The Doomsday Scenario

At the end of my paper Ikanocracy: Government by the Competent, (which I am sure you have already read) I challenge readers to come up with a scenario where Democracy would make better decisions than a mature Ikanocracy. There is one scenario I have come up with which I call the Doomsday Scenario. The Doomsday Scenario is any situation where society has to make a decision where, if the wrong decision is made, there is a 50% chance the society would be destroyed.

One example of a Doomsday Scenario would be where a company was being run according to Ikanocracy and a decision had to be made where the right decision is expensive but if the wrong decision is made, there was a 50% chance the company could be bankrupted. Another example, would be where Earth had a world government based on Ikanocracy and a planet killer asteroid was heading towards Earth with a 50% chance that it will strike the Earth, and that if it did hit, all life on Earth would be wiped out. Scientists and engineers get together and come up with a plan to divert the asteroid, (think Armageddon) but it will cost (trillions of dollars) and the plan must be put into effect immediately.

(This scenario is not that far-fetched. Five years ago there was some concern that a huge asteroid called Apophis might strike Earth in 2029. With more precise measurements, it was realized that it would miss, although it will be back in 2036, and its exact trajectory cannot yet be determined. Earlier this year, a much smaller asteroid barely missed Earth.)

A Proposition is put to a vote to implement the asteroid diverting plan. A voter who is concerned with maximizing their vote share might reason as follows: if I vote against the building of the asteroid-diverter, and the asteroid hits the Earth then we all die anyway, but if it misses the Earth then I have saved trillions of dollars and so have supported the right decision and so later on my vote share will increase as society realizes I made the right decision.  My vote share will not decrease in either case, but if I vote for the building of the asteroid-diverter it is 50-50 whether by shares increase or decrease.

In a Doomsday Scenario, there is a 50% chance that the hindsight vote will never happen, and so a citizen concerned with maximizing their vote share vote on a Proposition (regardless of the correctness of their position) based only on how a hindsight vote might play out in the 50% chance it does happen.

I was concerned about this scenario, and considered whether Ikanocracy needed special rules when a Doomsday Scenario was in effect. You might think that special rules would be unnecessary as no rational person would risk their life on a 50-50 proposition, just to get an increase in vote share. But an individual might reason that the Proposition will almost certainly pass anyway, and so their vote shares would not be needed, and so by voting against the building of the asteroid-diverter they get the best of both worlds: the asteroid diverter would be built, but in the event it was not needed their vote share would increase.

One key feature of Ikanocracy is that acting in ones own self interest, (by maximizing their voting share) is also in the best interest of society, but in the Doomsday Scenario, this does not seem to be the case.

Some special rules I considered: (1) in a Doomsday Scenario, no hindsight vote would be taken, or (2) in a Doomsday Scenario, only the best decision makers (i.e. persons whose vote share was in the top X percent of all vote shares) could vote. These special rules offended my sensibilities. On of the key principles of Ikanocracy is its simplicity. Needless complexity should not be added to any governing system, but perhaps it is needed in this case.

I finally reconciled Ikanocracy with  the Doomsday Scenario by realizing that, even if the asteroid missed the Earth, the hindsight vote still might decide that it was the right decision to build the asteroid-diverter, just like we still think that having insurance is a good idea, even when we don't use it. Voters could not make assumptions about the hindsight vote and so, even when making decisions totally based on the selfish motivation of increasing their vote share, might still make the best decision for society.

Is there a scenario where Democracy makes better decisions that Ikanocracy?

Placing Ikanocracy on the Political Spectrum

While spectrum was originally used to describe the continuum of colours in a rainbow, it has since been applied to many areas. In politics we have the political spectrum, which varies from the conservative right-wing through the moderate middle to the liberal left-wing. Is Ikanocracy a left-wing or right-wing idea? In Planking: Ikanocracy Style, I discussed how, in our complex society, the idea of people's political views fitting into two or three "camps" doesn't really make sense. The idea that one's political views can be described by a single number (your coordinate on a one-dimensional  left-right scale) is similarly problematic. Organizations like The Political Compass have refined the left-right spectrum by making it two-dimensional with separate social and economic components. Even that is overly simplistic for describing the complex positions people take on any number of social, economic, environmental, scientific and religious issues. All that said, Ikanocracy is a social policy, so how should we classify it on a left-right social scale?

In general, the Right is conservative in the sense that it is against social change, while the Left is progressive in the sense that it is in favour of social change. Ikanocracy would certain be a change from our current representative democracy, so by that measure it is a left-wing idea.

In general, the Left is in favour of more government while the Right favours less government. Ikanocracy would result in less government, as most of the apparatus of maintaining Houses of Representatives (whatever they are called) would be eliminated, so by this measure Ikanocracy is a right-wing idea.

In general, the Right is in favour of a hierarchical society (even in governance structures) while the Left is more egalitarian. Ikanocracy is certainly non-hierarchical, with a broadly-based decision making structure and no appeals to authorities inherent to the system, so by this measure Ikanocracy is a left-wing idea.

In general, the Left is more concerned with equality of outcome while the Right is more concerned with equality of opportunity. In Ikanocracy, all voters have equal opportunity, but those who make good decisions have a better outcome (in terms of having their vote share increase), so by that measure Ikanocracy is a right-wing idea.

I could go on, but my point here is not to convince you that Ikanocracy is a left-wing idea or a right-wing idea, but rather that such labels are usually irrelevant. In the highly partisan atmosphere of today's politics, such labels are not used constructively to aid in fitting an ideas into contexts, but pejoratively to dismiss ideas without ever considering their merits.

Let's forget about the labels and put aside our ideological differences and reach across the spectrum to unite in working towards a society based on Ikanocracy.

OK, perhaps that last sentence was a bit over the top, or should I say ...  "Over the Rainbow".

Politics without Politicians?

According to Wikipedia, politics is the "the process by which groups of people make collective decisions".  Why is it then, that when I visit The New York Times Politics section, most of the articles are about politicians? The top three headlines in todays' NYT Politics section: "Gingrich push on healthcare appears at odds with GOP",  "As Romney steps quietly, Gingrich duels with others", "Huckabee gets star treatment on return to Iowa". Of the ten main headlined articles in the section, at least six deal with personalities more than politics. Today is no different than any other day in this regard. In much of the media,  political reporting is treated as either celebrity or sports reporting - Who said what about who? Who is winning and who is losing? Whose style is more appealing? and so on.

Politics has been reduced to this sad state partly because we have delegated our collective decision making to a small group (the professional politicians) which has developed into its own society with internal rules and conventions. If you want to join this group, you have to follow the rules and conventions to succeed, and so the society of professional politicians perpetuates itself, often to the detriment of society as a whole.

Were corrupt politicians like Jacques Chirac and Rod Blagojevich products of a political society that lends itself to corruption, or were they corrupt before becoming politicians and saw politics as a way to maximize their "take"? In the end it doesn't matter. Chirac and Blagojevich are just the latest in a long series of corrupt politicians, and the honest politicians who try to change the structure of the society of professional politicians find it difficult to impossible and often end up disillusioned and become outsiders in the political system.

The Canadian charitable organization Samara, which studies citizen engagement in Canadian Democracy, recently released a report "The Real Outsiders: Politically Disengaged Views on Politics and Democracy". It is interesting reading, and they sum up the feelings of many disillusioned citizens with a quote "Democracy's great: its politics I hate".  When you read the report, it is clear that it is the politicians that are hated, while the ideals of Democracy as still valued (check out the word clouds).

Suppose it was possible to achieve the ideals of Democracy: freedom, accountability, human rights, fairness, transparency, equality and so on,  without having the professional politicians which have failed us in so many ways. I say it is possible with Ikanocracy. If you haven't already, please read my paper on Ikanocracy (link at the top of this blog), and if you agree, help spread the word.

Planking - Ikanocracy Style

Do you think we should get tougher on crime? Are you in favour of longer prison terms for offenses, mandatory minimum sentences, tougher penalties for drug possession,  or an end to house arrest? These are a few of the features on the Federal Conservatives Omnibus Crime Bill. All of this despite (1) falling crime rates, (2) over 90% of Canadians reporting they feel safe from crime, (3) at least a half a billion dollar a year price tag (estimated, since the government will not give the actual costs), (4) almost every expert saying these policies will make Canada less safe, and (5) similar policies acknowledged (even by conservatives) to have been a failure in Texas and other American states.

The Conservatives won the last election, and the Omnibus crime bill was part of their platform, and so they say they have a "mandate" to make these changes. However, they won only 40% of the popular vote, and every other party in Parliament was against most of the measures in the Crime Bill so what kind of mandate is that?

Some might want to make an issue of the fact that voter turnout was barely over 60%, but the 40% of Canadians who declined to vote had their chance to be counted, and cannot be now assumed to be in one camp or the other.

This Omnibus Crime Bill is a sad example of the distortion of democracy that is caused by the "first past the post" system of representative government that Canada employs, but there is another failing of democracy here as well. That is the "plank-mixing problem".

Consider the typical political platform. It consists of planks, or positions on issues. There may be planks on the economy (taxes, trade, government spending, etc), the environment (climate change,  clean air and water, population growth, etc.), social issues (crime, gun control, the death penalty, socialized medicine, abortion, gay marriage, drug policies, etc.),  and so on. Is every voter going to totally agree with every plank in some party's platform? That seems very unlikely. What is more likely is that a voter decides on the one or two high-priority issues that are important to him or her, and then votes for the party whose platform most closely aligns with his views on those key issues. Was the Conservatives Omnibus Crime Bill was that high on many people's priority list. I don't think so. So what kind of mandate do they really have?

I already can guess at the counterargument to the "plank-mixing problem". That plank choices are not independent and that an entire platform for a party is the logical offshoot of a few key ideas, and  agreeing with these leads to to acceptance of each plank in the the platform. There is some truth to this, but people are more complex than that. There is so much diversity of persons and opinions in modern society that it is impossible to compartmentalize peoples into two or three camps.  Which camp is for the anti-abortion, libertarian, climate-change activist? Which camp is for the gun toting, pot smoking, fiscal conservative farmer and his same sex partner?

In  a dictatorship, there is one camp chosen by a one person, and everyone is forced to live in it. In a democracy it is better. There are two or three camps, and the competition between them forces them to try to make their camp somewhat livable, but in the end one of the two or three camps is chosen. In Ikanocracy, you get to mix-and-match. Each aspect of the camp is designed by a competitive process, where persons who have displayed proficiency in aspects of camp design have more input. In Ikanocracy we can take our planks, and instead of building one or two pre-fab camps, we can build a mansion.