Tag: politics

Arrow’s Theorem

What Arrow showed is that group choice (aggregation) is not like individual choice. Suppose that a person is rational and that we observe their choices. After some time we will come to understand their choices in terms of their underlying preferences (assume stability–this is a thought experiment). We will be able to say, “Ah, I see what this person wants. I understand now why they are choosing in the way that they do. If I were them, I would choose in the same way.”

this is why we can’t have nice things: even rational actors lead to absurd group choices.
2022-03-24:

When people make mistakes, they usually try to make better decisions subsequently. To do this, you have to acknowledge that you made a wrong choice. Next, you have to examine the process by which you made the choice, in order to theorize about what would have produced a better outcome. The next time you face a similar decision, you try to correct your decision-making process.

People can experience bad outcomes when they vote. Your preferred candidate or policy could lose. Or your side could win and produce bad results. But chances are, you will not go through an error-correction process. Very rarely will a voter say, “I made a mistake. What went wrong? I need to review how I made my choice, so that I do things differently the next time.”

There are 2 reasons that voters do not engage in error correction. One reason is that 1 person’s vote almost never affects the outcome of an election. It does not pay to invest effort in figuring out what went wrong and trying to correct it. Another reason is that political outcomes are more complex than personal outcomes.

Destroy police unions

The corruption and incompetence of the NYPD is staggering.

2 years ago, a police officer in a Brooklyn precinct became gravely concerned about how the public was being served. To document his concerns, he began carrying around a digital sound recorder, secretly recording his colleagues and superiors. He recorded precinct roll calls. He recorded his precinct commander and other supervisors. He recorded street encounters. He recorded small talk and stationhouse banter. In all, he surreptitiously collected 100s of hours of cops talking about their jobs. Made without the knowledge or approval of the NYPD, the tapes—made between June 1, 2008, and October 31, 2009, in the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant provide an unprecedented portrait of what it’s like to work as a cop in this city. They reveal that precinct bosses threaten street cops if they don’t make their quotas of arrests and stop-and-frisks, but also tell them not to take certain robbery reports in order to manipulate crime statistics. The tapes also refer to command officers calling crime victims directly to intimidate them about their complaints.

2014-10-25: NYPD still as corrupt as ever, unsurprisingly, by the canonical expert Frank Serpico.

40 years on, my story probably seems like ancient history to most people, layered over with Hollywood legend. For me it’s not, since at the age of 78 I’m still deaf in one ear and I walk with a limp and I carry fragments of the bullet near my brain. I am also, all these years later, still persona non grata in the NYPD. Never mind that, thanks to Sidney Lumet’s direction and Al Pacino’s brilliant acting, “Serpico” ranks No. 40 on the American Film Institute’s list of all-time movie heroes, or that as I travel around the country and the world, police officers often tell me they were inspired to join the force after seeing the movie at an early age. In the NYPD that means little next to my 40-year-old heresy, as they see it. I still get hate mail from active and retired police officers.

2015-06-09: I don’t agree with all the proposals, but yes to killing police unions.

History offers evidence of the intractability of the problem of police violence. What should we do then? Quite simply, we must end the police: Ending cash bail, Overturning police bills of rights, Abolishing police unions, Crowding out the police in our communities, Disarming the police.

2014-12-22: So awkward for De Blasio to crush a union that is out of control

He is not running the city of New York. He thinks he’s running a fucking revolution

2014-12-24: Collective bargaining for government jobs is absurd, and needs to be eradicated.

If police officers were at-will employees (as I’ve been at every job I’ve ever held), none of the cops mentioned above would now be walking the streets with badges and loaded guns. Perhaps one or 2 of them deserved to be exonerated, despite how bad their cases look. Does the benefit of being scrupulously fair to those individuals justify the cost of having more abusive cops on the street?

I’d rather see 10 wrongful terminations than one person wrongfully shot and killed. Because good police officers and bad police officers pay the same union dues and are equally entitled to labor representation, police unions have pushed for arbitration procedures that skew in the opposite direction.

2015-12-04: Police unions are the worst and the ones most in need of being destroyed.

The Chicago police union has filed a motion to allow the department to erase any complaint record of police misconduct that’s older than 4 years. The union is asking for this right just as the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times have filed in court for the right to data on police misconduct complaints going back to 1967 —which the city already agreed to fork over in an earlier consent decree. It will be interesting to see how the city can forge a new early-warning system if it can’t actually track early warnings from years back.

2016-02-07: Yet more reasons:

Contracts between police and city authorities, leaked after hackers breached the website of the country’s biggest law enforcement union, contain guarantees that disciplinary records and complaints made against officers are kept secret or even destroyed.

2016-07-15: There won’t be any progress with police violence until police unions are destroyed.

Let’s take the counterfactual but very similar “In Defense of Military Unions.”

Doesn’t sound like a great idea, does it? The reason is simple: militaries and paramilitary organizations like the police are coercive instruments of state power. Since at least the 1500s, It’s been recognized as fundamentally important to stability that that coercive power remain in the hands of the state. And since the Roman republic, it’s been recognized as critically important to democracy that that power be utterly subordinate to democratic institutions.

This is why the military offers recruits only 2 options: take the terms which are offered or remain a civilian. It’s why the military severely curtails soldiers’ civil rights. Because everything we care about in our society depends on the consensual illusion that political power comes from somewhere other than the barrel of a gun.

Police are less dangerous, but not much less. Police unions create contractual relationships with the state. Those contractual relations have the force of law. And that private law supervenes on democratic attempts to create police accountability, because — in criminal matters — the management of police departments is the very authority to which the police are accountable.

In all other labor organizing, labor and management are negotiating over the usual subjects of contracts: how much is labor paid; what are the conditions of retirement or disability; how many hours are worked, and when. But the primary subject of negotiation between police unions and city governments is policing strategy and citizens’ civil rights.

It is utterly impermissible for governments to negotiate with private parties about civil rights in a way that actually supervenes on public law.

2018-01-24: The reasons to disband these corrupt organizations are mounting.

The city’s police-officers’ union is cracking down on the number of “get out of jail free” courtesy cards distributed to cops to give to family and friends. The rank and file are livid.

2021-10-13: There’s also rampant overtime fraud:

The NYPD has blown past annual budgets every year for at least 20 years, almost entirely due to overtime costs. Those extra hours also drive up the city’s pension obligations. In fiscal 2020, New York City police officers logged more overtime hours than any other big city in the US, and violent crime rates still went up.

Engineering Leadership

The senior body of China’s Communist Party is the Politburo’s standing committee. Making up its 9 members are 8 engineers, and 1 lawyer. This is not a relic of the past: 2007 saw the appointments of 1 petroleum and 2 chemical engineers. The last American president to train as an engineer was Herbert Hoover. Why do different countries favor different professions? And why are some professions so well represented in politics?

The presence of so many engineer-politicians in China goes hand in hand with a certain way of thinking.

Consanguinity

Royal inbreeding

From 1516 to 1700, it has been estimated that over 80% of marriages within the Spanish branch of the Habsburg dynasty were consanguineous.

2013-04-26: Cousin Marriage and Democracy. I had no idea this was so common in some parts of the world.

Approximately 0.2% of all marriages are consanguineous in the United States but in India 26.6% marriages are consanguineous, in Saudi Arabia the figure is 38.4% and in Niger, Pakistan and Sudan a majority of marriages are consanguineous. A recent paper finds that consanguinity is strongly negatively correlated with democracy.

2016-03-07: Middle east Cousin marriage. This explains a lot of problems.

Once common practice in Western societies, estimates suggest the Middle East, along with Africa, continue to have the highest levels in the world. In Egypt, around 40% of the population marry a cousin; the last survey in Jordan, admittedly way back in 1992, found that 32% were married to a first cousin; a further 17.3% were married to more distant relatives. Rates are thought to be even higher in tribal countries such as Iraq and the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Kuwait.

2018-03-03: US Cousin Marriage

Taken together, the data show a 50-year lag between the advent of increased familial dispersion and the decline of genetic relatedness between couples. During this time, individuals continued to marry relatives despite the increased distance. From these results, we hypothesize that changes in 19th-century transportation were not the primary cause for decreased consanguinity. Rather, our results suggest that shifting cultural factors played a more important role in the recent reduction of genetic relatedness of couples in Western societies.

2022-12-06: The MFP may have been a big part of why Europe developed differently

the Church’s “Marriage and Family Plan” (MFP), which included features like monogamy in addition to an obsession with preventing broadly-defined incest, had important downstream consequences in practically every aspect of life. Young men would be more likely to find marriage partners since a few high-status leaders could not claim a disproportionate share of women, creating incentives for individuals to be more hard-working and less violent. The power of elders was further reduced by an inability to arrange marriages in ways that would keep wealth and resources within the same family, unlike in Muslim societies where the son of one brother would often be wedded to the daughter of another. When incest taboos extended to 6th cousins, an individual may have had 10k relatives that were off limits in the marriage market. This wouldn’t be a big deal in a modern city, but when most people lived in small villages it would have created major difficulties for anyone trying to find a spouse. This led to a population that was more mobile, less embedded in kinship networks, and ultimately more individualistic.

What is sure to be one of the most surprising findings discussed in the book relates to how rare the individual components of the MFP have been throughout history. According to one database looking at 1200 societies before industrialization, only 5% had newlywed couples start their own households, 8% organized domestic life around nuclear families, 15% had only monogamous marriages, 25% had little or no cousin marriage, and 28% had bilateral descent, meaning that lineages are traced through both the mother and father. Christian Europe under the MFP had all five, which wasn’t true for over 99% of other societies. Today, after the rest of the world has been heavily influenced by Western culture, given its success, it’s easy to lose sight of how unique its mating and familial practices have been in the larger historical context.

People prone to individualism would go on to achieve high rates of urbanization and form guilds, universities, marketplaces, and other voluntary institutions that were based on principles of mutual self-interest and competed with one another. Ultimately, Western Europe would conquer the world on the back of the strengths of these institutions, with democracy and capitalism being arguably the most important among them.