End-of-year lists and wiser democracy

Several end-of-year lists for 2013 demonstrate that things are, indeed, getting better and better and worse and worse faster and faster. Personally, one post particularly encouraged me this year. It described WHY Congress can’t generate much policy wisdom and how we could change our political and governance STRUCTURES so that making wise policy was more routine. That would generate bigger and better end-of-year lists in the future, as well as a better world.

Dear friends,

There are so many negative developments, it is hard to track them all.

There are so many positive developments, it is hard to track them all.

Things are, indeed, getting better and better and worse and worse faster and faster simultaneously. And since it is the end of the year, we find competing lists being offered to get us to think one way or another about what happened in 2013.

At the end of this post you’ll find six such lists from eco-progressive perspectives. (If you want to compare them to a more mainstream list, see http://newsfeed.time.com/top-10-everything-of-2013/ or, for libertarian-conservative lists, see
http://beforeitsnews.com/opinion-conservative/2013/12/2013-year-in-review-2779450.html or http://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2013/12/28/nrcc-debuts-list-of-35-biggest-democrat-fails-of-2013-n1764628. If you have a favorite 2013 list, go ahead and add it as a comment on this blog post.)

I notice that much of the good news in the lists below celebrates the successes of activists or the resurgence of activism. Reading over them, I realize how much I would love to live in a political system that doesn’t require activists fighting and making noise to have good things happen – how much I want to live in governance systems that transparently operate on the informed, well-considered will of us all when we come together to co-create healthy communities and a good future for our children.

With that in mind I think that for me one of the best things that happened in 2013 was seeing the article below posted on the progressive news site Truth-Out.org. The article, “If Crowds Are Wise, Why Isn’t Congress?” by Ahmed R. Teleb, describes how both our voting methods and our lack of true diversity in Congress makes it virtually impossible to generate real policy wisdom using our current political system. Teleb describes how better approaches to voting and the use of random selection in democracy – as practiced in ancient Athens – could vastly increase the level of political wisdom that governs us. With such systems, the positive results for which activists now have to battle would become more routine.

A small number of activists on all “sides” – liberals, conservatives, libertarians, greens – are beginning to realize that our systems are STRUCTURED in a way that prevents the emergence of wise policies that the vast majority of us would understand and support. Teleb’s article gives us a glimpse into what’s possible, into directions for structural change, into a different order of social change work whose successes could dominate our end-of-year lists in 2014, 2015, 2016, and beyond.

How different each year would be if we were celebrating victories that change HOW our governments make and implement policies so that our common lives and destinies were at last being shaped by our collective wisdom, our collective aspirations, our collective capacities… and we knew that we would never lose that again.

Blessings on the Journey.

Coheartedly,
Tom

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http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20753-if-crowds-are-wise-why-isnt-congress
(As usual, this URL will give you the article filled with links.)

If Crowds Are Wise, Why Isn’t Congress?
Friday, 20 December 2013
By Ahmed R Teleb, Fila Sophia | Op-Ed

We’ve all heard of the “wisdom of crowds” especially after James Surowiecki’s 2004 best-selling book by that name and Scott Page’s 2007 “The Difference.” A recent entry into the English dictionary, dating from around 2006, is indeed “crowdsource.” In the last decade, every manner of organization has begun using crowdsourcing technology to do everything from write software to proofread text to design armored vehicles. Facebook famously crowdsources the translation of its pages. Remarkably, Iceland recently crowdsourced amending its constitution.

So why does the US Congress, a crowd of 535, seem so remarkably un-wise?

The reason: Group wisdom flourishes under certain conditions, diversity of thought and independence of judgment, virtually impossible under our current plurality voting and single–seat, winner-takes-all (often gerrymandered) Congressional districts.

The good news: This is relatively easy to fix – without overthrowing the government. In order for crowds to be wise, says Surowiecki, individuals in a group should be independent, decentralized, and diverse. The most important of these conditions, it appears, is diversity – diversity in opinion, skill, outlook, background, depending on the issue in question. Surprisingly, Surowiecki, Lou Hong, Scott Page, and others argue, it is more important than a group’s average intelligence and usually more important than the group’s subject matter expertise.

Diversity’s effect flows from the inclusion of varied perspectives that not only bring in more relevant information, but, just as critically, cancel out individual errors. The varied perspectives furnish the group with different decision-making heuristics (rules of thumb) each more likely to grasp certain aspects of a situation. Moreover, well-known and broad diversity makes it more likely that each individual will honestly voice his/her opinion free of social pressure.

In “Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many”, Helene Landemore, a Yale political scientist, extends the idea of crowd wisdom to political theory based on the benefits of diversity. In order for a group’s reasoning to be wisdom – and not its shadow double, groupthink – individuals must independently come to their own judgments as to the merits and demerits of a proposition. She argues that “cognitive diversity” makes crowds more intelligent than individuals and democracy a wise form of government. She cites Surowiecki, Hong, Page, and the Marquis de Condorcet, for many of the (mathematical) arguments on group wisdom.

If democracies have shown themselves to be more successful, or more peaceable, it is due to their tendency to take in more information and take account of more opinions, all thanks to their cognitive diversity. Drawing a distinction between epistemic (knowledge-oriented) and deliberative (discussion-oriented) democracy, she points out two nuances of group wisdom that suggest different procedures. If the object is to predict a measurable result, such as the number of jelly beans in a jar, then simple, secret majority rule would yield the best result. If the objective is to solve a problem, then deliberation among a sufficiently large number of equally powerful individuals would work better, for example, as in a jury.

“Democracy [stems from] a reverent awareness of human folly,” says Paul Woodruff, philosopher and classicist at UT-Austin, in “First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea”, published in 2005. Unlike many books about Athens that wax nostalgic or sentimental, this one tells the history of politics during the 200 year reign of democracy in a sober yet energetic manner. Democracy emerged the way it did, according to Woodruff, not only because the economic and social conditions favored egalitarianism, but because it built a feeling of group solidarity (essential for maintaining a non-professional army) and at the same time ended class warfare between aristocrats and the masses.

With respect to institutions, he also draws a distinction between the majoritarian and deliberative aspects of democracy. The Assembly, open to the first 6000 male citizens, irrespective of wealth, who showed up on a particular day served the majority rule function. Since deliberation was impossible in such a large, noisy crowd, a Council of around 400 was chosen by lot [i.e., random selection] to deliberate different problems. It was the Council that would draw up measures to be “yayed or nayed” by the Assembly at large. Mob rule was avoided through a liberal judicial system, open to all, that was based on a constitution or “the basic laws.” Anyone in the Assembly could sue another for proposing a measure violating the constitution and a judge and jury, selected by lot, would rule on the matter.

Athens, then, ensured “cognitive diversity” through the use of lots and the openness of both its courts and Assembly. Of course, certain public posts had to be based on merit, such as in the treasury or the military. It promoted accountability, through “euthunai”, whereby all persons upon leaving public office, went through a jury-led settling of accounts. If the person was found to have violated public trust while in office they could be punished or ostracized entirely from the community. Remarkably, even experts had to undergo this open, public test that ensured a wide range of perspectives.

What About Congress?

Leaving aside the more entangled issues of independence and decentralization for a moment, the case regarding lack of cognitive diversity is clear.

In the United States, members of both Houses are elected through large, single-member districts based on a first-past-the-post (FPTP) plurality method where the candidate with the most (not usually majority) votes wins. Moreover, districts are gerrymandered (with explicit approval of the Supreme Court) by the party in power, creating “safe districts” for itself. Single-seat, plurality districts means that a party could win millions of votes and still get zero seats, if none of its candidates finishes ahead in any single district.

This type of voting mathematically favors a single or dual-party system. It also happens to virtually shut out minority parties and, more importantly, minority opinions. In other words, our electoral system virtually eliminates cognitive diversity – what may be not just a prerequisite for a well-functioning legislature, but the very justification for democracy as a form of government to begin with.

The disadvantages of plurality voting are so well known in political science that Congress is one of the rare representative bodies in the world that uses single-member plurality districts. Ever wonder why modern democracies are characterized by multiple parties and “governing coalitions?”

Americans Know This Too

The State of Illinois in 1870 adopted cumulative voting for multi-seat districts to deal with recurring deadlock between Democrats and Republicans in its General Assembly. Cumulative voting in a 3-member district, for example, means that a voter could “pool” her/his votes for one candidate and ignore the other two seats. What’s remarkable about the Illinois experience is how quickly (within a couple of elections) diversity came in. This lasted for over one hundred years, and a proposal backed by then State Senator Barack Obama to revive a similar system was recently made.

Several California counties have approved another method that increases access to minority parties and independents: instant runoff voting, or I.R.V. On election day, each voter ranks the candidates (from most to least desirable) on his/her ballot. When no single candidate receives a majority of first-place votes, the last-place candidate is eliminated, giving his/her votes to the others according to voter preferences. The process is repeated until a majority winner emerges.

San Francisco voters adopted IRV in 2002 and began implementing it in 2005 in city council elections. Similarly, Oakland approved IRV in 2005 and first implemented it in 2010. See FairVote.org (an advocacy group that promotes more inclusive voting methods) for more information, especially on instant runoff voting.

Yes, today Congress is dumb, in cognitive diversity one of the dumbest in the world perhaps. But, it can smarten up rather easily on some simple electoral reforms.

[I do not advocate any particular method of vote counting as the solution to all political problems. In fact, I will argue later that voting in-itself tends to introduce systemic bias. What I am saying is that IRV, cumulative voting, and similar methods would be a significant first step in improving our representative bodies. –AT]

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Ahmed R Teleb is a blogger, tutor, political scientist-in-training, author of filasophia.com and curator of twisdoms.com. He is a Fulbright and AmeriCorps Alum and lives in Wisconsin.

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END-OF-YEAR LISTS OF GOOD NEWS IN 2013

5 Reasons Why 2013 Was The Best Year In Human History

10 Good Things About the Year 2013

10 Hopeful Things That Happened in 2013 to Get You Inspired for What’s to Come

13 Major Clean Energy Breakthroughs Of 2013

END-OF-YEAR LISTS OF [MOSTLY] BAD NEWS IN 2013

9 [Climate Related] Reasons Why 2013 Was Not The Best Year In Human History

9 Incredibly Important Things That Happened In 2013 That Most People Aren’t Talking About

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