Random Enfranchisement

A passing comment by Brian Weatherson (on the topic of vote-counting in Florida) got me thinking – and we all know how dangerous that can be.

So we’re just going to trust the computers. Given how reliable we all know computers to be, this is about as democratic as selecting candidates by lots. (Just for the record, I think it’s an interesting theoretical question about how democratic that is. It’s how we pick juries after all, and they are often considered an important part of the democratic process.)

Set aside selecting candidates by lots, and consider a somewhat different proposal: selecting voters by lots. Instead of allowing anyone who meets the formal criteria for voting to vote, why not take a random sample of registered voters (or people in the census) and designate them as the only people allowed to vote in a given election? If the sample were sufficiently large, it would represent the views of the overall population, within some margin of error (a sample of a mere 10,000 would generate a vanishingly small margin of error, if the sample were truly random). The people selected would have a stronger incentive to become informed and vote wisely than in the status quo, because each vote would stand a greater chance of actually making a difference. The chance would still be very small, of course – it must be small in order for the law of large numbers to kick in and support my prior claim about having a representative sample. But apparently feelings of civic duty interact with very small chances of making a difference; otherwise, non-voting would be even more common than it is. I surmise, therefore, that increasing the weight of one’s vote by two or three orders of magnitude would have a substantial impact on voting choices, even if the absolute likelihood were still tiny.

Aside from the benefits of motivating qualified voters to consider their votes more carefully, the proposed system would reduce the administrative costs of voting. We could invest a great deal more per voter in safeguarding against fraud and error and still save money. We’d need a mere fraction of the ballots, voting booths, and manpower to run the system. Plus, everyone else could stay at work instead of taking time off to vote.

Yeah, yeah, this is a pipe dream. It’ll never happen, which is why I don’t have to worry much about the possible downsides of my scheme. But I’m curious – what would the disadvantages be? The obvious one is that people whose name never got randomly chosen would feel disenfranchised (which, by some definition of the term, they would be). Yet everyone would have the same chance of being a voter, so there would be no formal violation of equal treatment principles. The communitarian objection would be that participation in the voting process is desirable in and of itself, as a device for making people feel connected to each other and their government. This argument is not terribly persuasive to me, since I’d prefer that people feel attached to voluntarily chosen communities instead of the state, but I can still understand the objection. What other objections are there?

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You Can't Stem the Stem-Cell Tide

This is fantastic news:

South Korean and U.S. researchers said Wednesday they had cloned a human embryo and extracted from it sought-after cells called embryonic stem cells. The cloning was not intended to make human babies, but the first step toward developing cures for diabetes, Parkinson's and other diseases, the researchers said.

The experiment, the first published report of cloned human stem cells, means so-called therapeutic cloning is no longer a theory but a reality. Supporters of medical cloning say it can transform medicine, offering tailored and highly effective treatments for diseases. They say it could eventually lead to grow-your-own organ transplants.

As anyone who's spoken to me on the subject will tell you, I am bullish on both cloning and stem-cell technologies. In the past, I’ve predicted that these technologies, separately or in concert, will substantially extend the human lifespan within the next 20 or 30 years (if not sooner). However, the political resistance to both types of research, exemplified by Bush’s limitations on the use of fetal stem cells and his desire to ban all human cloning, dampened my excitement somewhat. Today’s news reignites it. Even if political opposition slows down or stops the research in the US, it will assuredly occur elsewhere in the world. Note that while both Americans and South Koreans are credited, the actual experiments took place in South Korea.

In casual conversation, some people have given me skeptical looks when I’ve suggested that stem-cell and cloning research are closely related and will eventually merge. Today’s news confirms my suspicions. The cloning process was used to create embryonic stem cells with genetic codes identical (or nearly identical) to those of adult human beings. Stem cells have the potential to grow into any form of human tissue. Thus, we may eventually be able to grow new human organs that are exact genetic matches for recipients, a development that could both alleviate the organ shortage and decrease the frequency of organ rejection.

Keep eating your Wheaties, folks. You don’t want to die before the fruit of this groundbreaking research ripens enough for general use!

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Conservatives in Academia

So why are conservatives underrepresented in academia? Kieran Healy argues that conservatives are on the horns of a dilemma: they must either (a) admit the existence of institutionalized inequality or (b) admit that conservatives just aren’t as smart as liberals.

C’mon now, isn’t there a more obvious explanation? No, I don’t mean Ezra Klein’s idea that smart conservatives are more likely than liberals to seek material gain in the private sector (though there may be something to that). I mean the fact that academia is almost entirely a non-profit enterprise, and it’s much easier for discrimination to survive without the discipline of profit and loss. In academia, there is no bottom line. Whether one gets tenure has much to do with the popularity of your ideas with the old guard in your profession. Like will tend to hire like, and as a result the same biases get duplicated year after year. The dominance of liberalism decades ago perpetuates itself to the present day. (Note that it’s much easier for non-liberal professors to survive in institutions with a long history of non-liberal viewpoints, such as the University of Chicago.)

There is a very weak market test for schools based on ideological balance, because students can choose to go to other colleges – but rare is the student who will reject a prestigious school because of the ideology of its professors. The smart but non-liberal student will attend the most prestigious school he can get into, and then tolerate the views of his professors for long enough to graduate. The lack of diversity across colleges in their ideological balance makes it very difficult to find an equivalent college with a substantially different ideological balance.

Another possible reason liberals dominate academia was suggested by Robert Nozick: intellectuals are, in general, people who appreciate thinking and planning, and they feel underappreciated. They tend to think society would just work better if all the dumb people would stand aside and let the smart people run things. As a result, they tend to be more hostile to arguments in favor of spontaneous, decentralized orders like the market.

One more thing: When complaining about the ideological balance in academia, conservatives are generally not asking for any special privileges. They aren’t demanding affirmative action for conservatives. Rather, they are drawing attention to the hypocrisy of liberals who champion the need for diversity of every variety (gender, race, economic background, etc.) except the kind of diversity that presumably matters most in an academic setting: diversity of opinion. Perversely, they even justify race- and class-based preferences on grounds of engendering more diversity of viewpoints. I’ve yet to hear a liberal advocate of diversity-based affirmative action advocate the recruitment of more non-liberals.

(BTW, I’m not a conservative. I’m a libertarian. Since libertarians are usually lumped together with conservatives in the studies of ideological diversity, I don’t know whether libertarians are over- or under-represented relative to their numbers in the population.)

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You Can't Plan This Kind of Thing

This evening, I was explaining to a class of MBA students how above-normal profit in an industry tends to attract entry into the industry (unless there are significant barriers to entry). I asked the students for examples of industries that are currently making above-normal profits, and one student volunteered the pornography industry. “Yes,” I said, “and I imagine there’s a great deal of entry in porn!”

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WTC Insurance Case

A federal court will soon decide whether the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center constituted one event or two. The answer matters because the insurance policy carried by the WTC’s owners specified payouts on a per-event basis. If 9/11 attack was one event, they will receive $3.5 million from the insurance companies; if it was two, they will receive $7 million.

There is no obvious right answer here. The biggest lesson, one that I emphasize to my law & economics students, is that no contract is ever complete. There will always be contingencies unforeseen by the parties and left unspecified in the contract, because it is costly to predict unusual events and insert clauses to deal with them, and there are diminishing returns to doing so. The parties to a contract rationally choose to leave some things for the courts to decide ex post, and that’s why the courts have to establish default rules.

Still, I’ll take a stab at finding the most correct answer. While the 9/11 attack was highly unusual, non-independent events are hardly unknown to contract law. Consider the damage done to your car by a hailstorm – would it be considered one event (a hailstorm) or many events (hailstone 1, hailstone 2, … , hailstone 100…)? I’m not an insurance lawyer, but I strongly suspect it’s the former. Similarly, if you have cancer, and the cancer leads to the need for two different procedures (an operation to remove a tumor, and a series of chemotherapy treatments), your insurance policy’s “per condition” cap presumably applies to the total from both, not each one individually. In each case, the probability of a second event, conditional on the other having occurred, is greater than zero. Given that my car got hit by one hailstone, there’s a greater chance than usual chance it will get hit by another. If I need to get a tumor removed, the chance of my also needing chemo is greater than if I hadn’t needed to get a tumor removed.

The general rule, then, is that when two events are not statistically independent, they are treated as one for insurance purposes. (I’m assuming positively related events; I choose to ignore cases in which one event reduces the likelihood of another.) In the present case, the two airplanes that hit the WTC were pretty clearly part of a coordinated attack, and thus not statistically independent. So I would probably side with the insurance companies, unless their contracts defined “event” in some novel way. The precedent established would be consistent with the general pattern I noted above.

Naturally, people writing insurance contracts would have the right to contract around the precedent by defining “event” in some more specific way (and adjusting premiums upward accordingly, since the liability created for the insurance company would be greater). The same would be true of the opposite precedent as well (with a downward adjustment of premiums). This is one of the great virtues of contract law – if you don’t like the court’s rules, you can typically write your own, with the consent of the other party, of course. But since the rule I advocate here seems congruent with current practice in less dramatic circumstances, I think it would not require as much rewriting of existing contract forms as would the alternative.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, I realize there’s some ambiguity in the rule I suggest here. Among other, we would have to ask what other factors should be taken as given before doing the calculation of statistical independence. For example, an elderly person might be more susceptible to a variety of illnesses; if we didn’t control for age, then a person with condition X might have a greater chance (than a randomly selected person) of also having condition Y, even though X and Y are not related. To deal with this and similar cases, my rule might have to be adjusted to some threshold higher than zero correlation. The implication for events like hailstorms and WTC attacks is still pretty clear, though.

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