Obama gains vote share

Back in 2009, President Obama bailed out General Motors and Chrysler. Both companies have now recovered, paid back the money and are profitable and rehiring. Most experts say that Obama's actions saved the auto sector in North America. In Ikanocracy, if the proposition to bail out the auto sector had been put to a vote, we would now be able to have a hindsight vote with a reasonable confidence of the correctness of decision to bail out. Obama was clearly on the right side and his vote share would increase.

Presumptive Republican nominee for President, Mitt Romney, on the other hand is clearly on the record as saying "Let Detroit go bankrupt". His vote share would have took a hit on that one.

However, in American Representative Democracy, sometimes down is up and bankrupt is bailout as Romney is now claiming that "he takes a lot of credit" for the fact the auto industry has recovered.

It takes a lot of chutzpah to make claims so contrary to established fact. We will see if the American public gives him the credit he is taking.

Is everything OK?

Have you heard of folksinger Bob Snider? One of my favorite songs of his is Darn Folksinger. It begins with Bob saying how he was once asked "How come you never wrote any protest songs?" His response: "Since everything is OK." 


While Bob's tongue was firmly planted in cheek, there is a truth in his words. Most people just want to live their lives, and as long as everything is OK, they will let the politicians do what they want, even if they were given no mandate to do it.

Deregulate the banking industry? I don't have a lot of money in the bank anyway, so it doesn't really affect me, so OK.

Unlimited spending by political action groups during campaigns? I probably will be carpet bombed by negative political ads, but I know what's going on and those ads don't influence me, so OK.

Invade a foreign country? I'm not going to be fighting, our soldiers knew what they were signing up for, and they say those foreigners had it coming, so OK.

Mislead the public about the true cost of of some expensive program? The politicians complaining about it would probably do the same thing if they had power, so I can't do anything about it, so OK.

Cut taxes on the rich so that rich billionaires are paying a lower percentage of their earnings in taxes than their administrative assistants?  Hey, maybe I'll be rich someday, and they say those guys will use their tax savings to create jobs, so OK.

Enact a prohibition on recreational drugs (like alcohol or marijuana)?  Some people say it just drives up the prices, which causes addicts to commit petty crime to feed their addiction, and leads to powerful crime gangs who make money trafficking, but that's not in my neighbourhood, and we gotta get that crap off the streets, so OK.

Eventually, as the negative effects of bad decisions accumulate, and people notice that their lives are becoming less OK, there is a backlash. But it would be better if we had some way to not enact bad decisions in the first place. Maybe Ikanocracy?

Oh, and you may know someone who thinks all the above are great ideas. Well I think Bob would agree with me:  What an idiot he is! (and the last line of that song is particularly ironic.)

Good news, politicians aren't having fun!

I was driving in to work yesterday and was listening to the CBC. It was the political panel, a Liberal, a Conservative and a New Democrat, discussing ... and mostly spinning the current events.

It one point, when discussing some recent provincial government cutbacks, the Liberal had the following gem:

"It's not a fun time to be a politician. 
They have some tough choices to make."

I thought that was their job. Perhaps if they had made some tough choices when times were good and actually tried to balance the budget then, or even better, ran a surplus, we wouldn't be in this mess today.  This is one of the premises of Keynesian Economics.  

If politicians really were putting the good of society ahead of their own interests, prudent budgetting would be the norm. Instead, what we see is politicians who bribe voters with their own money, or worse, the money of future generations, with their main goal of perpetuating their rule or the rule of their party.

If anyone has ideas about how we can make our representatives actually represent us, we need these ideas now. If not, how about we move to a system where they are not needed. You know what system I am talking about.

An Ikanocracy Infographic

It appears Ikanocracy is gaining some support. One of its supporters, Ryan, who is a friend of my son Zack, created the following awesome infographic about Ikanocracy.

You can see the full sized version here.  Thanks Ryan.

Bender vs the Board of Education

While I have been pointing out all the problems with our current representative democracy, and trying to convince you that a system based on Ikanocracy would be better, I have to admit there are still a few wrinkles to work out with Ikanocracy. One of the ideas of Ikanocracy is to take advantage of new information dissemination technology, namely the internet, to modernize our governmental structures.

However, there are still some problems with electronic voting, as was illustrated recently in a election for the Board of Education in Washington DC. They thought they had such a foolproof system, they dared hackers to hack it, and it turned out that it wasn't too hard to do, as Bender (the Robot from the TV show Futurama) won in a landslide.

Technological tampering is a serious concern with electronic voting, and we still have no clear solution. What about open source for all software running the electronic voting system, or multiple servers processing the raw data at distributed sites?

Just like "Brown vs the Board of Education" paved the way for integration of schools and the civil rights movement in the US, perhaps Bender vs the Board of Education can be a pivotal moment in the development of tamperproof electronic voting systems and in the Ikanocracy movement.

Too Stupid to Vote

I saw this article : "People Aren't Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say" and I had to bring it to your attention. It certainly fits in with the narrative I have been describing about why Ikanocracy is better that Democracy. We shouldn't make assumptions about what demographic the people who are making stupid decisions belong to, but once a person has a track record of making stupid decisions, we should make their vote count for less.

Subversion

I am really disgusted by the latest affront to Canadian democracy. Apparently, in the last Federal Election, there was a coordinated attempt to mislead voters by phoning them with recorded messages, claiming to be from Elections Canada, and giving them misinformation about location and times of polls. The persons receiving calls seem to have been supporters of either the NDP or Liberal Party. If even a small part of what is being claimed about this robo-calling scandal is true, we have reached a new low in Canadian democracy. A decade ago, the Liberal Party subverted democracy with the sponsorship scandal, and it has led to their near destruction. Now the Conservatives may have done the Liberals one better) or should I say "one worse".

We also had a local case of subversion of democracy closer to home last year. During municipal elections in a nearby small town, there were rumours that the mayor and council had squandered over a million dollars on a concert that wasn't going to happen. During the campaign, the mayor flatly denied these rumours. The mayor was re-elected, but a number of new councillors were also elected and after the election they refused to be part of a coverup and so it came out that the rumours were true. In my opinion, the mayor's deception during the election campaign was far worse than the actual wasting of the money, because it robbed citizens of something more important than money ... their franchise ( i.e. right to make an informed decision about who governs them.)

The Sponsorship scandal and the Robo-calling scandal similarly robbed citizens of their franchise.

Unfortunately there are many other similar cases of abuse. Remember Watergate? (OK maybe that was before your time... look it up.) What happens when politicians are elected under false pretences, or by employing unethical or illegal tactics? It is very hard to get these abuses exposed and addressed after the fact. As we've mentioned in previous posts, one of the problems of a representative democracy is that representatives often put their own interests ahead of the interests of the citizens who elected them, and nothing is more in a politician's own interest than covering their own posterior.  The elected politician often now has the power to delay, obfuscate or stifle investigations. Even if the abuse is able to be exposed and the perpetrators punished, it often takes so long that the politician gets to serve their term, and meanwhile, the business of governing suffers as the politician is diverted by their posterior protecting, and public confidence in the process is degraded.

These abuses keep happening, and no one seems to have a fix for our representative democracy to stop them. In Ikanocracy this wouldn't be a problem, as in general you are voting for ideas, not people, and ideas have no self-interest.

A Foray diverted

Well, our local paper published my letter: ON ITS WEBSITE !?! It appeared there within 24 hours of my submitting it. It wasn't in the paper the next day, or the next, or the next. There is still an outside chance it will appear sometime next week, but that seems unlikely. It appears that it wasn't deemed hard-copy print-worthy. This from a newspaper that still publishes the results of the card games at the local community halls, and has no qualms about regularly printing the incoherent rantings of our local Bible literalist.

Now obviously I think Ikanocracy is a good idea, and at least worthy of inclusion in any discussion about reforming a dysfunctional political system. I figured that I would just start a blog, post my paper,  comment on the improvements Ikanocracy offers, and that the whole thing would go viral. That hasn't happened.

Part of the problem might be that, while I want to get the ideas of Ikanocracy into the public eye, I have no desire for personal fame or recognition and prefer to stay in the background. However, I may need a more aggressive PR strategy. Any suggestions?

A Foray into Mainstream Media

I sent an opinion piece to our local newspaper (The Guardian) last night. A few days ago, a Political Science professor had an opinion piece published in The Guardian about mandatory voting (requiring, by law, all eligible persons to vote in elections). He was in favour.

My piece was partially in response. The gist was that we should think bigger when addressing the problems plaguing our government structure. I  took the opportunity to talk a bit about Ikanocracy and how, in an Ikanocracy, abstaining (not voting) is often a conscious decision and that abstainers serve a useful purpose.

This is my first foray into the mainstream media talking about Ikanocracy and, assuming The Guardian prints my letter, I am interested in seeing the response.

Once the letter is published, I will provide a link in this blog. If it doesn't get published (or gets severely edited), I will publish the letter here in a few days.

Make Room for the Elephant!

What is the biggest problem facing humanity today? While politicians argue over fixes for our economic woes, or the geopolitics of dealing with countries with unpleasant regimes, or various social issues (gay rights, gun control, separation of church and state, etc.),  the elephant in the room just keeps getting bigger and bigger. That elephant is world population.

I am not saying that politicians shouldn't be talking about this other stuff. That is part of their job. But who is looking out for the long-term sustainability of our planet?

The United Nations has just released a report warning that, if changes are not made soon, the world will face severe shortages of food, clean water and energy by 2040. If current growth trends continue, the report predicts that by 2040, world population will reach 9 billion people, with a third living in endemic poverty.

This warning is nothing new. Over 200 years ago, when world population was just passing one billion, Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population where he noted that populations tend to grow exponentially until checked by disease or scarcity (or other unpleasant outcomes like war). Malthus argued that to advance towards a utopian society, we should enact voluntary checks on population.

In 1966 Harry Harrison (one of my favorite authors) wrote Make Room! Make Room! about then-future 1999 when world population was seven billion, and scarcity and eroding standard of living was the norm. As you can see from the graph below,  Harrison was off by 13 years ( as we just reached seven billion this year), but our standard of living is still increasing.

Why haven't the Doom and Gloom scenarios come to pass? The reason is science and technology. The world is in a race between the ecological demands of an ever increasing population and the ability of scientists and engineers to come up with new ways of providing plentiful food, water and energy while mitigating the ecological damage. If this race continues , it will almost certainly soon involve direct intervention in managing our atmosphere (carbon sequestering, ocean fertilization, mirrors in space, etc.) and genetic manipulation of our food supply, and other controversial actions.

It is a bit ironic that the forces that are the most resistant to getting off this race track, by beginning to do as Malthus suggested and  manage world population level, (mainly religious groups like the Catholic Church) have historically been the most anti-science and anti-technology. You could say that Science is enabling Religion.

What actions could be taken? Obviously, universally obtainable contraception and sex education should be a start. Also, just Education in general (especially of females) is a good idea, as the higher the education level of a society, the lower its birth rate. Also, perhaps we should specify a target population for the Earth. My opinion is that we are at the point now where zero population growth is necessary, with perhaps even planning a gradual decline in population until we reach 6 billion again. If we wait too long, even more severe actions might be necessary.

No politician wants to tackle these issues because they see no political or personal upside. Any benefits accrued from taking action on these issues would be long-term and felt long after the politician has left office, while all the negatives from enacting rules and regulations to move towards sustainability would be short-term.

Our current political system is just not configured to tackle long-term problems. It mainly is reactive and responds when a problem becomes a crisis. Ikanocracy is designed to take a more long-term view.

If we wait until this problem becomes a crisis, we have waited too long.

Ikanocracy Word Cloud

Here is a word cloud I made of all the words used in my blog so far.

Dictatorship

I posted an item on reddit about Ikanocracy with a link to this blog. I was trying to generate some publicity and discussion for the ideas about this alternate form of government. Unfortunately, my item was immediately autobanned. Not because of political censorship (I am told), but because  this is common with first posts to reddit, especially those which contain links. By the time I got the mod to unban my post, it wasn't considered new and so the reddit ranking algorithm buried it. I only got one comment.

That comment was about the possibility about Ikanocracy leading to Dictatorship. The commenter was concerned that if any one person ( or a bloc of persons) accumulated more than 50% of the vote share, from that point on we would effectively have a dictatorship, since they could not only force any decision to go their way, but they could also control the hindsight votes which determines the distribution of future vote shares.

How likely is this scenario? Let's do a quick, back of the envelope calculation. Suppose our Wannabe Dictator (or WbD) starts with one vote share (like every citizen in Ikanocracy) and in their march to world domination, systematically increases their vote share by making good decisions. Suppose WbD make 100 good decisions in a row, and each time WbD's vote share increases by 10%. Then WbD would have (1.1)¹⁰⁰,  or 13,780 vote shares. This is a lot of vote share, and would certainly make WbD an influential decision maker, but nowhere near enough to become dictator in country with a population over 30,000,000 (Canada) or 300,000,000 (US) (and in the meantime, society has benefitted by WbD's contribution to 100 good decisions.)

If you were going to implement an Ikanocratic decision-making process in a smaller group, then you would probably have to institute a cap on vote share. You could say that no person could have more than 10% of the vote share. Such a rule could be added in general, but doesn't seem likely to be needed in large population societies.

But, if there is even the slightest chance that Ikanocracy would lead to Dictatorship, should we take the chance? Well, you could argue that we already live in a (semi) dictatorship now. Consider the following quote:

Although we like to think of ourselves as living in a mature democracy, we live, instead, in something little better than a benign dictatorship, not under a strict one-party rule, but under a one-party-plus system beset by the factionalism, regionalism and cronyism that accompany any such system. Our parliamentary government creates a concentrated power structure out of step with other aspects of society. For Canadian democracy to mature, Canadian citizens must face these facts, as citizens in other countries have, and update our political structures to reflect the diverse political aspirations of our diverse communities.

Was this from some left wing radical manifesto? No, it was from an article written in 1997 by none other than Stephen Harper, the current Conservative Prime Minister of Canada. Unfortunately, his enthusiasm for updating our political structures disappeared after he achieved power, and he has continued and even increased the concentration of power in the Prime Minister's office that was a legacy of the the Liberal Party.

What about in the USA? Recently Republican Newt Gingrich made some disturbing comments saying that, as President, he would impeach judges whose decisions he thought were wrong. A historian like Gingrich should know that the three branches of government in the US were designed to be independent for a reason: to ensure that power does not concentrate in the hands of any one branch, especially the executive branch (i.e. the President). Having achieved independence from one autocratic system, the founding fathers were careful to put checks and balances into their Democracy to ensure no Dictatorship took root in the United States.

Whether in a Democracy or an Ikanocracy, as Thomas Jefferson said,  The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

Occam's safety net

One of the key design principles of Ikanocracy is simplicity, or more precisely minimal complexity. The world is a complex place and complex problems sometimes require complex solutions, but we shouldn't add unnecessary complexity to our solutions. Occam's Razor is the principle that when choosing between two solutions, all other things being equal, you should choose the simpler one.

We could apply this principle to other government functions besides decision-making. Consider the various government programs that disburse monies to citizens: welfare, unemployment insurance, social security, old age pension,  children's allowance and probably a number of other minor programs as well.  There seems to be a lot of overlap, bureaucracy, and unnecessary complexity (as well as unintentional social engineering) in these programs.

With these programs we are trying to solve the problem of ensuring that no citizen goes hungry, or lacks shelter in a developed country. I don't know the history of how all these programs developed, but I can imagine that people saw some segment society that were lacking these basics, and so developed a program to help them. Then some other segment was still lacking, so another program was developed to help them. The process continues, with add-ons to old programs and additions of new programs each time a segment of the populace needed help.

As an Ikanocrat, I am willing to be guided by any decision reached through an Ikanocratic process, but   if I was designing a system ensure that all members of society has access to a reasonable level of support, I would not do it through a patchwork of programs, but through a minimum guaranteed income, which is managed through the income tax system.

It would only require some minor changes to the tax system.  Instead of non-refundable tax credits, people would get refundable tax credits (i.e. the minimum guaranteed income). At age 18, citizens would receive $X per year. Any additional income earned would be taxed (on a progressive scale)  until a person earning $Y dollars per year would have their minimum guaranteed income taxed back. The actual values of X and Y could be determined by the government of the day, and could be tied to the per capita GDP (Gross Domestic Product), so the better the country does economically, the better its lower end does.

We could then get rid of all the bureaucracy associated with the patchwork of programs, which would save money, and the increased transparency and simplicity of the system would result in increased confidence in the fairness of the system. For those who say we shouldn't just be giving money to people I would counter that we already have a de facto minimum guaranteed income anyway, except for a small marginalized segment of society that has fallen though the cracks of our current social safety net. I'm sure that right now some bureaucrat is designing a program to add complexity to the system and catch some of these people who have fallen through the cracks. Let's cut through this patchwork with Occam's Razor and replace it with Occam's safety net.

The Money Infection

The corrupting influence of big money is infecting our democracy. In the US Republican Primaries, media stories about how much money each candidate has raised seem to outnumber stories about issues. Today, Newt Gingrich received a five million dollar contribution from a billionaire casino owner. Barack Obama is sitting on a war chest of 155 million dollars and expects to raise 750 million dollars for his reelection campaign.

Who is donating all this money? A lot of rich people and rich corporations. And what do they expect in return? Usually they want their political agenda promoted, even if it is not in society's best interest. A recent article in The Guardian by Bill McKibben, titled Time to get corporate cash out of democracy highlights a number of scandals where corporations received special favours from politicians they supported. At least, they should have been scandals, but this stuff seems to have become the norm, and people have gotten tired of living in state of permanent outrage, and so have tuned out.

How do we treat the corrupting infection of money in a Representative Democracy?  The problem seems to be chronic (although the symptoms have worsened lately). By concentrating the decision making power in the hands of a few persons,  we make it easier for the infection to take hold, as it has only to target a small number of persons to achieve a foothold.

In Ikanocracy, he decision making process is widely based, and so without any special rules it is already resistant to the corrupting infection of money.

Parallels and Possibilities

I just read an interesting  article by historian Dominic Sandbrook about the parallels between 1931-1932 and 2011-2012. Then, as now, the economy was in the tank, financial institutions were failing, unemployment was high, mainstream politicians seemed impotent and unable to solve the problems and there were numerous demonstrations and marches by angry citizens.

Eighty years ago, people searched for cures to the maladies of society, but unfortunately many of the cures, like Fascism and Communism, ended up being worse than the disease. Luckily, we have the history of that period as our guide, and are unlikely to repeat those failed experiments. But people are still searching for solutions. Most of these involve creating additional laws, or other forms of adding additional complexity to our already complex democratic system.

What other options are out there?  Well, we could take advantage of new technologies (the internet) and paradigms (social software) to create a new political system. This is what Ikanocracy does.