Yes, democracy, but...

I've often wondered why democracy works the way it does in the UK. If we accept that, to deploy the old maxim, that it's the least-worst way of running things, that doesn't then mean that our particular current version of it is the Platonic ideal. The discussions about voting for the devolution options in Scotland have once again led into the absurd situation where the votes of 16-years olds are going to count. I think this is ridiculous. But, then again, why is the franchise restricted to 18+? Why not 16 indeed? Or 13+? Why have any age restrictions? And if there are going to be age restrictions, why is there no upper limit? Why not cut it off at 75? Maybe age shouldn't be the determinant: perhaps the qualification for the franchise shouldn't be age, or property or anything else, but the ability to understand any of the issues and make a rational decision?

Does every citizen really deserve to vote? If so, why? This issue has been explored by Jennifer L. Hochschild, Professor of Government at Harvard. In 2010, she published a study entitled If democracies need informed voters, how can they thrive while expanding enfranchisement?, which suggests that “as democracies become more democratic [by giving the vote to disenfranchised groups], their decision-making processes become of lower quality in terms of cognitive processing of issues and candidate choice”.

[From Why should all citizens be allowed the vote? – Telegraph Blogs]

The is self-evidently true and hardly worth academic discourse. A fifth of the British population is functionally illiterate. Why on earth should they be allowed to make the choice as to how the country and, more particularly, my family should be governed?

Apparently some people in Britain think that Buzz Lightyear was the first man on the moon. What is the moral imperative behind allowing them any influence over public policy on anything? I’m outraged that these people are allowed to vote

[From Grumpy old reactionary | 15Mb: yet another blog from Dave Birch]

There is no ethical edge to this at all in my mind. It's not even close to being an ethical debate. There is no reason at all to continue the universal franchise with the current model. It's time for a re-think, and I'm pretty sure that I know what the outline of the new franchise should be.

According to Jason Brennan, a professor of political philosophy at Brown University and author of The Ethics of Voting, it would be better for society if the ill-informed do not vote.

[From Why should all citizens be allowed the vote? – Telegraph Blogs]

I have consistently argued this, and even come up with a simple 2-out-of-3 system to make it work.

make voting machines that are bit like the “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” machines in the pub. Voters come in to the booth and have to answer three questions (they get one 50:50 and one “phone a friend” — it doesn’t make sense to ask the audience in this context) randomly selected from categories such as politics, economics, history, that sort of thing. “Who’s the Chancellor of the Exchequer”, for example.

[From Votonomics | 15Mb: yet another blog from Dave Birch]

This could work pretty well, as it would give the election night studios some extra graphics to play with and a terrific new statistic for the subhead in the morning papers: "And this is what the result would have been had the stupid votes been counted".

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

It's Loony O'Clock at last

First, an historical note for our foreign readers. The Official Monster Raving Loony Party is a real British political party and not simply a colloquial term for Tony Blair's "New Labour" party when in power.

The Official Monster Raving Loony Party is a registered political party established in the United Kingdom in 1983 by musician and politician David Sutch (1940–1999), better known as Screaming Lord Sutch.

[From Official Monster Raving Loony Party - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

A few years ago, in a blog post about the stupidity of minting 1p coins, I noted that:

When the Monster Raving Loony Party was first launched in 1964, two of its policies were votes for 18 year-olds and all day opening for pubs (both of which are now law). The other one was putting Parliament on wheels and taking it round the country. Give them time.

[From Digital Money: Extending debit]

Well, it looks as if the time has come. The Houses of Parliament are falling down so MPs need to find somewhere else to "manage" the country from. Personally, I think it might be better to put Parliament into abeyance for five years while Parliament gets its makeover and then have another election, but if not going to do that, then we're going to need a plan for a temporary talking shop.

Other moves being considered include leaving the palace for good, selling it off and building a new parliament - possibly even moving out of London.

[From Houses of Parliament could close for five years under £3bn plan to repair crumbling Palace of Westminster | Mail Online]

Now would be the perfect time to implement to Loony proposal: put them on a soon-to-be-surplus-to-requirements Virgin train and they could spend a month in each major city of the nation on a rotation. Problem solved. It wouldn't do them any harm to spend a bit more time in Barnsley (if Barnsley has a railway station - I was just using it as an example).

Remember, another of the Loony manifesto commitments for many years has been to abolish income tax. Give them time.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

The Woking Way

Although I only smoked marijuana once and I never inhaled, I am an acquaintance of people who do. People who, I might add, hold down very responsible jobs and pay a large amount in tax. When last in Amsterdam, I went to a "coffee shop" with a friend of mine. I stuck to beer, but my friend bought a pack of pre-rolled joints and smoked one. Absolutely nothing remarkable. There were plenty of other people in the coffee shop at that time of night, many of them American to judge from the accents, and the street outside was packed with people going to and from bars, clubs, restaurants and so forth. Unlike Woking on a Friday night, no-one was fighting, vomiting in the gutters or walking around dressed as a prostitute (in Amsterdam, the prostitutes have their own retail area). In every respect, the coffee shops represent a pragmatic solution to the management of recreational self-medication, which is why it is completely bizarre of the Dutch to institute the new system of residents-only grass.

The plan is that starting from January 1, 2013, people without a special ID will not be allowed to make purchases of cannabis in the city Coffee shops. ID in the size of the credit card with the picture of the owner would be issued at request to all adult inhabitants of Amsterdam, while tourists and visitors to Amsterdam would be excluded from applying for this permit.

[From Amsterdam Coffee Shop News 2012 | Amsterdam.info]

I'm surprised that they are allowed to do this under EU Law (what happened to the Single Market?), but even before this moronic edict takes effect, it is already having the entirely predictable consequence.

Unsurprisingly, what has happened is that drug dealers, who previously had dealt only in hard drugs, are now also selling marijuana illegally.

[From Freakonomics » Drug Dealers in the Netherlands Now Selling Marijuana]

Why the Dutch want to make Amsterdam more like Woking is completely beyond me but anyway I will make a prediction about it right here right now. Next year, some drug dealers will make more money selling bogus ID cards than they do selling the grass. I sometimes wonder if drug dealers don't have the most effective lobby in Parliament.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

More modern eqtiquette

I'm working at home because I don't feel very well - since I can't think imaginatively, I'm doing mundane catch up work, like filling out my expenses form, replying to some e-mails I'd put to one side and sorting out a bunch of Powerpoint. Oh, and upgrading my laptop to Mountain Lion.

Phone rings. A pleasant sounding woman asks to speak to Mr. Birch.

"I am Mr. Birch", I tell her and she starts to ask me something about my energy supplier. So I say "Can I put you on hold you on hold for a moment" and put the phone down and go back to work. I always do this when I get an unsolicited commercial call. After a couple of minutes the phone beeps because the call centre has hung up. I put the phone back in the cradle.

My wife thinks this is rude, but I think if you just say "no thanks" and hang up, you are not costing the culprit enough money. They'll just hang up at their end and a few seconds later their outbound call distribution software will connect them to next call that's been picked up. If you get them to hang on for a minute, you are wasting their time and money and if enough people did this then the economics of their call centre would tip - they'd need three times as many staff. But my wife thinks I'm being rude to the people who work in the call centre, people who are just doing their jobs.

I've also noticed that the majority of the calls I've picked up recently seem to come from people with bizarrely vanilla Anglo-Saxon names like "Christine Peters" but noticeably South Asian accents. And when they tell you that they are from the "Maintenance Department of Microsoft Windows" and that "your PC is sending us warning messages" they know that they liars and conspiring in a fraud to get hold of your credit card number. So I'm unsympathetic - when people start a call by lying, I'm released from any moral qualms.

Hhhmmm… well?

By the way, if you would like to talk to Christine Peters from the Technical Department of Microsoft Windows, she's on 033 3000 11234.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Innumeracy in the headlines

England's greatest living poet, the Bard of Salford, John Cooper-Clarke sagely observed a couple of years ago that "mass illiteracy is a comparatively recent phenomenon", a reflection I'm sure on 13 years of New Labour Edukashun policy. He might have added that mass innumeracy is now so rampant as to form an irreversible block to national progress.

The win is the sixth time this year that a Briton has taken a slice of the jackpot and is the fifth highest EuroMillions prize ever won by anyone from the country.

[From British ticket holder scoops £63.8m share of EuroMillions jackpot - Telegraph]

Bizarrely, this was reported in one or two media outlets here as evidence of British "luck", when it is, of course, evidence of British innumeracy. No figures were published, but I'd certainly wager that the reason more Euromillions winners come from Britain is because more Brits buy tickets, and the reason why they buy so many tickets is that they don't understand rudimentary arithmetic and basic probability. I know this to be true, because I also saw in the newspapers here that some retailers were, rather disgustingly, to be honest, allowing their dimmest customers to waste money on another betting scam.

Cable slams casino tactics after shops offer 'disturbing' £1 bets to win purchases instead of paying

[From Top stores condemned for letting you gamble on shopping: Cable slams casino tactics after shops offer 'disturbing' £1 bets to win purchases instead of paying | Mail Online]

I'm sure this sort of thing must be related to the general decline in IQ in the UK.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Meritocrats

I have to say that it's not terribly often that I agree with things I read in The Guardian, but Julie Burchill's anti-monarchist rant contained an entirely accurate snipe at one of my growing hatreds.

The spectacle of some smug, mediocre columnista who would definitely not have their job if their mummy or daddy hadn't been in the newspaper racket advising working-class kids to study hard at school, get a "proper" job and not place their faith in TV talent shows is one of the more repulsive minor crimes of our time.

[From Once we had anarchy in the UK. Now all we have is monarchy in the UK | Julie Burchill | Comment is free | The Observer]

One of the reasons why I still consider myself a working class Thatcher Tory is that she believed in meritocracy and had a suspicion of embedded privilege, whether at the stock market or anywhere else. It seems to me that over time, meritocracy makes a nation stronger. I think that's true at an individual level as well as at a Darwinian social level.

If my next door neighbour makes more money than me because he's better at something than I am, then I don't hate him. But if my next door neighbour makes more money than me because of some regulatory capture or market dysfunction or government nonsense, then I feel angry and resentful. This isn't conducive to the social order, and I think I'm noticing it more and more in newspaper report, blogs and media from the US at the moment. Americans in particular, and more so than the Brits, are happy to see someone make it so long as the game isn't rigged. But when they see the 1%, the banksters and the oligarchs floating free from the rest of us _because_ of the rules of the game, they feel that society is broken.

This explains why people feel so differently about different kinds of "rich" today. If some film star gets $50m for a movie, I might think it's sick and tragic, I might think it's an insane waste of resources and I might think it's a revolting commentary on our degraded values. But I don't really care about it. Good luck to them and good luck to David Beckham and good luck to Alan Sugar. They made their way to the top by being better at something than their peers. David Cameron didn't, of course, and neither did Baronet never-had-a-job Osborne, which is why I suppose I have so little respect for them.

Of course, this doesn't apply to all actors, because the establishment are working hard to make acting an hereditary profession, but you get the point.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Stupider means poorer

The bad news is that not only has it been scientifically measured that the English are getting stupider, after about 30,000 years of steady progress from the simple use of tools in Kent chalk pits up until David Blunkett took over at the Ministry of Edukashun, Edukashun, Edukashun. Since when...

A study in 2009 led by James Flynn himself and published in Economics & Human Biology compared IQ scores obtained by British teenagers in 1980 and 2008, using the same test. The average had declined by two points on average, but by as much as six points among teenagers in the top half of the IQ scale… a six-point decline in IQ would equate with a 0.3 per cent fall in GDP.

[From Received wisdom | Prospect Magazine]

It's the second point that's even more disturbing than the first. In the olden times, stupid people could contribute to the economy by farming and such like, but those days are over. We now have an economy where stupid people are unemployable, and that's a real problem for society. I suspect when we look back on this era from the perspective of the distant future we will be genuinely perplexed about the "design" of society. A welfare state that's gone horribly wrong -- leading to an overproduction of stupid people -- and an education system optimised for jobs that vanished a generation ago. There's probably no way back -- the English will vanish like the Easter Islanders, having created an environment that cannot support them -- but we may be able to launch a rearguard action if we take immediate steps. I don't know what these might be -- it's hard to think of ways to reduce the number of stupid people without veering into eugenics -- but one place to start might be to stop stupid people from voting. The political process is undermined by stupidity as it is, and as the population continues to get stupider than state actions will become further deranged.

One defence worth considering is immediate action to reduce the size of the state, so that there are fewer aspects of society for it be deranged about. If sectors such as health and education were not run by the government it would be much more difficult for stupid people to obtain control of them, and this would be much to our benefit I'm sure.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]