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Archive: al-gore

Electoral reform: a different answer

17 December 2007 14:26

Categories: Current affairs, Economics, Edinburgh, Make My Vote Count, Politics, Scotland

A few weeks ago I attended a talk by Eric Maskin, who this year was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory.

Eric Maskin seems to be quite an interesting person. He lives in a house that was once occupied by Albert Einstein. I imagine that would make a great pub quiz question. Perhaps even more startlingly, Eric Maskin dresses up as Albert Einstein at Halloween.

Professor Maskin came to Edinburgh en route to Sweden to talk about voting systems, a topic related to mechanism design.

Arrow’s impossibility theorem implies that no voting system is perfect at satisfying a number of desired criteria. These criteria are:

  • The Pareto principle — if everyone prefers x to y then y should not be elected
  • Anonymity — every voter should be treated equally
  • Neutrality — every candidate should be treated equally
  • Independence of irrelevant alternatives — the ability of x and y to win an election should not be affected by the entrance of a candidate z
  • Transitivity — if x is preferred to y and y is preferred to z then x should be preferred to z

That fourth one is probably the one that grates with most proponents of electoral reform. We can reel off instances where independence of irrelevant alternatives has been violated. For instance, had Ralph Nader not run in 2001 then Al Gore would almost certainly have become President of the USA. A fragmented left in France allowed Jean Marie Le Pen to enter the final run-off with Jacques Chirac in 2002, when there was every chance that Lionel Jospin would have won such a face-off.

Interestingly, Eric Maskin thinks that if the SDP / Liberal alliance hadn’t run in 1983, Michael Foot’s Labour party would have won the general election. What a thought!

Just thinking about this sent me under a dark cloud. The design of institutions clearly has a disturbingly massive effect. The voting system is much more important than the voters themselves, particularly when you couple this thought with the paradox of voting.

The system that Eric Maskin concentrated on is Simple Majority Rule. This method has voters submitting rankings of candidates, just as in Single Transferable Vote. Then you take these rankings and use them to compare candidates in a head-to-head scenario, two candidates at a time. By comparing just two candidates at a time, you get rid of the problem with independence of irrelevant alternatives. If one candidate is preferred over another by >50% of the voters, he wins the election.

Well, almost. Unfortunately, this system is susceptible to Condorcet’s paradox. For instance, >50% of voters may prefer Labour to the Conservatives, >50% of voters may prefer the Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats and >50% of voters may prefer the Lib Dems to Labour. In other words, simple majority rule violates the transitivity principle.

The view of Eric Maskin is that to worry about transitivity is too pessimistic. For him, the Condorcet paradox is possible, but highly unlikely. This is because candidates can be lined up on a spectrum from left to right, and voters tend to vote in accordance with these positions.

As such, he suggests that simple majority rule is good as a least-worst voting system as it meets all of the desired criteria apart from transitivity which is unlikely to be violated. No other voting system works this well as often.

Of course, because the possibility of the Condorcet cycle even exists, there must be a tie-breaker. This is probably cause for a whole new debate in itself!

The talk provided some food for thought. For several years now I have been convinced that there needs to be a move away from the First Past the Post system. For the past few years I have been strongly in favour of Single Transferable Vote.

During the talk, one person in the audience specifically asked Eric Maskin about Single Transferable Vote. He said that STV can still violate independence of irrelevant alternatives, and pointed out that a similar system to STV was used in the 2002 French election.

I’m not entirely convinced that STV is all that similar to the run-off system used in French Presidential elections. The main problem with the French Presidential election (and the other examples that have been highlighted), as Proferssor Maskin pointed out, was the fact that voters were unable to rank candidates. Well, voters can rank candidates in STV.

Nevertheless, Condorcet cycle aside, I find the simple majority rule approach quite appealing. Yet we hear very little about it. If you are interested in electoral reform, I would say it is worth looking into a bit.

6 comments

How to save the planet: Windbags, hot air and massive speakers

12 April 2007 19:47

Categories: Current affairs, Entertainment, Music, Politics, Technology

I see that Al Gore has decided he wants to be the next Bob “Give me us your fockin moneys” Geldof. Mr Gore wants to stage the biggest concert of all time ever. Rumours that the stage will be Gore’s forehead are yet to be confirmed.

Gore has given the series of concerts the oh-so-imaginative name Live Earth. Wait a minute that sounds like a Microsoft product. Wait a minute — it is! Shit me!

Hopefully this will knock Geldof off his perch a bit. Back when there was all that Live 8 nonsense I wrote plenty of stuff about the offensiveness of Geldof, a man who unashamedly makes a living out of starving Africans.

He is not content with giving an undue platform to bland rockstars who don’t have the faintest clue about politics or economics and bollocksing up his purported goals in the process. Geldof has also allowed his offensive sperm to turn into Peaches Geldof. I had my suspicions before, but now I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Bob Geldof is the most evil man on the planet.

As such, I hope Gore’s big concert puts a massive dent in Geldof’s ego. The problem is that Geldof will only be replaced by Gore on the “Massive Arsehole” league table. Soon, Geldof will strike back with his own massive concert, then Gore will hold another huge concert. Then Bono will come along and throw his weight behind the creation of a carbon neutral™ Benevolence Android™, thereby gazumping them both.

Despite the fact that Bono is firmly in third place on the Massive Arsehole league table, he might have the right idea with this carbon neutral™ Benevolence Android™. After all, it is surely true that a great deal of climate change is caused by the hot air emitted from the Geldof / Gore axis of ego. And that is without taking account of the guitar-wielding windbags that they place on their foreheads that are cleverly disguised as stages.

Of course, the biggest problem with holding massive concerts is that they actually use up shedloads of energy. After all, they involve the use of massive fucking speakers and sophisticated lighting systems — real energy guzzlers. And then there is the small matter of the transport involved to get everyone there.

Gore claims that the concerts will be carbon neutral, but this is a bit hollow. After all, they could plant the trees anyway, without holding a concert. That would probably do much more good. But then we wouldn’t be able to have a giant party then, would we? Diddums.

My biggest problem with this concert proposal though is the fact that it is designed to “raise awareness” of the climate change issue. But has Gore not seen the news recently? Every fucker on the planet already knows about climate change. You could not possibly raise awareness of climate change! It is already the most talked-about issue on the planet!

In other words, this concert will achieve absolutely zip. If anything, it will have a generally negative effect — just like Live 8. Well done Mr Gore! Do the world a favour and stick to what you’re good at — losing presidential elections.

Gary Andrews is similarly unimpressed.

1 comment

Does Honda care about the world?

4 March 2007 00:31

Categories: Current affairs, Formula 1

The Honda F1 team’s new livery has caused a bit of a stir.

I think it looks revolting. It ensures that this season will be one of the ugliest in history, with Renault’s multicoloured vomit-coloured livery, Ferrari’s funny slanted subliminal Marlboro non-descript barcode and, of course, Toro Rosso’s paint factory explosion.

Now Honda have only gone and taken the Earth, and re-moulded it into the shape of a Honda RA107. Yuk!

But for those people who aren’t just interested in a racing car’s colours, Honda’s sponsor-free livery has raised more than an eyebrow around the place. Friends of the Earth have been particularly critical, pointing out the hypocrisy of a gas-guzzling Formula 1 team trying to push forward an environmental agenda.

On the other hand, as Ollie White points out, isn’t it better for a Formula 1 team to try and promote an environmental cause? That’s better than nothing, right? After all, if they didn’t, Honda could be accused by Friends of the Earth of burying their heads in the sand.

I think Friends of the Earth are being a little bit too harsh. It’s easy to paint a picture of motor racing being a horrible, over-indulgent, carbon emitting, environmentally unfriendly sport.

But the reality is a good deal more nuanced. Some say the F1 teams are there just to sell cars. But it’s worth remembering that they make cars as well.

As such, much of the life-saving technology that is in everyday use in road cars is developed, improved or even invented by motor racing teams. Once upon a time, the technology we take for granted today was the cutting-edge in motor racing. So motor racing has probably saved countless lives.

The strangest thing about this all is the revelation that Formula 1 has been carbon neutral for a whole decade! This is news to me, which immediately makes me suspicious.

But I mean how can a sport be carbon neutral? Has Bernie Ecclestone been going around planting trees on behalf of each of the teams? And does it count the testing, air travel to long distance races, and suchlike? This revelation poses more questions than it answers.

This whole thing does kind of prove one cast-iron law about environmentalism: don’t open your big yap about the environment, or you’re bound to be exposed as a hypocrite.

(eg. Do Friends of the Earth go without electricity then? Don’t they realise that electricity use contributes to one third of carbon emissions — ten times more than air travel. This makes them hypocritical environmentally unfriendly scum!!1!etc.)

Perhaps the worst thing about Myearthdream is the fact that it is blatantly designed to disguise the fact that Honda have not managed to find a new sponsor since the enforced departure of Lucky Strike.

When rumours that Honda was thinking of changing its livery first surfaced I was a little bit disappointed. Honda were in a unique position, where the colours of their tobacco sponsor coincidentally matched with the team’s traditional colours. All Honda had to do was remove the ‘Lucky Strike’ logos and it would have been fine. (Remember the ‘Impossible Dream’ advert…)

And who would have minded that? Nobody would have accused Honda of being hypocrites, or jumping on the bandwagon, or even of being unable to find a sponsor. The environmental message may be a laudable aim, but Honda are taking a hell of a lot of stick for it.

And perhaps this is deserved. After all, this is the big idea of Simon Fuller — a man who, it is worth remembering, was responsible for S Club 7 and Pop Idol. The man has brought nothing but pain to this world. This is just his latest hare-brained scheme.

The problem was that he was hired by Honda to do something. He would have been better off doing nothing, and sticking with Honda’s traditional colours. But he would be out of a job then.

4 comments