Why Vote? Cont.

Yesterday I posted a link and some quotes from Kevin Vallier’s post on the title subject.  Today I have my own take.  Why vote?  In one word, uncertainty.

Let me lay out my underlying assumptions:

1. Each voter prefers either Candidate A or Candidate B by some fraction.
2. Preference for a candidate is represent by P where P = 0 is complete preference for A and P = 1 is complete preference for B.
3. The exact preferences of other voters are unknown; thought there may be indications as to P’s average value among a population (i.e. polling, historical results, etc.).

To show how these assumptions should drive everyone to vote, I’ll use the two states I have called home in my life, North Carolina (current) and Mississippi (birth).

More after the jump.

Why Vote?

Kevin Vallier writes:

Jason Brennan’s excellent The Ethics of Voting dispatches a number of familiar arguments for a duty to vote and provides grounds for a duty to vote well or not vote at all. I’ve been mulling over an argument for voting that J doesn’t address (probably because it is crazy). But let me try to work it out and see what you think. It’s complicated, as the argument is based on Newcomb’s Paradox and resolving the paradox in favor of the “one-boxer” position. As such, I’ll call this The One-Boxer Argument for Voting. If you get to the end, I think you’ll find the conclusion interesting.

He concludes:

OK, so here’s my conjecture:

(1) If you are a voter whose inclination (i) to vote and (ii) to vote for either Obama or Romney is a reliable indicator of the outcome AND,

(2) If you have justified beliefs about (1) AND,

(3) If on your view, the outcome matters enough to exceed the disutility from voting, if you get net disutility from voting AND,

(4) If you have no countervailing moral reasons (not counted in your disutility) to vote, THEN:

(C) Despite the fact that you will have no causal impact on the outcome, and that you get mild disutility from voting, it is rational for you to vote.

To put it simply, if you have reason to think that your inclination to vote for your candidate is a bellwether for whether he will be elected, and you care a lot about the outcome, then it is rational for you to vote for your candidate, in the absence of countervailing moral reasons and despite the disutility you get from voting.

Wilkinson on Liberty and Racism

Will Wilkinson writes:

When I was a Rand-toting libertarian lad, I believed, as I believe now, that racism of any stripe is a disgusting form of collectivism. Where my opinion has changed is that I used to think that if negative rights to non-interference were strictly observed, liberty was guaranteed, but I don’t now. Here’s how I had thought about the matter. One racist acting in a private capacity on his or her racist beliefs can’t violate anyone’s legitimate, negative rights. (No one is entitled to another’s good opinion!) Two racists acting as private citizens on their racist beliefs can’t violate anyone’s rights. Therefore, I inferred, thousands or millions of racists acting non-coercively on their racist beliefs can’t coercively violate anyone’s rights. I now think this is quite wrongheaded.

Eventually I realised that actions that are individually non-coercive can add up to stable patterns of behaviour that are systematically or structurally coercive, depriving some individuals of their rightful liberty. In fact, rights-violating structures or patterns of behaviour are excellent examples of Hayekian spontaneous orders—of phenomena that are the product of human action, but not of human design. This shift has led me to see racism and sexism themselves as threats to liberty. Racism and sexism have come to matter more to me in that I have come to see them in terms of the political value that matters most to me: liberty. And so I have become much more sympathetic to policies that would limit individual liberty in order to suppress patterns or norms of behaviour that might pose an even greater threat to freedom. So I’ve become fairly friendly toward federal anti-discrimination law, affirmative action, Title 9, the works. I have found that this sympathy, together with my belief in the theoretical possibility and historical reality of structural coercion, releases me almost entirely from the liberal suspicion that I’m soft on racism (even if I do wish to voucherise Medicare). Phew!

TED Thursday – Democracy

Ivan Krastev talks about democracy.

What I’m Reading

Lately I’ve been reading an interesting book that I think is worth recommending. The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, according to The New York Times:

seeks to enrich liberalism, and political discourse generally, with a deeper awareness of human nature.

Though, at least so far, I’ve been less interesting in Mr. Haidt’s descriptions of neuroprocesses and more in his commentary on philosophy. Perhaps I’ll update this when I’m done with more commentary on the book’s suggestions on that subject.

A little more discussion of gun rights

The Democracy in America blog looks at some of the philosophical issues underlying gun rights.  The blogger writes:

Perhaps American supporters of gun rights would say that in fact people in every country do have a natural right to bear arms, but their enjoyment of that natural right is denied them by oppressive governments in countries like Britain, France, Canada, Israel, the Netherlands and Japan. Meanwhile, the so-called “right” to health insurance enjoyed by citizens of those countries is presumably only a fake right which they do not in fact possess. This just doesn’t seem to be a satisfactory explanation. Is the problem that we use the word “right” in two ways, meaning in one sense an inalienable moral consideration which we believe all humans possess regardless of the context of government in which they live, and in another sense an enforceable claim within a country’s legal system which commands government and other persons to guarantee certain kinds of treatment to every citizen? Which kind of right would the right to health insurance be? Which kind is the right to bear arms?

Market Morality

Hopefully I will have time to do some follow-up on this later, but this Will Wilkinson post, which responds to this Michael Sandel essay, is worth reading. Here’s a highlight:

The ur-public good is a culture of low-cost cooperativeness. Call it trust. Call it civic virtue. Call it social capital. Call it civilization. Whatever you call it, neither markets or government work well without it. This cuts both ways ideologically. If trust or whatever is high, government can be effective. But then so can voluntary alternatives to government, for the same reasons. The question is always what works best in this case. When trust or whatever is low, markets and voluntary civil society won’t work so well. But then government in this case is likely to be predatory, which is the worst possibility. When trust or whatever is high, there’s a good chance folks can do it without government. But if the problem really is intractable without bringing in state coercion to solve the problem, then folks shouldn’t worry that much because the quality of governance is in this case likely to be high and the level of predation and corruption likely to be low. Effective government and effective markets are two sides of the same coin.

Tax Policy, Metaphysics, Extremeties and Moderation in One Post

Recently I linked a Wolfers-Stevenson tax commentary about behavioral biases and tax expenditures as well as some follow-up by Will Wilkinson (from before and from this morning). The post that I linked this morning had an especially inspiring paragraph:

Now, we’re still stuck with crazy endogeneity problems. Whether public spending or private investment will do better in a particular case may be a function of shared beliefs, trust, public-spiritedness, etc. If we treat mental models, belief systems, cultural values, ideologies, etc. as fixed points, we may be able to determine whether public or private investment is more “expensive.” But if we don’t, and acknowledge that belief systems and policy systems are reciprocally influencing, it may be impossible to identify in any clear way the ideal baseline, in which case there may be no identifiable fact of the matter about whether public spending on this or that costs money or makes money. We’re going to have to guess a lot of the time, and hope.

This quote, to me, really highlights the symphonic messiness of republics; the democratic underpinnings typically pull the society to a libertarian stance, while conversely the social contractarian trajectory (regarding equality, justice, etc.) tend to push things away from a libertarian culture position. This push and pull somehow works out into a hindsight appearance of a moderate/cooperative society. Simply put, a messy process creates masterful results.

So in a system that fosters libertarians that see property as unilaterally defined by possession on one extreme, social contractarians that would prefer to pool resources and reallocate them in a neo-Marxist process based on optimized utility, and literally everything between the two (in fact most of society is concentrated in this latter amalgamation of groups).

As an adendum to Will Wilkinson’s above commentary on the challenge of endogeneity within this question, I would add a consideration for a posivite observer effect whereby acknowledge and further relating the fact of moderation within a republic could lead to a moderation of principles rather than a retreat to extremes. In tax policy this could manifest itself as a move towards the gray area between all taxation as stolen property and all tax expenditures and subsidies as unfair payments. This is not a move solely towards the utility maximizing level of the social contractarians, but it is a move away from a possession only approach to property. Reality in a republic seems to dictate this cooperation.

A “liberalitarian/Rawlesekian” criticizing Santorum

Will Wilkinson, who self-identifies with the two adjectives I used in the title of this post, is pretty critical of Rick Santorum’s tax policy ideas in a post on The Economist‘s Democracy in America blog. In fact he concludes:

If “economic freedom” means “a system rigged to the advantage of petrochemical companies and large middle- and upper-class families”, Mr Santorum’s proposal might have a lot to be said for it. I could be wrong, but I suspect it doesn’t really mean that.

Wilkinson argues that Santorum has a revisionist view of the Declaration of Independence

Will follows his post on The Economist with a post on his Big Think blog specifically dealing with child tax credits in Santorum’s policies. Here he gets into political philosophy much more as he critiques Reihan Salam’s apparent defense of Santorum’s policies because, he asserts, they are pro-growth in human capital. Will responds:

If the idea is to promote growth through human capital, the obvious freedom-enhancing solution is to offer work visas to any highly-skilled foreigner who would like to live in the States. Effects on growth aside, this policy increases economic freedom in a straightforward way: it lifts coercive barriers to U.S. labor markets for a large class of people, allowing economic exchange previously forbidden to take place. Notably, nothing along these lines appears in Rick Santorum’s “economic freedom agenda.”

This really highlights the intra-party debate going on between countless factions of the GOP currently. It is beyond Tea Party versus establishment; after all the Tea Party includes libertarians and members of the religious right. Clearly marrying these two concepts will not work forever. This is the trouble that comes when a group starts trying to create “purity” tests for a party it hopes will represent at least a plurality of the country, it simply doesn’t work for very long. Wilkinson’s comments, as usual, are thoughtful and worth reading; it would be interesting to have him elaborate on what this suggests about the GOP’s factions.

A brief response to Ken Rogoff’s column

Earlier today I posted a link to Ken Rogoff’s recent Project-Syndicate column examining the sustainability of modern (Western) capitalism. Rogoff lists what he sees as the five major flaws of capitalism in its present, dominant incarnation, which are:

1. Failure in pricing public goods (e.g. clean air and water)
2. “[E]xtraordinary levels of inequality”
3. Market failures in medical care
4. Undervaluation of future generation needs, welfare, etc.
5. Financial crises

While Rogoff identifies five unique failures of capitalism, however I would synthesize all of his observations into one, a failure to account for the long-run. (more after the jump)