is also important for making us more humble; we don’t know everything and so putting our beliefs to the test requires us to reduce our certainty until we’ve researched a subject before making baseless claims.  Confidence levels are an important part of predictions, as they force us to think in the context of value and betting: a 90% confidence level means I would take a $100 bet that required me to put up anything less that $90. Moreover, it’s not just a good idea to make predictions to help increase your knowledge; people who have opinions but refuse to predict things with accompanying confidence levels, and therefore refuse to subject their theories to scrutiny and testability, must be classified as more fraudulent and intellectually dishonest.

Before I take a look at how I did this past year, and see if my calibration levels were correct, I should look at some hard fork predictions I made in July:

  1. There will be a Bitcoin Cash block mined before 12 AM August 2, US Eastern time: 80%
  2. The price of Bitcoin Cash at 12 AM August 2, US Eastern time will be <10% of Bitcoin’s price: 70%
  3. The price of Bitcoin Cash on August 5 will be < 10% of Bitcoin’s price: 90%
  4. The price of Bitcoin Cash on September 1 will be < 10% of Bitcoin’s price: 90%
  5. The value of all transactions of Bitcoin Cash around September 1 (maybe averaged over a week?) will be < 10% of the value of all transactions in Bitcoin: 95%

I did not predict that Bitcoin Cash would have long term staying power. In retrospect, I should have had more confidence that it would be similar to Ethereum Classic, which has remained for over a year now.

Now for predictions made at the beginning of the year:

World Events

  1. Trump Approval Rating end of June <50% (Reuters or Gallup): 60%
  2. Trump Approval Rating end of year <50% (Reuters or Gallup): 80%
  3. Trump Approval Rating end of year <45% (Reuters or Gallup): 60%
  4. Trump 2017 Average Approval Rating (Gallup) <50%: 70% (reference)
  5. ISIS to still exist as a fighting force in Palmyra, Mosul, or Al-Raqqah: 60%
  6. ISIS to kill < 100 Americans: 80%
  7. US will not get involved in any new major war with death toll of > 100 US soldiers: 60%
  8. No terrorist attack in the USA will kill > 100 people: 90% (reference)
  9. France will not vote to leave to the EU: 80%
  10. The UK will trigger Article 50 this year: 70% (reference)
  11. The UK will not fully leave the EU this year: 99%
  12. No country will leave the Euro (adopt another currency as their national currency): 80%
  13. S&P 500 2017 >10% growth: 60%
  14. S&P 500 will be between 2000 and 2850: 80% (80% confidence interval)
  15. Unemployment rate December 2017 < 6% : 70%
  16. WTI Crude Oil price > $60 : 70%
  17. Price of Bitcoin > $750: 60%
  18. Price of Bitcoin < $1000: 50%
  19. Price of Bitcoin < $2000: 80%
  20. There will not be another cryptocurrency with market cap above $1B: 80%
  21. There will not be another cryptocurrency with market cap above $500M: 50%
  22. Sentient General AI will not be created this year: 99%
  23. Self-driving cars will not be available this year for general purchase: 90%
  24. Self-driving cars will not be available this year to purchase / legally operate for < $100k: 99%
  25. I will not be able to buy trips on self-driving cars from Uber/Lyft in a location I am living: 80%
  26. I will not be able to buy a trip on a self-driving car from Uber/Lyft without a backup employee in the car anywhere in the US: 90%
  27. Humans will not land on moon by end of 2017: 95%
  28. SpaceX will bring humans to low earth orbit: 50%
  29. SpaceX successfully launches a reused rocket: 60%
  30. No SpaceX rockets explode without launching their payload to orbit: 60%
  31. Actual wall on Mexican border not built: 99%
  32. Some increased spending on immigration through expanding CBP, ICE, or the border fence: 80%
  33. Corporate Tax Rate will be cut to 20% or below: 50% (it was 21%)
  34. Obamacare (at least mandate, community pricing, pre-existing conditions) not reversed: 80%
  35. Budget deficit will increase: 90% (Not if you go by National Debt increase January to January)
  36. Increase in spending or action on Drug War (e.g. raiding marijuana dispensaries, increased spending on DEA, etc): 70% (hard to say: Rohrbacher AmendmentFY2018 DoJ changes)
  37. Some tariffs raised: 90% (reference)
  38. The US will not significantly change its relationship to NAFTA: 60%
  39. Federal government institutes some interference with state level legal marijuana: 60%
  40. At least one instance where the executive branch violates a citable civil liberties court case: 70% (I made this too broad as I can cite Berger v New York and the NSA violates it every day)
  41. Trump administration does not file a lawsuit against any news organization for defamation: 60%
  42. Trump not impeached (also no Trump resignation): 95%

Postlibertarian

  1. Postlibertarian.com to have >15 more blog posts by July 1, 2017: 80%
  2. Postlibertarian.com to have >30 blog posts by end of year: 70%
  3. Postlibertarian.com to have fewer hits than last year (no election): 60%
  4. Postlibertarian Twitter account to have <300 followers: 90%
  5. Postlibertarian Twitter account to have >270 followers: 60%
  6. Postlibertarian Subreddit to have <100 subscribers: 90%

I missed all the ones I marked as 50% confident, but I’ve realized this category conveys no mathematical information. I could have also listed the predictions as simultaneously saying that there was a 50% chance the exact opposite of the statement occurred, so actually, I got exactly half of them right, and I will always get exactly half of them right. This makes the category completely useless, and so I have decided to avoid posting any predictions of exactly 50% accuracy for next year.

In the other categories:

  • Of items I marked as 60% confident, 10 were correct out of 13.
  • Of items I marked as 70% confident, 5 were correct out of 7.
  • Of items I marked as 80% confident, 9 were correct out of 12.
  • Of items I marked as 90% confident, 7 were correct out of 9.
  • Of items I marked as 95% confident, 2 were correct out of 3.
  • Of items I marked as 99% confident, 4 were correct out of 4.

This may not look great, but is better than last year. Additionally, the big problem is the 95% predictions, which was severely hurt by my poor decision to make predictions about the Bitcoin hard fork, an event which hadn’t really happened before. Ignoring those predictions made in July would change my scores to:

  • Of items I marked as 60% confident, 10 were correct out of 13.
  • Of items I marked as 70% confident, 4 were correct out of 6.
  • Of items I marked as 80% confident, 8 were correct out of 11.
  • Of items I marked as 90% confident, 6 were correct out of 7.
  • Of items I marked as 95% confident, 2 were correct out of 2.
  • Of items I marked as 99% confident, 4 were correct out of 4.

That’s actually remarkably well, with perhaps some 60% predictions that needed more confidence. Moreover, it’s clear I had no business making predictions about Bitcoin with such high confidence, nor did anyone this year. I will definitely be dialing back my confidence levels in Bitcoin price predictions next year, and I’ve focused a bit more of whether Drivechain will be adopted.

Predictions for 2018:

World Events

  1. Trump Approval Rating end of year <50% (Gallup): 95%
  2. Trump Approval Rating end of year <45% (Gallup): 90%
  3. Trump Approval Rating end of year < 40% (Gallup): 80%
  4. US will not get involved in any new major war with death toll of > 100 US soldiers: 60%
  5. No single terrorist attack in the USA will kill > 100 people: 95%
  6. The UK will not fully leave the EU this year: 99%
  7. No country will leave the Euro (adopt another currency as their national currency): 80%
  8. North Korea will still be controlled by the Kim dynasty: 95%
  9. North Korea will conduct a nuclear test this year: 70%
  10. North Korea will conduct a missile test this year: 95%
  11. Yemeni civil war will still be happening: 70%
  12. S&P 500 2018 >10% growth: 60%
  13. S&P 500 will be between 2500 and 3200: 80% (80% confidence interval)
  14. Unemployment rate December 2018 < 6%: 80%
  15. Unemployment rate December 2018 < 5%: 60%
  16. WTI Crude Oil price up by 10%: 60%
  17. Price of Bitcoin > $10,000: 70%
  18. Price of Bitcoin < $30,000: 60%
  19. Price of Bitcoin < $100,000: 70%
  20. Lightning Network available (I can complete a transaction on LN): 80%
  21. Drivechain development “complete”: 70%
  22. Drivechain opcodes not soft-forked into Bitcoin: 70%
  23. No drivechains soft-forked into existence: 95%
  24. US government does not make Bitcoin ownership or exchange illegal: 90%
  25. Self-driving cars will not be available this year for general purchase: 95%
  26. Self-driving cars will not be available this year to purchase / legally operate for < $100k: 99%
  27. I will not be able to buy trips on self-driving cars from Uber/Lyft in a location I am living: 95%
  28. I will not be able to buy a trip on a self-driving car from Uber/Lyft without a backup employee in the car anywhere in the US: 90%
  29. Humans will not be in lunar orbit in 2018: 95%
  30. SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will attempt to launch this year (can fail on launch): 95%
  31. SpaceX will not bring humans to low earth orbit: 60%
  32. No SpaceX rockets explode without launching their payload to orbit: 60%
  33. Mexican government does not pay for wall: 99%
  34. Border wall construction not complete by end of 2018: 99%
  35. Some increased spending on immigration through expanding CBP, ICE, or the border fence: 80%
  36. No full year US government budget will be passed (only several months spending): 90%
  37. US National Debt to increase by more than 2017 increase (~$500B): 70%
  38. Increase in spending or action on Drug War (e.g. raiding marijuana dispensaries, increased spending on DEA, etc): 70%
  39. Some tariffs raised: 90%
  40. The US will not significantly change its relationship to NAFTA: 70%
  41. Federal government institutes some interference with state level legal marijuana: 70%
  42. Trump administration does not file a lawsuit against any news organization for defamation: 90%
  43. Mexican government does not pay for wall 99%
  44. Trump not removed from office (also no Trump resignation): 95%
  45. Democrats do not win control of Senate: 60%
  46. Democrats win control of House: 60%

Postlibertarian

  1. postlibertarian.com to have 10 new posts by July 1, 2018: 80%
  2. postlibertarian.com to have 20 new posts this year: 80%
  3. Postlibertarian to have more hits than last year: 70%

 

*I modified prediction #31 on January 24th from 70% positive to 60% negative. This feels early enough that I can still call it a prediction, and I’m not sure why I was so confident in December when I wrote these.


Leave a comment on reddit.

Electoral Reform Fantasies

It’s been a particularly divisive…month? year? presidency?  Maybe you could even argue this last decade or so has been increasingly polarizing. Last election cycle specifically was unlike anything we’ve seen in the modern political era in terms of highly unpopular candidates running against each other, just look at the numbers:

Trump won with the lowest popular vote percentage of any president since Bill Clinton in 1992, when Ross Perot ran as a third party candidate getting 19% of the vote. In fact, Trump won the lowest percentage of any president in US history when no third party got more than 5% of the vote. Actually, we can go further; every case in which a US president was elected with less than Trump’s 46.1% had a third party getting over 8% of the vote that year. Except 2016.

Thus, we should first acknowledge that political frustration with political parties is nothing new in American politics. The only difference is that this time, there are no other parties to turn to.

This is a problem. Organizations acquire rules and absorb ideas over time. Sometimes those ideas are toxic to the organization, and it is out-competed. I’m mostly imagining the creative destruction of the market, but the same logic can apply to religions, non-profits, and political parties. However, the Republican and Democratic parties have constructed excellent barriers to entry, helped along by American electoral rules. Perhaps these barriers to entry have always existed, but they seem particularly effective at present.

I believe this lack of competition has resulted in two parties that are having difficulty providing a platform for new political ideas or approaches. Without competitive pressures, there is a lack of popular outlet and political advocacy, resulting in frustration. With only two political parties to work with, the idea of a political dichotomy seems inescapable, with every single culture battle melding together to become one gargantuan struggle between two fiercely divided tribes.

This is by no means the only problem we face: sluggish postindustrial economic growth, cost disease, shrinking populations, etc, are all issues. However, it’s quite possible our outdated political system may be stifling any solutions. Thus, I’d like to provide some ideas to fix the way we run our democracy.

Primaries

Presidential primaries seem to be the toughest to fix, but primaries themselves would become much less important with other reforms. Primaries today tend to favor more extremist candidates, while general elections (and, by definition, most people) favor more centrist ones.

One way to solve this is with an open primary, which some states have. California even has an “open blanket” primary, where the top two vote-getters in the primary are on the ballot in the general election, regardless of party. Of course, California does not use such a system for president (Donald Trump would have likely not been on the ballot if they had). There are drawbacks here, as theoretically several centrist candidates could split the “centrist” vote and leave two extremists running in the general election.

One possible way to help improve the presidential primaries might be to rotate the order in which states are the “first” primary. Iowa has often been the first state, but New Hampshire actually has a law that it must be the first presidential primary by a week (Iowa has caucuses, so New Hampshire has decided those don’t count). New Hampshire isn’t a great bellwether: going back to 1980, in election years where a candidate won a competitive primary and then won the presidency (i.e. not 2012, 2004, 1996, 1984 when a sitting president was re-elected), New Hampshire got Donald Trump in 2016, George H. W. Bush in 1988, and Ronald Reagan in 1980. It wrongly selected Hillary Clinton over Obama in 2008, John McCain over George W. Bush in 2000, and Paul Tsongas over Bill Clinton in 1992.

Iowa isn’t any better. It selected Obama in 2008 and George W. Bush in 2000. And it wrongly selected Ted Cruz over Donald Trump in 2016, Tom Harkin over Bill Clinton in 1992 (Harkin was from Iowa, but Paul Tsongas came in second, not Clinton), Bob Dole over George H. W. Bush in 1988, and George H. W. Bush over Reagan in 1980.

So in our first two primary states over the last 30+ years are 3/6 and 2/6 respectively when picking a president from a competitive field. Not great.

There’s some merit to simply holding a national primary all at once. The argument against it is that this may bias the primary system against discovering good lesser known candidates who can campaign in small states more easily than a national stage. However, there’s no evidence indicating such a system of candidate discovery functions with the small states at present. Maybe we need other states that better represent a microcosm of the country. Maybe such states don’t exist.

Ballot Access

Did you wonder why there wasn’t a well-known centrist Republican candidate running as a third party in the race last year? It seemed to be the perfect storm. A significant minority of Republicans were not a fan of the party’s nominee; the party’s previous nominee had called out Trump in an aggressive speech earlier in the year, and the Democrats had nominated a fairly progressive, well known candidate that most conservatives disliked.

Well, it turns out there was one, Evan McMullin, but he was only on the ballot in 11 states, accounting for 84 possible electoral votes.  Why? Because it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to get onto the ballot in most states. The Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson was the only third party candidate on the ballot in all 50 states. In fact, he was the first third party nominee to be on all 50 ballots since 1996. Johnson did better than previous Libertarian Party candidates, and so the LP will not have to spend as much money for ballot access in the coming cycle…yet they are still looking to raise $130,000 this year just for ballot access costs.

This needs to change. There can be no serious competition to the current parties without fixing the ballot access problem.

Take a look at the Wikipedia article on the topic for a good overview. One problem is that major political parties are often exempted from ballot access requirements entirely. Other times, parties that get over a certain percentage of the vote are not required to gather signatures. The signatures are often rejected, so in reality the signature requirements are really 20-30% higher than actually stated. Ohio is an interesting example, as it requires a candidate to file in March, before they are actually nominated at their party’s convention. To get around this, the LP of Ohio filed a placeholder candidate in 2016, and then changed it to Gary Johnson later in the year. Of course, he had to file as an independent candidate since Ohio’s independent requirements are much less burdensome than trying to get the Libertarian Party be recognized as a state political party.

A possible solution would be to at least even the playing field by having a federal law forcing all qualification rules to apply to all parties running for federal office, including the Republican and Democratic parties. This would require them to waste resources on gathering signatures as well. Of course, the major parties could handle large numbers of signatures more easily since they have more resources available, but it still might be difficult enough to push them to reduce the total number of signatures to more practical levels.

More direct reductions in the ballot access requirements would be great as well, but perhaps not as directives from the federal government for the sake of federalism. Of course, none of this will happen, as there are no third party members in office at the national level, and thus no interest in reforming third party access at the state level.

House of Representatives – Single Transferable Vote

This one is totally crazy I know. It would definitely require a change in law, as it’s currently against the rules to have more than one representative from a district. However, I don’t suspect it would be unconstitutional, as each state creates their own districts and runs their own elections.

An STV system is unambiguously better than our current system. Single Transferable Vote is a voting system where you rank several candidates in a multi-member district. The candidates that reach a threshold of support (something like 33% for a three seat district, 25% for a four seat district, etc) are elected. If not enough candidates reach the threshold, unpopular candidates are eliminated with voters’ next choices receiving their votes instead, until all seats are filled. This helps achieve a proportional representation while maintaining local legislators. Currently all Representatives are elected in single member plurality elections, also known as First Past The Post (FPTP). For an easily digestible explanation of STV, watch CGP Grey’s video on the system.

STV systems do well when there are many seats available in a single district. Ireland has used as many as six seats in a single district, Tasmania has used as many as seven. Given the US population of 320 million, the average congressman represents over 700,000 people, with the median being even higher. However, many Americans live in cities much larger than 700,000, and so there are many cities that could support single citywide districts with five or ten congressional seats filled by STV. These could much better reflect the diverse viewpoints of those living in cities. Of course, cities wouldn’t be the only ones who benefit from this, as gerrymandering can also be done to disenfranchise rural voters depending on who’s drawing the boundaries.

Gerrymandering is itself much harder with STV multi-member districts. This itself is an indication that an STV system is better than what we have now. Even if STV is poorly implemented with districts that only have three or four seats, it would be a vast improvement in representation and political competition than what we have today.

This reform is certainly the most important reform for third parties. I don’t think third parties will solve all our problems; other countries have plenty of third parties with little to show. But it’s certainly a necessary step in providing alternatives to the duopoly people are obviously very sick of. Moreover, even if third parties aren’t super successful, the threat of competition will force the two major parties to react. We need a diversity of opinions and new ideas, and without third parties, everything has to be filtered through a party system with vested interests and previous baggage.

President – Approval Voting

The electoral college system is supposed to select a candidate from a wide range of possible candidates, with the college of electors itself imagined as acting as a bulwark against the excesses of democracy. This didn’t really pan out the way the founders of the United States might have hoped. Instead, several elections have resulted in presidents being elected despite other candidates actually receiving a plurality of the popular vote.

Those were:

  • 1824, when Andrew Jackson won 41% of the vote in a split election that was thrown to the House of Representatives since no one had an electoral college majority. The House picked John Quincy Adams, who lost in 1828 to Andrew Jackson. This one is less concerning because there was no clear majority, so while Jackson didn’t like it, the system “worked”.
  • 1876, when Samuel Tilden handily won an outright majority of the popular vote, and probably won the electoral college, but a “bipartisan” commission gave 15 “disputed” electoral votes to Rutherford Hayes instead. I’m still bitter.
  • 1888, when sitting President Grover Cleveland won a close popular vote victory, but lost in  the electoral college to Benjamin Harrison. Cleveland would win the rematch (both popular vote and electoral college) in 1892.
  • 2000, when Al Gore won a plurality of the vote, but lost Florida by a few hundred votes, and so George W. Bush became president.
  • 2016, when Hillary Clinton won a plurality of the popular vote, but Donald Trump won the electoral college.

If we set aside 1824, which I think is reasonable, we have 4 elections out of 58 total in American history in which the electoral college has selected against the popular vote winner, despite only two major candidates in those elections. This is an error rate of 6.9%.

But how to fix this? There have been several times when the electoral college was helpful in sorting out a multi-candidate election.  In 1860, Lincoln won a plurality with only 39.8% of the vote, but the electoral college gave him a majority. From a voting system perspective, this may not be seen as a victory, as Lincoln’s election was so divisive, it precipitated southern secession. However, in 1912, Woodrow Wilson won the electoral college with only 41.8% of the vote in a three way race. 1968 and 1992 may also be considered elections where the electoral college helped establish a winner when the plurality winner only had vote totals in the low 40s.

Moreover, any debate about the electoral college, especially after this most recent election must necessarily have political implications. Nonetheless, I believe I have a system that is strictly better than our current system, preserving any usefulness it has. The proposal is as follows.

Ballots for president will ask two questions, one asking the voter to select all candidates which they will be ok with being president (approval voting) and one asking voters to select their single favorite candidate (first past the post/ our current voting system).

The president will be chosen based on who receives the highest percentage in the approval voting ballots, as long as the percent total is above a threshold. Here I’m recommending 55%. In the case of no candidate receiving above 55% of the vote, the system simply defaults back to the electoral college system using the second, first past the post / favorite candidate vote.

I suspect this would encourage much more positive campaigns, as candidates try to attract as many voters as possible rather than scare voters away from voting from their opponents. It would also make third party campaigns much more useful, as there is less strategic voting with approval voting. If a popular centrist party had a candidate with broad appeal across the spectrum, they could get votes without causing right or left wing voters to fear their votes are “wasted”. Moreover any candidate that wins the approval vote would have a strong mandate with a super-majority of voters supporting them. This is what the electoral college was supposed to bring us, a wide base of support for the president, but this system will guarantee it outright.

In the worst case scenario, if I am wrong about these predictions, the system is simply what we have right now, today. There is no way for it to do worse than our current system since it’s fall back is our current system. In this way, it is also conservative and gradual in its reform, in ways other voting systems are not.

Conclusion

These reforms are likely long shots, but I think it’s undeniable that our current system of government is deeply flawed. These are just my current best ideas, so if you read this and have some voting systems that you think would be more politically palatable or mathematically accurate, be sure to let me know on Twitter, Reddit, or email.

 


Leave a comment on the official reddit thread.

Picture Credit: Vote here, vote aqui. Erik Hersman. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.