Myth of the "wasted vote"

With minor parties doing so well, the election will be dominated by questions of tactical voting.

Every five years, leaflets come through our doors: "Labour/Lib Dems/Tories can't win here! Don't waste your vote!" Only the party labels change, depending on the constituency.

Here is one of the best-kept secrets of politics: this is utter bollocks.

Unless your constituency election is decided by a single vote (unlikely), your vote is always "wasted", whether you voted Tory, Labour, Lib Dem, UKIP or the Petting Pony Pyjama Party. Somebody won; if you had stayed in bed, or voted any other way, the same person would still have won. Your vote wasn't pivotal.

So, you might as well vote for the party you like best, no matter what size it is in your constituency. In fact, if everybody did that, FPTP would probably work much better. It would still be hugely distorting. But at least it would be a distorted reflection of what people actually wanted.

Strange but true: the notorious bias of first-past-the-post in favour of the top two parties, and/or small highly localized parties, comes not only from electoral maths, but also from a quirk of voter psychology. If the party we voted for wins, we think that "we helped them win", even though nothing we could have said or done would have changed the outcome.

Why I am a conservative III: family values

III. Family values matter

By family values, I mean the Tony Blair interpretation - the idea that the two-parent family is quite a good way to bring up children, and should be supported. I do not mean - hopefully, by 2015, this will cause little surprise - that I hate gays, want to ban abortion or stem-cell research, or point at single mothers in the street.

It does mean that some things I hear make me angry. Take the phrase "single-parent family", which replaced the earlier "broken home". "Broken home" is judgmental, yes. That judgment has an immediate emotional resonance for me. I spent some of my childhood in a broken home. The description fits really well. I don't say it would for everybody.

Now "single-parent family" is less judgmental, but for me it is a lie. I wasn't in a "single parent family": I had two parents, one of them had custody, one had access. A majority of "single parent families" are, like mine, not single-parent families at all but two-parent families of whom one parent is not in the house, either having left or never having arrived.

Beyond vocabulary, the point is that there is no useful judgment-free definition of a family. A family is a set of people who have obligations to each other. It is a good idea for a society to have public expectations about what those obligations are and who has them.

Again, I do not long for the days when single mothers were shamed and their children put in orphanages. But this seems like a red herring. Why would I be blaming the mothers? A while back, I was talking to someone in my home town. He was a small-time criminal and drug dealer, and did not seem very nice. He told me he had a kid, but he'd moved out of the mother's home. Why? "She was doing my head in," basta.

On the face of it - and of course superficial judgments can be mistaken - I did not really think that was OK. Is it?

So, then, after making all allowances for the huge complexity of human relationships, would we not, quite likely, want to blame somebody who behaved like that?

And if you don't like the idea of blaming people who heaven knows are facing difficult enough lives, with tight enough material constraints and few enough spiritual resources, might you not at least blame the society that has created the message that thinking that way, acting that way, is OK?

I don't especially see why this would make anyone vote Conservative in 2015. Tony Blair practically cared much more about this kind of family values than David Cameron seems to. But it matters. Most thinking people in America, Left or Right, seem to have understood this. Few in Europe do.

Why I am a conservative II: socialism

II. Socialism doesn't work

Come on, you are thinking, even Labour admit that Soviet socialism failed. The debate's moved on. Well, actually there are still loons out there like the Green party. But do you really think that socialism doesn't work? Specifically, that command-and-control systems, where goods are allocated by a central planner according to need rather than being demanded via a price mechanism, are doomed to failure?

If you do think so, then you should draw the conclusions that follow. For instance, the NHS won't work: it is just this kind of system. Nor will state education, for the same reason. You must expect these systems to fail. I do. (I see the failures of state education at first hand.)

This does not mean that the market will provide a utopia. There are excellent reasons to think it won't - health and education are not like packets of cornflakes, whose buyers know what they need. I do not know any perfect solution; but our current systems are doomed to failure by design.

Socialism doesn't work. Consider taking this truism seriously.

Why I am a conservative I: state spending

(The next few posts are going to give some views of mine which few other people seem to share. That might make them interesting to think about. They are the reasons why I am a conservative, and they also help explain why I will be voting Conservative in May.)

I. State spending does not need to be more than 35% of our extremely large GDP.

To me this seems obvious. A third of everything this country makes is not enough? Really? Of course, economists have thought of many reasons why state spending should carry on getting higher forever: I think they're bonkers.

For the record, I think that Krugman and the Keynesians have won the economic debate about austerity. I do not think the big cuts in 2010 were a good idea.

However. First, at some point stimulus has to stop being an argument and we have to assume normality is returning. As I understand it, intellectually respectable Keynesian policy works like this: you spend more than you save during recessions caused by inadequate demand, and, to fund this, you save more than you spend in normal times. Western democracies have been failing to do this for some time. Austerity has harmed many in the past few years. Unsustainable public debt, however, has destroyed many regimes. If this happens to us, the harm to us and democracy will last for generations. So, the long run matters more.

Second, politics has its topsy-turvy logic that makes it hardest to cut spending when the economy seems to be going well, to "take the punch-bowl away". If the choice were between cutting during good years or during bad years, I would choose the former like a good Keynesian. But I fear the choice may be cutting during bad years, or not at all. Neither of the Labour and Conservative platforms offers much grounds for optimism about this, since both parties are irresponsibly promising tax cuts to their core supporters.

Linkage

The Rolling Stone retracts its story about rape on a US campus.

What strikes me, honestly, is that this story of failure shows higher journalistic standards than you would find in most of the British press. The journalist realises her story has holes in; tells her editor; and they call in a third party to investigate. Contrast with the Daily Mail's methodology. The irony is that the Mail's plagiarism production line allows it to fund some good investigative journalism, while Rolling Stone's business model is threatened because it strives to keep its integrity.

The jholawala syndrome. Including terrible puns.

Education linkage

Peter Thiel on higher education:

All the hard work at Harvard is done by the admissions officers who anoint an already-proven hypercompetitive elite. If that weren’t true — if superior instruction could explain the value of college — then why not franchise the Ivy League? Why not let more students benefit? It will never happen because the top U.S. colleges draw their mystique from zero-sum competition.

The Economist on the same.

This debate hinges on two arcane issues of econometrics. First, what is the real return to education? You can't just compare the wages of those with and without degrees, because presumably the people with degrees were smarter on average anyway, and might get higher wages even without the degree.

Second, what is the social return to education? That is, suppose we can answer the first question, and know that a degree gets you, say, $10K more in salary. Is that because it makes you $10K more productive? Or does it just get you a higher paid job ahead of somebody else, without actually increasing social wealth at all? (As Peter Thiel says, maybe higher education is just "a tournament".)

Neither extreme is really plausible. It can't be that society would be completely unaffected if nobody got, say, engineering degrees. On the other hand, it is surely true that sometimes, education helps people queue-jump, rather than actually making us more productive. AFAICS we don't yet know where the truth lies and for what kinds of education.

Linkage

The problems with peer review - Biomed Central retracts 43 articles after it was found they had been scammed to use fictitious peer reviewers.

"Imagine the pathology department in your local hospital gave prestige, job security, advancement, praise and more money to the individual pathologists who found the most cancer in the biopsy samples they are sent. Not to the ones who most accurately identify cancer: The ones to detect the most – and the rarer the better. This is how academics are incentivised and it is a disaster." -- an aside from this new blog, btw the article is also great and thoughtful. 

North Korean slogan or TED talk?

This should be subtitled Why The Internet is Not Making Journalism More Efficient. 

Why do areas with few immigrants support UKIP?

Here's the map (thanks to Soylent Dave):

UKIP's key message is anti-immigration, but its support comes from areas with few immigrants. Why?

• People who dislike immigration have moved to get away from it. 

This surely does happen but it is hard to believe it happens on such a large scale. After all, moving to Northumberland to avoid immigrants seems a bit extreme.

• Fear of immigration is irrational, and is dispelled by getting to know some actual immigrants.

That could easily be true. Still, do people really base their vote on a fear of something they have never met?

(I recall a friend's father - a very intelligent guy, not a bigot - talking about immigration, in Shropshire in the 1990s. We feel as if we're being overrun! he said. I looked out of the cottage window. The immemorial hills stretched out above us. No human figure was to be seen. The green fields were dotted with grazing sheep....)

• The marginal cost of the first migrant is the highest

This is my idea. Suppose that there are gains from living in a very stable community with little in- or out-migration - say because people who interact repeatedly over the long run are able to develop high trust and solve social dilemmas. (This is the standard Ostrom-Axelrod-Folk-Theorem way of thinking, in the social science literature - an idea I think has some serious defects, but it will do to stand an argument on.)

Now suppose that even a little immigration or population movement destroys that trust quite quickly. Then the places which still have these stable communities will be keen to stop migration. Other places will already have lost the stability, so it will weigh less against the countervailing gains from immigration, such as cheap or skilled labour. They will also perhaps have started to develop more multicultural forms of community, making it easier for them to integrate more new arrivals.

• Poverty

The last explanation is the simplest: UKIP thrives where people are poor, and the countryside and North-East are poor places.

It would be fun to test these rival theories. Relatedly, it would be interesting to see whether the UKIP areas actually have big recent immigration flows (i.e. changes in the immigrant stock, it is the stock that is shown above) - in percentage terms, say.

Another point about these maps is that they do not seem compatible with anti-immigration sentiment being due to squeezed public services (the "Britain is full" argument). Those squeezes would surely be tighter in urbanized, highly populated areas, but UKIP support seems to come from the countryside.

Linkage

You could still have your life ruined for being gay in the 1980s.

Sorry, we still haven't found the aliens.

What's wrong with UKIP?

What's wrong with UKIP is not that they want less immigration. A large majority of the populace has wanted lower immigration for a long time. This government promised and failed to reduce immigration, so at present immigration levels can fairly be called uncontrolled.

This is not even a question of the majority view versus good policy. The cost-benefit analysis of immigration looks like this:

B = E + X

where B is the total benefit or cost, E is the economic effects and X is the political and social effects. To my mind, Jonathan Portes and others have persuasively shown that E is positive. But nobody has even tried to measure X. One example of X is that there are now about 600,000 people resident in Britain who "have some sympathy" for the Charlie Hebdo murderers. So these are not airy-fairy intangibles.

What's wrong with UKIP is that they want to leave the EU, and this would cripple the EU in its hour of need. But the point of view is defensible. Nation-states are ultimately incompatible with the EU, because free migration ultimately breaks the link between state and nation, and reduces government to administrators of the local populace. So, there is an existential choice between Europe and the nation-state. I favour Europe, since I want to be able to stand up to other bigger nations. But I cannot blame people for a different point of view - especially when Europe seems on the point of imploding because of economic stupidity, and unable to protect itself against a clear and present military danger.

Linkage

I very much liked this paragraph from here, re a "religious freedom law" in Indiana but relevant to the UK:

To our LGBT friends: with the astonishingly rapid-dawning first opportunity to marry in our country’s 225 year history, try extending some grace to others who have religiously informed objections to same-sex marriage; and if the baker or florist does not want to provide you a cake or flowers, move down the street and give your business to ones who will. To our conservative Christian friends: with religious liberty protected in this country like no other place in the world, try loving your LGBT neighbors (not even talking about your enemies) unconditionally, and understand that providing them goods and services in the marketplace is an act of hospitality, but it does not indicate approval of their nuptial decisions or their sexual orientation. It seems to me this is a better way for good citizens and good Christians to resolve conflict in the public square.

Urban myths that begin "studies show...."

blasphemous thought

UKIP and the Greens are mad. The SNP want to break up my country. The Lib Dems are inane. How about a grand coalition?

The humanities

Interesting Guardian article on "the war against the humanities".

Steve Jobs was a famous defender of the humanities and liberal arts. The bandwagon for STEM subjects may be an overcorrection.

But. Think of humanities and you perhaps imagine learning an appreciation of art, or reading a life-changing novel, or understanding a region's history - what the Romans called becoming cultus, cultivated. Alas, modern academics in the field often seem more doctus than cultus: learned, in a pejorative, dry-as-dust sense. Publishing articles unread beyond their subfield, greatly citing Foucault, writing turgid prose full of words like "intersectionality" and "discourse":

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows....

Guess what? Undergraduates are unkeen to suffer  three years of such stuff with no prospects of a decent job at the other end.

Plenty of humanities courses not like this. For example (plug) the creative writing master's degree at UEA has produced some of the best recent UK novelists. That kind of teaching surely has a bright future, because no matter what the pay gap, not all young people will want to be engineers, or even economists.

Linkage

Was there ever a Little Ice Age?

"... a Europe that is getting older and poorer is starting to find that moral stands in foreign policy are luxuries it can no longer afford." Nick Cohen.

The proportion of women in a country's parliament can be predicted by average male and female digit ratios in that country. (Robert Trivers is on the paper.) I am not absolutely convinced of the exogeneity here but it is in any case a very interesting result.

Sounds of the Bodleian.

Open source mapping, Renaissance edition

By the simple expedient of being honest with his readers and inviting criticism and suggestions, Ortelius made his Theatrum a sort of cooperative enterprise on an international basis. He received helpful suggestions from far and wide and cartographers stumbled over themselves to send him their latest maps of regions not covered in the Theatrum.
The Theatrum was... speedily reprinted several times...

Lloyd A Brown, The Story of Maps, cited in Elisabeth Eisenstein The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe

Linkage

The evolution of bankspeak. Really interesting, not just for laughing at World Bank bureaucratic newspeak - the point is that text analysis is now a powerful empirical tool for doing "cultural studies".

Is the United States of America a conscious being?

Linkage

Pseudomarkets don't work: American kids edition. Most terrifying quote: “There is this experience of breaking the sound barrier together....” Great, we are putting millions of children through an (ironically) untested system because of a jet pilot/engineering metaphor.

The BBC mapped the Big Five personality traits in the UK. The Big Five list (OCEAN - Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism), is like the "proper science" version of all that INTP crap, and deserves more publicity. Heh... London's level of agreeableness is the lowest possible. Figures.

Mark Duggan: "the best lack all conviction"

Here is the Independent Police Complaints Commission report on the death of Mark Duggan which sparked the 2011 riots in the UK.

I have just listened to his brother being interviewed on the Today Programme, attacking the report and the IPCC.

My first feeling was sympathy for a grieving brother. My next was: "Mark Duggan was a gangster - perhaps his family are no better...." Do I know Mark Duggan is a gangster? Several newspapers have said so. And then there is this photograph:

This photo is devastating - the kind of picture a defence lawyer would hate. The staring eyes, the ring and chunky bracelet, and of course the gun gesture, are all worth a thousand words. Plus, the fact that the subject is black. (Did that affect you? No? You sure?)

All of this activates a whole bunch of stereotypes in my brain. Those stereotypes then get transferred by association to Mr Duggan's family.

None of this seems like an ideal way to make a difficult judgment.

But what alternative do I have? After all, my thoughts on the other side are equally stereotypical. "You can't trust the investigation - the Metropolitan police are notoriously corrupt." How does that idea in my head link to the true level of corruption in the Met, which is - almost by definition - more than nothing but less than total?

Knowing a little of the psychology of belief makes me think that Yeats quote, "the best lack all conviction," is best read as a definition. The surer you are of yourself, the likelier you are to be wrong.

(I haven't read the report either. It's 500 pages long!)

Linkage

Now I want to check out Lil Wayne.

The Gulf Stream might be slowing down because of the melting Greenland ice sheet... making Britain colder. :-(

UK DNA

Basically unchanged by most invasions. A priori that is weird to me. What did the other invaders get - material resources to exploit? (I also love the FAQ: "Are some regions of Britain inbred? No." NB, I live in Norfolk.) Here is the original paper, which has more amazing data and pictures: there are more distinct genetic clusters in the Isle of Orkney than in all of the South-East and central England combined.

There's also a unique Welsh borders cluster :-)

Update: the Guardian gives its perspective.