Best way to pick legislators? At random.

Byoliveridley

While discussing options for Canada’s broken senate, I advocated for making senate selection random, an idea near and dear to many science fiction acolytes.  I believe this to be a superior alternative to the current lot of retired civil servants, failed politicians, washed up broadcasters, privileged elite, and a few decent people that currently make up the Canadian Senate. Here’s a study (pdf) that says a mix of random legislators makes for good policy.

The Abstract

We study a prototypical model of a Parliament with two Parties or two Political Coalitions and we show how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature, in terms of both the number of laws passed and the average social welfare obtained. We also analytically find an ”efficiency golden rule” which allows to fix the optimal number of legislators to be selected at random after that regular elections have established the relative proportion of the two Parties or Coalitions. These results are in line with both the ancient Greek democratic system and the recent discovery that the adoption of random strategies can improve the efficiency of hierarchical organizations.

Need to move those people from the bottom left to the top right

Good policy is supposed to maximize social gain. It is difficult for legislators to make good policy in the absence of personal gain, so everyone needs to be in the upper-right quadrant of the figure. The simulation works by denying any party a majority unless they can appeal to a number of independent, random actors. Since these legislators can’t be re-elected and have little to gain personally, they will make decisions based more on social gain than personal gain, and move things upward and right. The simulation also found that having no parties and complete independence conferred little advantage. The optimum was a little more than half of the legislature to be “independent” and “random”.

This is only a simulation. In practice, few people are independent and promises of future positions and future prestige will presumably influence independents to vote to preserve privilege rather than maximize “social good”. But the current system of a very small minority (1-2% of Canadians belong to a party) of people of a very specific kind passing policy based on diktats from the prime minister is not a good system anyway.

So, a senate that is part “elected” and part random would presumably provide the best outcome. A completely lottery senate would be a great, great improvement to the Canadian senate as it exists today. I am glad there’s some research to back my pet proposal.

via Washington Post – Study Says Pick some Legislators Randomly

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    India Debates Fitness of Woman Set to Be President

    Byoliveridley

    I remember her vaguely from being immersed in Indian politics a lot more in the past than I am now. She’s just another politician, member of the Congress Party, the corruption, nepotism, etc., well, par for the course. Just because she’s a woman does not make her immune. There’s a long history of corrupt politicians becoming president of India (See Singh, Zail!). Indira Gandhi started the rather convenient process of hiring pliant presidents, it was in general a good power consolidation move. It just so happened that the outgoing president, Dr. Abdul Kalam was a nuclear scientist and technocrat, not a career politician.

    It looks like the Congress party’s just returning to its politician president ways!

    India Debates Fitness of Woman Set to Be President – New York Times

    India’s first female president is likely to be voted into office on Thursday, but this milestone event has been overshadowed in recent weeks by an unusually savage debate over whether she is fit to become head of state.

    When the leader of the governing Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, announced in June that Pratibha Patil, 72, was her party’s official choice for the post, she added that to have a woman president would be a matter of “great pride” and a “historic moment in the 60th year of our republic.”

    But Gandhi’s attempt to promote this as a triumph for gender equality has won Ms. Patil little support.

    Instead, the pre-election campaigning has been dominated by a series of vitriolic attacks on Ms. Patil’s credentials.

    The opposition has alleged, among other things, that she shielded her brother in a murder investigation, protected her husband in a suicide scandal, and was herself involved in numerous financial irregularities.

    And then there are Ms. Patil’s own peculiar statements — most notably, her revelation that she had heard the voice of a dead guru predicting she would rise to power.

  • Canadian Elections October 14th?

    Byoliveridley

    Prime Minister Stephen Harper will later this week ask Governor General Michaëlle Jean to set Oct. 14 as the date for the next federal election, senior government officials said Monday.Harper will visit Jean at Rideau Hall, her official residence in Ottawa, to establish the election date, the officials told the Canadian Press, speaking on condition of anonymity.The prime minister will declare that, after having met with all three opposition leaders over the last few days, he no longer has the confidence of Parliament, the sources said. As per tradition, it will then be up to Jean to decide whether to dissolve Parliament and set the election date.

    Harper to ask GG to set Oct. 14 as election date: sources

    Just like most things Canadian, our elections will also be about 2 weeks before the American one, it’s Harper vs. Dion, also starring the NDP, the Bloc Quebecois and the Green Party. Climate Change will be front and centre, thanks to Dion and the Liberals’ Green Shift campaign:

    Our plan is as powerful as it is simple. We will cut taxes on those things we all want more of such as income, investment and innovation, and we will shift those taxes to what we all want less of: pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and waste.

    Energy costs are soaring all over the world. While energy prices continue to rise, we need to encourage energy efficiency. We need to change wasteful habits. We need to discourage polluting activities.

    In other words, a kind of Carbon Tax similar to the one the BC provincial government instituted this July. Of course, Harper called this a tax increase and has forecast gloom and doom for all Canadians if something like this happens. As such, his attacks have been successful and support seems to be dropping.

    It’s going to be very interesting and very tight, with the Tories and Liberals both polling in the Mid 30s. Expect yet another coalition government. The Greens could affect results in certain ridings, always good to follow. I hope to learn a lot about Canadian politics from watching this election. The system is quite like India’s and as such, is easily understandable.

    Also expect no soap operas, this is Canada, folks, if you were expecting the Jerry Springer feel to this weekend’s goings on South of the border!!

  • Palin's E-Mail Practices and Accountability

    Byoliveridley

    McCain's vice-presidential pick apparently used the accounts to communicate with key aides about government business

    ABC News: Experts Don’t Yahoo Over Palin’s E-Mail Practices.

    If I were to use my gmail account for official company business, I would get into all kinds of hot water. Many companies would consider it a serious violation of policies and procedures. Yet Americans want these people running their country? No standards whatsoever.

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    Fun with maps: BC Smart meters and the 2013 election

    Byoliveridley

    SmartMeterVotingMapI have been MOOC’ing this summer and learning how to do maps. Geography as an adult is much more fun than my 10th grade geography class.

    Chad Skelton over at the Vancouver Sun intrigued me with his data retrieval and mapping of British Columbia’s Smart Meter uptake. if you’re not from BC, here’s a short intro (#BCpoli-aware feel free to skip the next two paragraphs).

    BC Hydro is the government owned (Crown Corporation) utility that produces and distributes electricity for the province of British Colombia in Canada. In 2011, BC Hydro announced its intention to spend $$$ upgrading all its electricity meters to “smart meters”. These meters are capable of being read via wifi by meter readers, and potentially also give BC residents the ability to monitor their electricity usage in near-real time.

    Many concerns were raised about the smart meters. One was about the costs of the program vs. perceived benefits. The others, which gained traction were around an emerging movement in BC connecting wifi, cell signals and wifi-enabled smart meters with a whole variety of health effects. While few, if any of these health concerns have been actually causally linked to smart meters, or even to the amorphous descriptor “wifi radiation”, these health concerns have gained traction even among official bodies such as the Union of BC Municipalities, municipal councils and school boards. The BC provincial election in 2013 was a chance for people to voice their concerns. The opposition parties all brought the issue up during canvassing.

    For my peer assessment mapping project, I wanted to see if areas of relatively high smart meter refusal were correlated or co-located in any way with voting against the ruling BC Liberals.

    This is the map I made, my first ever map not scrawled on paper.


    View Larger Map

    Reading the Map

    The electoral districts are colour-coded by BC Liberal Party percentage, darker means higher vote for the BC Liberals. I chose this rather than “who won” because I was looking more for an anti-BC Liberal effect. I will, at some point in time, try to overlay “who won” as well. The smart meter refusal data is in three different coloured and sized circles. Large and red means higher refusal, and small and green means low refusal. This is a hybrid of a graduated circle symbol scheme and a diverging colour scheme. Clearly, using points to represent areas is a big limitation, but it is sufficient for a quick peek.

    Anything to See?

    • An overwhelming majority of people had smart meters installed, > 90% in most places. So, BC Hydro’s brute force, no options, default installation plan was mostly successful
    • Places of higher than normal refusal tended to vote against the BC Liberals. I believe this had more to do with existing anti-BC-Lib tendencies influencing smart meter refusal rather than the other way around.
    • Urban centres like Victoria and Vancouver had relatively low rates of refusal. Is this because of higher apartment proportions, or because smart meter refusal was restricted to a small number of high information, highly motivated individuals whose number varied by location and whose numbers in places like Victoria were muted by larger populations?. Note that my home area of Victoria had the most (7300) rejected smart meters, even though the percentage is small. The ageing white (l)iberal enclave of Saltspring Island (Ganges), aka hippieville, Canada had by far the highest refusal percentage. So, is this smart meter refusal map mostly a hippie population distribution map?

    The take home message for me was that the anti-smartmeter movement had little influence on the election, which was most likely won on the usual and mundane issues of the economy, trust and corruption.

    Methods

    1. I downloaded data on smart meter refusal from the Chad Skelton’s post and Tableau public
    2. The data from BC Hydro is categorized using their division of BC into distinct geographical billing areas. I used billing area names to geotag the information. The site http://www.findlatitudeandlongitude.com/ has a feature where addresses can be uploaded in bulk via a text interface, and the site returns the place, and latitude longitude. I added province and country to the place names, and edited ambiguous names to make the search more effective.
    3. I uploaded this table to arcgis to form one layer. Arcgis is a big and expensive GIS software, with a limited free online playpen where this map is displayed. I used graduated circles and natural breaks to represent the different levels of smart meter refusal. A big limitation to this approach is that the BC Hydro billing areas are just that, areas, not points on a map. However, the area boundaries are not available as a shape file, and geographical areas vary widely. So, the points correspond to the centre of the nearest big population area mentioned in the BC Hydro billing area description
    4. I downloaded BC electoral district shape files from Paul Ramsey of Open Geo. These shape files are an improved version of those available from Elections BC, again, thanks to Chad Skelton for pointing me in this direction
    5. Elections BC lists 2013 provincial election results information by party by district. However, there is no publicly downloadable mapped source for the election data results. I used the open source GIS desktop software QGIS to open the shape file and add the attribute of BC Liberal percentage to the shape file. I uploaded this shape file to arcgis and layered it with the smart meter refusal rate graduated circles to look for patterns.

    Maps are fun to play with, and I know very very little about them, which is a great combination. Every minute I spent making this map was a learning experience. Comments and feedback, please. I think I will slowly incorporate mapping into my skill set. But I think I will use open source/free solutions in the future.

  • |

    Brits…

    Byoliveridley

    Yes, fight and die for us in the most important war we ever fought, but god forbid, we don’t want you to live with us.

    BBC NEWS | UK | Gurkha hero appeals for UK entry

    A former Gurkha who won the British military’s highest honour is appealing against a decision to deny him a home in the UK. Tul Bahadar Pun, 84, who was awarded the Victoria Cross during World War II, wants to move from Nepal to the UK for health reasons. But British officials in Nepal told him that he was unable to demonstrate strong enough ties to the UK.

    Geez, are these guys morons or what? Is this just plain old “going by the book” incompetence, or something more malign? Anyway, I don’t expect anything more from these people. It’s kinda like how the US lets fewer Iraqi refugees in than Sweden.

    Update June 3rd:

    All’s well that ends well…

    Tul Bahadur Pun, 84, who wanted to move from Nepal for medical reasons, promised to be a “credit” to Britain and expressed “deep gratitude”.

    He was initially told he did not have enough British ties to move but was eventually granted a visa because his case was “exceptional”

  • |

    Dear Mulcair: Connect your short term oil goals with energy transformation

    Byoliveridley

    NDP leader Thomas Mulcair has finally listened to the legions of Globe and Mail comment thread participants (and some other people, of course!) who repeatedly urge policy makers and oil companies to build a pipeline West -> East. I believe Bob Rae has talked about this idea approvingly as well. Why? Because Western Canada exports oil at a “discount”, and Eastern Canada pays “full price” from non-Canadian sources.

    In a speech to the Canadian Club of Toronto at the Royal York Hotel, the federal NDP leader gave his clearest sign of support yet for the notion of a West to East pipeline that would allow producers to receive higher prices for their crude oil.

    The NDP leader’s speech also repeated his concern that western energy developers are not paying the full cost of the environmental consequences of their projects. He said this is leading to an artificially high Canadian dollar, which hurts other sectors of the economy.

    Mulcair wants East-West Pipeline

    The full text of his comments can be seen at iPolitics and has much more than Globe and Mail Report (it wouldn’t have fanned the flames otherwise).

    Mulcair spoke about this pipeline, he also talked a lot about income inequality, robust government, and making polluters pay. He talked about strengthening environmental safeguards, ending fossil fuel subsidies and more.

    What he didn’t say: That tackling climate change requires a fundamental transformation of our system.

    Sometimes, what is not said is more important than what is said.

    If this proposal to use Canadian oil more “judiciously” by building a short-term closed supply chain is just part of a clear plan to go to a renewables and demand-reduction based energy transformation, propose away. We do need to hold both these truths in our heads at once: The tarsands are a big source of short-term revenue feeding our fossil fuel based culture, and unchecked climate change will kill many. It isn’t possible to cut fossil fuel use to zero next year, but it is imperative to cut emissions from fossil fuel use to near zero in the medium-term. Any policy that makes sense within that main objective should be looked at on its merits, but ending fossil fuel emissions soon HAS to be a cornerstone of any progressive energy policy, the crisis demands no less.

    So Mr Mulcair, propose oil pipelines if you wish, it may make for good short-term politics (read comments below the article), and who knows, maybe even tolerable policy. But remember to frame it as part of the necessary energy transformation. Politics is messy, and lasting change requires a broad coalition, don’t alienate progressive supporters right away.

     

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