On quadratic voting and politics as education

While this mechanism may seem as though it may work for minority groups with strong preferences, it&#x27;s important to point out the implicit assumption of class equality between majority and minority voters. That is, the example of gay rights works because homosexuals are spread evenly across the wealth distribution (and in fact are <i>more</i> financially and socially successful in the aggregate than non-homosexuals).<p>But compare this to transgender peoples, who are marginalized, disproportionately homeless, almost universally imprisoned, and make up a very disproportionate percentage of the lower class (usually they &#x27;fall&#x27; to this class rather than being &#x27;borne of it&#x27;). It is unlikely that transgender people could buy the votes to achieve policy measures they felt necessary just as it would have been impossible for slaves and poor indentured whites and immigrants in the 1700s and 1800s, Native Americans pushed from their land and made to walk trails of tears, children working in factories, or women for these same centuries (who in addition to having effectively no political voice also had few reasonable financial options) to &#x27;buy&#x27; freedom.<p>Additionally, entrenched interests within classes - and in disputes between them - make it easy for the upper division of the wealth distribution to buy political power to block the opposing classes vote, this exacerbated by high wealth inequality. That is to say so-called Quadratic Voting also depends on the wealthier class having no strong opinion - yet its very easy to find examples both today and historically where this is easily shown not to be the case.<p>So its suspect whether today&#x27;s working poor, child laborers, blacks and latinos, immigrants, or members of small (or no) unions would benefit from a system like this.<p>Finally, these market based solutions to voting would be yet another way to trade financial power for political power. The history of all governments show how strongly political power already responds to wealth. Is it smart (and ethical) to make votes market commodities?

&gt; I would gladly have gay marriage legal throughout the United States. But overall, like David Hume, I am more fearful of the intense preferences of minorities than not. I do not wish to encourage such preferences, all things considered. If minority groups know they have the possibility of buying up votes as a path to power, paying the quadratic price along the way, we are sending intense preference groups a message that they have a new way forward. In the longer run I fear that will fray democracy by strengthening the hand of such groups, and boosting their recruiting and fundraising. Was there any chance the authors would use the anti-abortion movement as their opening example?<p>This is the punchline for me. At the end of the day, the whole point of democracy is that the majority is in charge. Majority control is the general rule; protection of minorities is the exception to the general rule.

One thing that was helpful to me in making sense of this post was to understand that Quadratic Voting is trying to solve the problem of the &quot;tyranny of the majority.&quot; It&#x27;s a voting scheme that gives greater weight to minority preferences than the one-person-one-vote schemes we are mostly familiar with.<p>(Please note that this is &quot;minority&quot; in the &quot;!majority&quot; sense of the word, and not merely &quot;!caucasians.&quot;)<p>Tyler&#x27;s contribution here is to push back a little against the idea that we should be favoring minority preferences more than we do currently. He thinks this is too indiscriminate. Some minority preferences are quite good and others are pernicious. Favoring <i>all</i> minority preferences empowers the good and the bad.<p>I was also struck by the last paragraph: &gt; &quot;In any case the relevant question is what kinds of preference formation, and which kinds of groups, we should allow voting mechanisms to encourage.&quot;<p>In other words, all voting schemes favor certain preferences and groups over others. There is no perfectly objective voting scheme that would let us avoid this. We as a polity have no choice but to grapple with what and who to favor.<p>The implicit criticism in that final paragraph is that Quadratic Voting is leaping over the &quot;what&#x2F;who should we favor&quot; question and optimizing for a particular answer. Tyler is saying &quot;wait a minute, we haven&#x27;t even agreed on the fundamental questions. So why are we already optimizing for a particular solution?&quot;

Why purchase votes retail when you can just buy a Congressperson wholesale?

This system seems to encourage extremism - extremist groups are more able to affect political decisions than indifferent people.

The person who gets to decide how to break down policy into binary decisions and when to ask questions is the one with all the power here.<p>Suppose they want to suppress a 49% minority who care far more than the 51% majority and will pay far more. Assume that if the question (e.g. do you support gay marriage) was asked once, the minority could afford the votes for it to pass. If the person deciding what questions are asked wants to suppress this, they simply formulate the policy so that for the minority to get what they want, they have to answer &#x27;No&#x27; to n binary questions (e.g. each of the n questions is a measure that bans gay marriage in a slightly different way). The minority can afford to overcome the majority on one question, but for some n, they can&#x27;t afford to defeat the majority repeatedly. Therefore, asking the same question more than once would change the outcome.<p>Bundling decisions would also allow manipulation of binary preferences - for example, by mixing popular and unpopular measures (e.g. cutting taxes and re-establishing slavery) in a single decision so that just enough people considered it worth supporting, even though they don&#x27;t support all line items.<p>The mechanism is therefore useless as a voting mechanism without some way of controlling how things get on the ballot.<p>Of course, the bigger issue (assuming, as the paper does, that a real currency is used and not an artificial one) is that the laws in place are never perfect, and measuring how much influence a group should have to make new laws based on how wealthy became under current laws will likely lead to dynamic evolution towards a solution that benefits a tiny minority.<p>For example, suppose we live in a fictional world where the currency is apples with 100 people. A person needs 1 apple a day to live (which is consumed, destroying it). The world has enough trees to produce 125 apples a day (and no more land to plant more trees). Due to an archaic and unfair law, people numbered 0-49 get 1.5 apples a day, while everyone else gets 1 apple a day. People 50-99 perform services to people 0-49 and get a little bit of extra apple in exchange. People 50-99 never vote, because they can&#x27;t afford it (or if they do, it is the minimum - they always vote for everyone to get 1.25 apples per day), while people 0-49 put forward a bit over the minimum and easily win to retain the archaic law.<p>One day, people 0-48 decide they want more apples, so they propose to change the law so that person 49 gets only 1 apple per day. Person 49 puts in all their savings, but it is not enough, and the law is changed. Person 49 is now impoverished and in the same state as people 49-99. Gradually, this continues until one or two people have virtually all the superfluous apples - and everyone else even has to work hard for that small group of people to get even the one apple they need to survive.