Cumulative voting is not permitted in the 2016 Santa Clarita City Council election, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge has ruled, according to SVC News and hometownstation (different articles, both by Jessica Boyer; ht Election Law Blog), because state law “does not define any cumulative voting ballot tabulation methods by which testing and certification criteria could be developed.”

Cumulative voting allows each voter, in an election in which multiple candidates win (such as for a city council), to cast multiple votes, including (if the voter chooses) more than one vote for a single candidate. It can increase the chance that candidates favored by a minority of voters will be elected (to a minority of the available seats). It was up for discussion in Santa Clarita for that reason, as a result of an action brought under the Voting Rights Act. In a handful of other similar cases it has actually been implemented. (E.g., in Chilton County, Alabama)

Capitalism, as a method of resource allocation, is a form of cumulative voting. Each of us votes as many of our dollars as we wish for whatever we desire and can afford, and the invisible hand steers resources in accordance with our aggregated preferences. Some have pointed to the cumulative character of market-based “voting” as somehow the source of the inequality inherent in the system and its creative tension with democracy. (E.g., Paul McCulley seems to imply this.)

It’s true that capitalism is bound to cumulative voting. On the other hand, while one person, one vote is our usual election rule, cumulative voting isn’t incompatible with democracy. As these voting rights battles suggest, far from demanding inequality, cumulative voting is arguably fairer, more broadly democratic, because—unlike one person, one vote—it measures voters’ preferences proportionally. It’s in fact that capacity for proportionality that makes cumulative voting essential to capitalism. For the same reason, one or another variety or variation of cumulative voting will be a key element of our Democratism project. Any complex system of resource allocation based on the preferences of large numbers of people must measure their views proportionally, whether it counts their views democratically or not.

This interesting news piece from Princeton’s Wilson School, about a paper on the causes of income and wealth inequality, points to a danger in trying to learn too much from causes.

The paper attributes a great deal of the swell in inequality to, in the words of one of its authors, “the mere process of development,” which raises demand for higher-skilled workers in the service sector of rich countries. The paper itself (at NBER, restricted access) doesn’t  address policy solutions, but the authors offered one up for the news story: “Equipping workers with high-level skills could be key to closing the gap, they said.”

So, a thought on causes and solutions: I may be enjoying a swim in a river and then notice that I’ve drifted too far downstream. Fortunately, I don’t necessarily have to swim upstream to get back. I could take a bus instead. That’s the difference between me and a salmon.  Likewise, even to the extent that inequality arises from disparity in certain skills, the solution isn’t necessarily training more people in those skills.

However we got here, the challenge before us is to balance the needs and desires of everyone involved, including

• people with skills that pay well; let’s call them the “richly skilled” (they’re not, after all, the most highly skilled in any other sense than that their particular skills can make them rich)
• people who might seek the services of the richly skilled
• people who aspire to be trained and to enter the ranks of the richly skilled
• people who don’t really want to spend their lives doing what the richly skilled do but might consider it if it seems the most practical option
• people who just aren’t going to end up richly skilled no matter what
• people who might seek other kinds of services, such as from the not-richly-skilled
• the family and friends of any of these people

Okay, evidently it includes everyone. So the right question isn’t, How can we increase the number of richly skilled people competing for riches? It’s something more to the effect of, Given everything we’re capable of, what’s the best balance we can strike in fulfilling our needs and aspirations for ourselves and our society? We can build a system that allows us to answer that question together and shift resources accordingly.

Advertisers and politicians lie to us every day, often spewing the same lies again and again. There’s good reason for that: the more we hear something, the more likely we are to believe it, whether it’s true or not.

But what about if we know the truth about it already? We don’t fall for lies in that case, do we? Lisa K. Fazio and co-authors of this recent article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology designed a study to answer that question, and the result wasn’t pretty. Knowledge of the truth doesn’t protect us from the effect of repeated falsehoods.

What does this mean for democracy? How can we make wise decisions when our own knowledge of the truth is so fragile—and so vulnerable to moneyed interests who control so much of what we hear through the media?

One solution is to expand democracy, by expanding the range of decisions we make together. Electoral campaigns, by their nature, focus on only a handful of issues. That makes them into battles of repeated claims on a few points. The more repetition, the less our prior knowledge matters. Note that public finance of electoral campaigns can’t fix this, because it arises from the paucity of issues.

What we really need is a subtler system of voting, one that takes account of our views on many issues, instead of just a few. The more issues we decide, the less power to the repeaters. They can’t repeat away our knowledge of everything.