Category Archives: Complete Blog

Please note: None of the ideas expressed in this blog post are shared, supported, or endorsed in any manner by my employer.

Why I got rather afraid at a Meetup Group

 I attended a Meetup Group the other day which worried me. Since I’m pretty immunocompromised with the Long COVID I don’t go to in person meetings lightly. But I was genuinely interested in the topic of the Swiss highly “referendumised” system of government and expected an explanation, with no shilling of books or blatant party political sloganeering.
Boy oh boy was I wrong. I asked an innocent question and now face ad hominem attacks by the group owner. I have been giving public lectures since this guy was a kid, one’s on YouTube, and I have had to justify everything I have done/said in the exhaustive peer-review process since the mid 1990s.
This kind of attack is nasty, pure and simple. Here is the text of the reply I originally put on Substack (since the host’s group wouldn’t allow me to post it – after he ASKED for input on things we thought the guest speaker, let’s call him “Mr X”, might be mistaken on). Mr X attacked me on Substack so here is my reply. Maybe he and the group owner might learn some manners whilst they think on the criticisms.

I actually felt rather uncomfortable at this meetup session, for a whole host of reasons but NOT because I felt Mr X was fundamentally wrong with regard to the the current system. I just felt his arguments were poor at best and in some cases were demonstrably wrong via basic mathematics.

  1. There is NOTHING wrong with having a meeting where the speaker is advocating for a political party BUT this should be stated in the information beforehand. I am forced to wonder “Why were you afraid to say beforehand what you said in the meeting, namely that you looked forward to Reform cleaning out Nottingham at next election?”
  2. You trotted out the old canard of the Evil Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is actually under the power of the US government. Its power could be nullified in an instant: look up “mint the 10 $trillion coin” or whatever large amount you get hits for these days. The Treasury can then spend whatever it likes.
  3. You bemoaned the size of the national debt. Either:
    1. You don’t understand what a balance sheet is: the national debt is EXACTLY equal to the national credit, which is the accumulated value of money spent by the national government into the economy to provide stability via bonds etc so people like you don’t get told one cold snowy February month “sorry old chap, can’t pay you your pension, the stock market took a dive”. The national credit oils the machine and ensures guaranteed pension payments. There is a version of an old joke: economists have predicted 20 of the last zero hyperinflations in Japan after its national debt ballooned.
    2. You DO understand a balance sheet, in which case you are deliberately being partisan to “cut spending” and people are going to question your motives.
  4. You could not even be consistent in your own arguments within a single paragraph. You proclaimed private rights over property and land, then lauded China for not following this and achieving the “highest growth”. Not true. Singapore has, since its founding as an independent nation, free of British and Malaysian control, done better than China (which, even if you find GDP growth figures to contradict me will ignore the little issue of the millions who died of starvation). Singapore had full public ownership of most of the land: equivalent to the “land value taxation” that those “lefties” (snort) Adam Smith said were ESSENTIAL for ANY system to run.
  5. Singapore did so well partly because of the issue you clearly didn’t understand (and ironically gave a “classic politician’s fudging” reply to), namely that Capitalism or any other economic system can only work if the third, crucial, factor of production, LAND, is ensured to give everyone a “level playing field”. This is why the Classical Economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo HATED rentiers and advocated Land Value Taxation. Tax land according to the value it has to society so big companies that are content to keep unused shops will incur taxes that mean that they must get tenants or sell up to someone who will use the land more productively. Singapore kept the vast majority of land in public ownership for decades so no “rentiers” could exploit companies or individuals.
  6. I’ve read Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” and the key sections of “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” where he qualified his views. You clearly have not. Your answer to me was a politician’s answer, full of avoiding the issue because you DO NOT KNOW HOW A BALANCE SHEET WORKS AND YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW SOVEREIGN vs OTHER CURRENCIES WORK.
  7. In short, this felt like a very unwelcoming environment to anyone who wasn’t already signed up to Reform UK or who knew enough to challenge the litany of mis-statements made.
  8. I feel profoundly sorry for those attendees who lapped this up. We know that COVID19 has led to neurological damage: maybe they should get checks?
  9. Resorting in the comments to comparisons with Nazi Germany invoked Godwin’s Law. Which should make any genuinely open-minded person worried.
  10. Notice I have NOT mentioned MY textbook at any point. I don’t shill. If you really want to understand personal preferences then 2 minutes on the internet gives my entire history and links. My work stands on its own two feet.
  11. There is NOTHING wrong with advocating Swiss style system. But when you shill your book and laud Reform I feel conned. My £80 royalties from MY book based on 15 years of research into public preferences (and yes Mr X, you’re correct that this is due to oligopolists) all just go straight to an accountant since I, earning a “weird” income, must use an accountant who charge about £80 p.a. I get annoyed. But you know what? I just engage in open forums….I never Shill for my book.

I’ve got a MeetUP Politics Group!

My long COVID prevents me from doing a lot. However, I’ve always wanted to feel useful and some limited improvement recently caused me to set up a Meetup group.

The group appears like it is a “sandbox for people in the Midlands”. It isn’t. I merely set the boundaries of the pre-Norman Kingdom of Mercia to ensure I understood what I’m talking about and to not try to run before I could walk: after all, the SNP stays in Scotland whilst the LibDems are heavily concentrated in the SouthWest.

https://www.meetup.com/mercia-politics-to-revive-midlands/ is the group. You must be a Meetup member to contribute but it has free membership option. If you have ideas come contribute.

The only rules are that this group is “an extension of my living room”: bigotry and “Mercia is for certain ethnicities” will get you an inst and permaban. No 2nd chances.

I am perfectly aware, with a LOT of my paternal side of the family hailing from East Midlands and areas going East to the coast, that funding for a large influx of people has been awful. I say influx because I’m just as annoyed at influx of “white Brits” from posh areas buying up land and property as I am at immigrants who don’t integrate. But government, whether local or central, are the main “baddies”: money for GPs, Hospitals, Schools, Social and Health Care Auxiliary Services, along with a whole host of services have been TERRIBLE. Thus people living there feel “left behind” and it breeds resentment. I aim to discuss POSITIVE solutions to this that don’t rely on the “simplistic dog whistle calls” used by Reform UK, The Conservative Party, and Increasingly, the Labour Government.

The YouTube intro to the issue is here

I’ll post more when it comes to future topics but this is just a flavour of “where I’m coming from”.

First session 5.30pm (British Summer Time; 4.30pm GMT) on 2nd July. You must be member of Meetup (minimal requirements) but if my experience of logging in to others’ Meetup groups is anything to go by, you CAN use use the MS Teams link (provided on the day) to log in without having a MS account.

When it is fair to elect the loser of a three-horse race

How a three-way race in democracy can be “fair” in electing any of them.

If you knew that three candidates, let’s call them Clinton, Sanders and O’Malley, had achieved 49%, 48% and 3% respectively in a first-past-the-post election (used extensively in the US and UK) you’d correctly proclaim Clinton as the winner. However, suppose two systems that took into account second and third rankings not only went against Clinton, but disagreed on which of the other two candidates should win. You’d probably be puzzled. Yet this is perfectly possible and will be demonstrated using voting intentions that are rather close to a real life example from 2016.

The Iowa Democrat Party caucus in 2016 saw two “major candidates”, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, square off. However, there was a third, minor candidate, Martin O’Malley who polled in the single digits and realistically was never going to be proclaimed the winner under existing rules (and he withdrew mid-contest). Whilst ranked choice voting has been adopted in Australia and in State elections in several parts of the USA, it remains contentious and was rejected in a referendum a few years ago in the UK. Ranked choice voting effectively would likely, if Iowa had used it in a primary vote, have allowed O’Malley’s supporters to act as “King-makers”: whoever their 2nd ranks went to would get “over the line” and be the winner. Yet there is another way to treat the second and third rankings that can be argued to be fairer, but give victory to O’Malley. This method is Most-Least Voting (MLV).

To illustrate how O’Malley could win, the first preference percentages will be retained. For purposes of exposition, it will be assumed that:
(1) Supporters of Clinton and Sanders strongly dislike the other candidate and would always place them in last place (third rank). This assumption is not unreasonable, given the polarised nature of debate at the time.
(2) O’Malley’s supporters regard Sanders as the “lesser of two evils” and all put Clinton as rank three. It will be shown that this assumption only matters for ranked choice voting – if they hate Sanders the result under MLV is unchanged.

Under ranked choice voting O’Malley is eliminated in the first round, since no candidate got 50%+1 vote. The ballot papers of the 3% of voters who picked O’Malley are re-examined. It is found that they all put Sanders as rank two. Their 3% is added to Sanders’s 48% making 51% and he wins. Had one third (1% of total) of O’Malley’s supporters put Clinton as 2nd rank then she would have got over the line and would have won.* MLV tallies things differently as it uses a profoundly different philosophical approach.

Under MLV, a ballot is only valid if the voter has indicated their “most preferred” candidate AND they have indicated their “least preferred” candidate AND they have not chosen the same candidate for both. A corollary of this is that election tampering/miscounting is very easy to spot: this will be explained later.

Given the above two assumptions, this is how MLV would play out. MLV simply subtracts the total number of “least preferred” votes from the total number of “most preferred”. The “net voting total” is very similar in nature to “net approval scores” often quoted in the media for high profile politicians.

Clinton’s net score would be 49% (her positive vote) minus (48+3=51%) – all Sanders and O’Malley voters put her as least preferred. Her net score is -2%. For Sanders it is 48-49=-1% (Sanders support is more than cancelled by the Clinton supporters but O’Malley supporters have no effect on his net vote). For O’Malley, although his most preferred score is only 3%, since nobody put him as least preferred, he obtains the highest net count and is declared winner. It should be noted that the net scores (-2, -1, +3) sum to zero. They must by definition and provide the aforementioned test for election miscounting or fraud. A major issue here is “how do we translate these three net scores into meaningful delegate counts?” Perhaps, as in most states at the level of the electoral college, “winner takes all” is applied, meaning that all of Iowa’s 44 (non-Super Delegate) votes would go to O’Malley. A subject for another day!

If O’Malley winning provokes disquiet I will not criticise you. MLV is just as vulnerable to Arrow’s Impossibility theorem as all other voting systems**. I will refrain from attempting to explain how the likelihood function of MLV differs from ranked choice and so why with three candidates, identical rankings can give different winners. Instead, I will simply detail the philosophical basis of MLV.

MLV, at its simplest, does two things:
(1) It gives EVERY voter identical weight in deciding the winner; ranked choice essentially gives the eliminated candidate’s supporters “another bite at the cherry” in playing kingmaker;
(2) It penalises candidates who might have a strong primary vote but are highly polarising. Essentially Iowa would have been “a plague on both your houses”.

One final thought on electing someone who is probably largely unknown. After (if going all the way) O’Malley had been president for 4 years, you can bet everyone will have formed a firm opinion on him and would have had a chance to turf him out. MLV was used for some elections in certain Baltic states in the immediate aftermath of their secession from the USSR. It is an open question as to whether it may be appropriate in elections in the 2020s. However, it certainly generates interesting debate over how the electoral landscape might be shaken up if it were to be adopted.

* Ranked choice voting can be argued to be destructive because the two major candidates simply try to get enough supporters of the minor candidate to help get them over the line. Under MLV, the second preferences of the minor candidate are irrelevant to the outcome: If O’Malley’s supporters all regarded Clinton as the lesser evil she still wouldn’t win. One of the two major candidates can only guarantee a win by making themself acceptable to some of the supporters of the OTHER major candidate. Getting some of “your” supporters to put the “minor candidate” as “least preferred” can offer a path to victory but is a very risky strategy – it can easily backfire and allow the other major candidate to come through.

** I and one of my co-authors of the definitive textbook on Best-Worst Scaling (of which MLV is a special case) believe this. My other co-author was unsure as to whether BWS variants were vulnerable. I stick with the math psych co-author!

PS: The MLV article is lost somewhere on a drive I currently can’t access. Authors from Belgium/Netherlands (IIRC) around 2014 detailed it. They failed to note that MLV is a special case of BWS but they probably had a limit to the number of references allowed in their bibliography. But it is curious that they knew of Tony Marley’s 1960s work but didn’t reference his post 2010 work.