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.