Democratism Blog

Over at NPR’s 13.7 Cosmos & Culture, Marcelo Gleiser asks whether technology will free us from work so that we can enjoy a life of leisure. It won’t, he says, because people are workers by nature, like ants and bees. Technology gives us new ways to spend our time, but “whatever our individual choices are, we seem to make sure we keep busy one way or another.”

It’s an old idea, as Gleiser says, that technology might free us from work, but we’re in a period of high fascination with it. Every week I come across new references to Keynes’s 1930 prediction that within a century or so we will have entered an “age of leisure and of abundance.” Like Gleiser, Keynes felt that “the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented,” but he reckoned that three hours a day would be plenty.

There’s also a more anxious strain, as in Martin Ford’s recent Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future—a title that says it all. Ford advocates a guaranteed basic income as a way to support the vast multitudes of us that the new robot-driven economy will discard.

The key point for our Democratism project is that, however technology develops, the consequences for our work and leisure are up to us to decide. Despite what Gleiser seems to imply, the mere existence of technology that can take work off our hands does not improve our options, as individuals, about how to spend our working lives. Everything depends on how we choose, as a society, to use the technology. History, in fact, shows that we often choose ways that do not widen options for individuals. At one time, for example, we employed new technology in ways that shifted massive numbers of workers from farms to factories. For most of those workers it was economic necessity that had made them farmers, and it was economic necessity that then made them factory workers. Their working lives often worsened as a result, and individual choice had little to do with it. The changes we’ve experienced in recent decades are no different. Some options for individuals close, others open. Technology has been advancing for a long time. If there were a direct line from better technology to better individual work options, Monday would be the happiest day of the week by now.

On the other hand, if Ford is right that our trajectory is toward an economy in which human work has no market value, we aren’t stuck with that, either. While the rise of technology doesn’t automatically increase our opportunities as individuals, it does increase our power as a society to create opportunities for individuals. In a world in which the robots do everything we’re paid to do now, there will still be plenty of good work for people to do—human problems to be solved through human relationships, human joys that we can experience only in connection with humans, new human goals to imagine with other humans.

I hold with Ford that our unattended markets will not support that work, at least adequately. They already don’t! Why would they then? Unlike Ford, though, I’m certain we can do better than just putting everyone on the dole. A guaranteed income might keep us fed, but there’s important work to be done, and humans are happiest when we’re doing it. If our markets don’t support the most socially valuable work, then by definition they don’t work correctly, and it’s our democratic responsibility to fix them so they do.

That’s important human work, too, and it’s already important, and it’s what our project is all about.

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Image by DonkeyHotey. Some rights reserved. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

The United States has not become more ideologically polarized, after all, say political scientists Seth Hill and Chris Tausanovitch. That is, our elected representatives have, but we the people haven’t.

Our Democratist system won’t be hamstrung by bitter ideological divisions that don’t reflect our views.

I’m starting a list of public issues, big and small, that we can’t do much about now, but that we should be deciding and addressing together democratically. It’s to be in the way of examples, not an exclusive list, and it can include anything that comes up in the news or conversation or anywhere. So far, we’ve posted about these:

• affordable housing
• union membership, higher pay for workers, job stability
• income inequality
• toxic work environments

Today I’ll add a smaller one, although maybe it’s really not so small:

Better classroom ventilation and temperature control “could significantly improve academic achievement of students,” the authors of a recent study conclude. In particular, they found that for “each liter per second per person” increase in ventilation rate, math test scores rose 0.5%. Scores went up a bit more than that for each 1.8°F decrease in temperature. Reading and science scores showed similar effects.

Assuming the science on this holds up and causality can be shown (it hasn’t been yet, so the authors’ conclusion is really still a hypothesis), this raises a question that might matter to many of us: Is somewhat better learning worth the cost of improving the air in classrooms? Right now, that’s a judgment call for school administrators, and for them it’s a question of the best use of a school budget. That’s an accident of practicalities. In principle, we should also count the views of parents, employers (who might hire former classroom-educated students), and everyone else who cares about school kids and the adults they’ll become. And if better air is worth the price, there’s no special reason we should pay for it with money that would otherwise go to new textbooks or art supplies, or anything else for schools. The money has to come from somewhere, but it could just as well come from, say, raising the price of air conditioning private mansions. At the same time, ventilation and temperature control might have downsides beyond the financial cost: they might cause environmental damage, for example. There, too, it’s a question of public value, not one for school principals in particular.

We ought to decide the value question here together. (And don’t worry: we can do it in a way that doesn’t require everyone to take a position on every issue, or even be aware of them. We’ll post about that sort of thing separately.)

I’ll add to this list, but it’s ultimately everyone’s list to create. Leave a comment, or tweet or email us about what issues matter to you.

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.