The typical Congressperson is decent rather than cruel, honest rather than corrupt, smart rather than dumb, and dutiful rather than selfish, but the conjunction of all four positive traits probably only occurs in about 60% of Congresspeople—most politicians have some kind of major character flaw.
I’d put the odds that “the vast majority” of Congresspeople pass all four tests, operationalized as, say, 88% of Congresspeople, at less than 10%.
I would be modestly surprised if any member of Congress has an IQ below 100. You just need to have a bit of smarts to get elected. Even if the seat you want is safe, i.e. repeatedly won by the same party, you likely have to win a competitive primary. To win elections you need to make speeches, answer questions, participate in debates and so on. It’s hard. And you’ll have opponents that are ready to pounce on every mistake you make and try make a big deal out of it. Even smart people make lots of mistakes and say stupid things when put on the spot. I doubt a person of below average intelligence even has a chance.
Even George W. Bush, who’s said and done a lot of stupid things and is often considered dim for a politician, likely has an IQ above 120.
As for decency and honesty, a useful rule of thumb is that most people are good. Crooked people are certainly a significant minority but most of them don’t hide their crookedness very well. And you can’t be visibly crooked and still win elections. Your opponents are motivated to dig up the dirt on you.
As for honestly trying to serve their country I admit that this is a bit tricky. Congresspeople certainly have a structural incentive to put the interests of their district above that of their country. But they are not completely short-sighted and neither are their constitutents. Conditions in congressional district X are very dependent on conditions in the US as a whole. So I do think congresspeople try to honestly serve both their district and their country.
The truth, however, is that Congress is probably less corrupt than at any point in our history. Real old-fashioned corruption, of the briefcase-full-of-cash kind, is extremely rare (though it still happens, as with William Jefferson, he of the $90,000 stuffed in the freezer).
Real old-school corruption like you have in third world countries and like you used to have more of in Congress is now very rare. There’s still a real debate to be had about the role of lobbyists, campaign finance law, structural incentives and so on but that’s not what I’m talking about here.
Are there still some bad apples? Definitely. But I stand by my view that the vast majority are not.
If by not-corrupt you meant “would consciously and earnestly object to being offered money for the explicit purpose of pursuing a policy goal that they perceived as not in the favor of their electorate or the country” and by “above-average intelligence” you meant “IQ at least 101” then I would downvote for agreement.
But if you meant “tries to assure that their actions are in the favor of their constituents and country, and monitors their information diet to this end” and “IQ above 110 and conscientiousness above average” then I maintain my upvote.
When I think of not-corrupt I think of someone who takes care not to betray people, rather than someone who does not explicitly betray them. When I think “above average intelligence” I think of someone who regularly behaves more intelligently than most, not someone who happens to be just to the right of the bell curve.
Point taken. And I concede that there are probably some congressmen with 100<IQ<110. But my larger point, which Vladimir made a bit more explicit, is that contrary to popular belief the problems of the USA are not caused by politicians being unusually stupid or unusually venal. I think a very good case can be made that politicians are less stupid and less venal than typical people—the problems are caused by something else.
I would certainly agree that politicians are unlikely to be below the mean level of competence, since they must necessarily run a campaign, be liked by a group of people, etc. I would be surprised if most politicians were very far from the median, although in the bell curve of politician intelligence there is probably a significant tail to the high-IQ side and a very small tail to the low-IQ side.
I would also agree that blaming politicians’ stupidity for problems is, at the very least, a poor way of dealing with problems, which would be much better addressed with reform of our political systems; by, say, abolishing the senate or some kind of regulation of party primaries.
At the very least I’m not willing to give up on thinking that there are a lot of dumb and venal politicians, but I am willing to cede that that’s not really a huge problem most of the time.
(Assuming US here). Abolishing the senate seems to be an overreaction at this point, though some reforms of how it does business certainly should be in order.
You say that abolishing the senate seems to be an overreaction. Can you point to specific cases where having a second legislative house, wherein representatives of 14% of the population (the 20 least populous states) can stop any action whatsoever from being taken has actually had a use?
I’m sure that you can, but I’m also fairly sure that it’s a poorly designed system and its best defense is status quo bias rather than effective governance.
Maybe I’m also biased in coming from California, that people from Wyoming have literally 68 times as much representation in the senate as I do.
You’re probably right in suggesting a change of voting system. Basically anything that’s not “first past the post” would be vastly better. But that doesn’t make our senate worthwhile.
I’m going to precommit to not making any further posts on this topic because politics will kill my mind.
Can you point to specific cases where having a second legislative house, wherein representatives of 14% of the population (the 20 least populous states) can stop any action whatsoever from being taken has actually had a use?
It’s rather difficult to find good examples. News coverage of bills that don’t pass is much harder to find. There’s an additional complication in that any given case where I think it was a fantastic thing that a bill didn’t pass is as likely to be interpreted by someone else as a damn shame.
I’m also fairly sure that it’s a poorly designed system and its best defense is status quo bias rather than effective governance.
I agree it’s a poorly designed system. There absolutely are better ways of doing things. But I don’t know entirely which they are, and there are far more ways of making the system worse than better. I’m just not convinced that abolishing is necessarily an improvement.
It’s hard to design well-functioning political systems. Just as it’s hard to design any complicated interacting system with many parts. Note too that the system is not just the formal rules, either, but includes the traditions about what is acceptable. These evolved in tandem. As an example of what can happen when they don’t, many Latin American countries borrowed heavily from the formal structure of the U.S. and then promptly slid into dictatorships.
There’s a computer programming adage that any complex working system was created by evolving a less-complex working system, rather than writing from scratch. I’d rather see incremental reform than large changes, barring an absolute necessity. Most of what the U.S. Congress does is not terribly time sensitive. It just doesn’t matter if most legislative tweaks get passed this month, or even this year. The budget is admittedly a very important exception.
(I too am from California, though I don’t currently live there. And yeah, the overrepresentation of “flyover country” is annoying. I would prefer the second chamber to be allocated differently than it currently is, but I still think two chambers is better than one, if for nothing else than slightly reducing groupthink.)
I think one of the biggest useful changes would be to reform voting so that the public gets more bits of input, by switching to approval or Condorcet style voting.
What do you use currently? Something worse than approval? Tell me it isn’t “First Past the Post”!
Condorcet voting systems seem like a good option. We’ve been using Instant Runoff Voting here (Australia) since before we federated but it seems like Condorcet would be a straightforward upgrade. The principle (‘preference voting’) is the same but Condorcet looks like it would better handle the situation where your first preference is (for example) the 2nd most popular candidate.
What do you use currently? Something worse than approval? Tell me it isn’t “First Past the Post”!
Why are you asking me to lie?
A proportional-representation system just won’t fly in (most of) the U.S. I certainly don’t like the enhanced party-discipline it tends to reinforce.
Although in theory approval is subject to most of the same strategic voting problems as FPTP, STV/IRV, and Borda count, in practice, approval works quite well. It’s simpler to explain and count compared to Condorcet, and for n candidates requires only n counts instead of the n(n-1)/2 counts that Condorcet would.
(I do regularly run votes for my smallish, intelligent gaming group, and there we do use Condorcet to e.g. pick the next game and who’s running it—though usually as nice summary for establishing consensus).
Although in theory approval is subject to most of the same strategic voting problems as FPTP, STV/IRV, and Borda count, in practice, approval works quite well.
You’re comparing approval favorably to IRV along dimensions related to strategic voting? That seems bizarre to me. Thinking of cases in which to vote strategically with IRV is relatively difficult—it very rarely matters and only changes the payoffs marginally. With approval voting strategic voting is more or less necessary to vote effectively. You need to know where to draw the line on what could have otherwise been a preference ordering in order to minimise the loss of your preference information due to the system.
I probably wouldn’t bother with Concorcet if not for the ability to use computers to do the counting. IRV is much simpler to count by hand. “OK guys. This candidate is out. Let’s take this box, cross off the top name and sort them again.”
You’re comparing approval favorably to IRV along dimensions related to strategic voting?
Yep. Strategic voting for IRV becomes relevant as soon as the third-ranked candidate becomes competitive, and essentially gives you first-past-the-post behavior. It’s less likely to encourage strategic voting than FPTP, and this is definitely important in practice, but it still falls under the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem. See, for example, http://minguo.info/election_methods/irv/
It’s true that optimally setting a cut-off in approval is part of the strategy. But there is never an incentive to lie and approve a lessor-favored candidate over a more-favored one. The second is far more informationally damaging. (And I think it is sometimes easier to just measure each candidate against a cut-off rather than doing a full ranking.)
I probably wouldn’t bother with Concorcet if not for the ability to use computers to do the counting. IRV is much simpler to count by hand.
I’d describe that slightly differently—Condorcet is easier to count by hand—it’s just the pairwise races that matter. Determining the winner from the counts involves a bit of skull sweat. IRV, the counting proper needs a separate bucket for each permutation, but is easier to analyze by hand and determine the winner. YMMV, on whether this is a useful distinction.
About the first paragraph: does your definition include in “corrupt” people who do not object in that situation because they believe that the benefit to the country of receiving the money (because they’d be able to use it for good things) exceeds the damage done to the country by whatever they’re asked to do?
I ask because I suspect many people in high positions have an honest but incorrectly high opinion about their worth to whatever cause they’re nominally supporting. (E.g., “without this money I’ll lose the election and the country would be much worse off because the other guy is evil”.)
I think that having damagingly uninformed opinions about the values of your actions (e.g. “I’ll lose the election and the other guy is evil”) counts as either corrupt (in terms of not monitoring information diet to take care not to betray people) or stupid (in terms of being unable to do so.)
If someone were to accept significant bribes, and then, say, donate all of the money to a highly efficient charity such as SIAI, NFP, or VillageReach, after doing a half-hour or longer calculation involving spreadsheets, then I might not count them as corrupt. However I think the odds that this has actually EVER occurred are practically insignificant.
Far too confident.
The typical Congressperson is decent rather than cruel, honest rather than corrupt, smart rather than dumb, and dutiful rather than selfish, but the conjunction of all four positive traits probably only occurs in about 60% of Congresspeople—most politicians have some kind of major character flaw.
I’d put the odds that “the vast majority” of Congresspeople pass all four tests, operationalized as, say, 88% of Congresspeople, at less than 10%.
All right, I’ll try to mount a defence.
I would be modestly surprised if any member of Congress has an IQ below 100. You just need to have a bit of smarts to get elected. Even if the seat you want is safe, i.e. repeatedly won by the same party, you likely have to win a competitive primary. To win elections you need to make speeches, answer questions, participate in debates and so on. It’s hard. And you’ll have opponents that are ready to pounce on every mistake you make and try make a big deal out of it. Even smart people make lots of mistakes and say stupid things when put on the spot. I doubt a person of below average intelligence even has a chance.
Even George W. Bush, who’s said and done a lot of stupid things and is often considered dim for a politician, likely has an IQ above 120.
As for decency and honesty, a useful rule of thumb is that most people are good. Crooked people are certainly a significant minority but most of them don’t hide their crookedness very well. And you can’t be visibly crooked and still win elections. Your opponents are motivated to dig up the dirt on you.
As for honestly trying to serve their country I admit that this is a bit tricky. Congresspeople certainly have a structural incentive to put the interests of their district above that of their country. But they are not completely short-sighted and neither are their constitutents. Conditions in congressional district X are very dependent on conditions in the US as a whole. So I do think congresspeople try to honestly serve both their district and their country.
Non-corruption is again a bit tricky but here I side with Matt Yglesias and Paul Waldman:
Real old-school corruption like you have in third world countries and like you used to have more of in Congress is now very rare. There’s still a real debate to be had about the role of lobbyists, campaign finance law, structural incentives and so on but that’s not what I’m talking about here.
Are there still some bad apples? Definitely. But I stand by my view that the vast majority are not.
Conflating people with politicians is an egregious category error.
If by not-corrupt you meant “would consciously and earnestly object to being offered money for the explicit purpose of pursuing a policy goal that they perceived as not in the favor of their electorate or the country” and by “above-average intelligence” you meant “IQ at least 101” then I would downvote for agreement.
But if you meant “tries to assure that their actions are in the favor of their constituents and country, and monitors their information diet to this end” and “IQ above 110 and conscientiousness above average” then I maintain my upvote.
When I think of not-corrupt I think of someone who takes care not to betray people, rather than someone who does not explicitly betray them. When I think “above average intelligence” I think of someone who regularly behaves more intelligently than most, not someone who happens to be just to the right of the bell curve.
Point taken. And I concede that there are probably some congressmen with 100<IQ<110. But my larger point, which Vladimir made a bit more explicit, is that contrary to popular belief the problems of the USA are not caused by politicians being unusually stupid or unusually venal. I think a very good case can be made that politicians are less stupid and less venal than typical people—the problems are caused by something else.
I would certainly agree that politicians are unlikely to be below the mean level of competence, since they must necessarily run a campaign, be liked by a group of people, etc. I would be surprised if most politicians were very far from the median, although in the bell curve of politician intelligence there is probably a significant tail to the high-IQ side and a very small tail to the low-IQ side.
I would also agree that blaming politicians’ stupidity for problems is, at the very least, a poor way of dealing with problems, which would be much better addressed with reform of our political systems; by, say, abolishing the senate or some kind of regulation of party primaries.
At the very least I’m not willing to give up on thinking that there are a lot of dumb and venal politicians, but I am willing to cede that that’s not really a huge problem most of the time.
(Assuming US here). Abolishing the senate seems to be an overreaction at this point, though some reforms of how it does business certainly should be in order.
I think one of the biggest useful changes would be to reform voting so that the public gets more bits of input, by switching to approval or Condorcet style voting.
Yes, US.
You say that abolishing the senate seems to be an overreaction. Can you point to specific cases where having a second legislative house, wherein representatives of 14% of the population (the 20 least populous states) can stop any action whatsoever from being taken has actually had a use?
I’m sure that you can, but I’m also fairly sure that it’s a poorly designed system and its best defense is status quo bias rather than effective governance.
Maybe I’m also biased in coming from California, that people from Wyoming have literally 68 times as much representation in the senate as I do.
You’re probably right in suggesting a change of voting system. Basically anything that’s not “first past the post” would be vastly better. But that doesn’t make our senate worthwhile.
I’m going to precommit to not making any further posts on this topic because politics will kill my mind.
It’s rather difficult to find good examples. News coverage of bills that don’t pass is much harder to find. There’s an additional complication in that any given case where I think it was a fantastic thing that a bill didn’t pass is as likely to be interpreted by someone else as a damn shame.
I agree it’s a poorly designed system. There absolutely are better ways of doing things. But I don’t know entirely which they are, and there are far more ways of making the system worse than better. I’m just not convinced that abolishing is necessarily an improvement.
It’s hard to design well-functioning political systems. Just as it’s hard to design any complicated interacting system with many parts. Note too that the system is not just the formal rules, either, but includes the traditions about what is acceptable. These evolved in tandem. As an example of what can happen when they don’t, many Latin American countries borrowed heavily from the formal structure of the U.S. and then promptly slid into dictatorships.
There’s a computer programming adage that any complex working system was created by evolving a less-complex working system, rather than writing from scratch. I’d rather see incremental reform than large changes, barring an absolute necessity. Most of what the U.S. Congress does is not terribly time sensitive. It just doesn’t matter if most legislative tweaks get passed this month, or even this year. The budget is admittedly a very important exception.
(I too am from California, though I don’t currently live there. And yeah, the overrepresentation of “flyover country” is annoying. I would prefer the second chamber to be allocated differently than it currently is, but I still think two chambers is better than one, if for nothing else than slightly reducing groupthink.)
What do you use currently? Something worse than approval? Tell me it isn’t “First Past the Post”!
Condorcet voting systems seem like a good option. We’ve been using Instant Runoff Voting here (Australia) since before we federated but it seems like Condorcet would be a straightforward upgrade. The principle (‘preference voting’) is the same but Condorcet looks like it would better handle the situation where your first preference is (for example) the 2nd most popular candidate.
Why are you asking me to lie?
A proportional-representation system just won’t fly in (most of) the U.S. I certainly don’t like the enhanced party-discipline it tends to reinforce.
Although in theory approval is subject to most of the same strategic voting problems as FPTP, STV/IRV, and Borda count, in practice, approval works quite well. It’s simpler to explain and count compared to Condorcet, and for n candidates requires only n counts instead of the n(n-1)/2 counts that Condorcet would.
(I do regularly run votes for my smallish, intelligent gaming group, and there we do use Condorcet to e.g. pick the next game and who’s running it—though usually as nice summary for establishing consensus).
You’re comparing approval favorably to IRV along dimensions related to strategic voting? That seems bizarre to me. Thinking of cases in which to vote strategically with IRV is relatively difficult—it very rarely matters and only changes the payoffs marginally. With approval voting strategic voting is more or less necessary to vote effectively. You need to know where to draw the line on what could have otherwise been a preference ordering in order to minimise the loss of your preference information due to the system.
I probably wouldn’t bother with Concorcet if not for the ability to use computers to do the counting. IRV is much simpler to count by hand. “OK guys. This candidate is out. Let’s take this box, cross off the top name and sort them again.”
Yep. Strategic voting for IRV becomes relevant as soon as the third-ranked candidate becomes competitive, and essentially gives you first-past-the-post behavior. It’s less likely to encourage strategic voting than FPTP, and this is definitely important in practice, but it still falls under the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem. See, for example, http://minguo.info/election_methods/irv/
It’s true that optimally setting a cut-off in approval is part of the strategy. But there is never an incentive to lie and approve a lessor-favored candidate over a more-favored one. The second is far more informationally damaging. (And I think it is sometimes easier to just measure each candidate against a cut-off rather than doing a full ranking.)
I’d describe that slightly differently—Condorcet is easier to count by hand—it’s just the pairwise races that matter. Determining the winner from the counts involves a bit of skull sweat. IRV, the counting proper needs a separate bucket for each permutation, but is easier to analyze by hand and determine the winner. YMMV, on whether this is a useful distinction.
I don’t care what you do over there, so long as you don’t try that over here.
About the first paragraph: does your definition include in “corrupt” people who do not object in that situation because they believe that the benefit to the country of receiving the money (because they’d be able to use it for good things) exceeds the damage done to the country by whatever they’re asked to do?
I ask because I suspect many people in high positions have an honest but incorrectly high opinion about their worth to whatever cause they’re nominally supporting. (E.g., “without this money I’ll lose the election and the country would be much worse off because the other guy is evil”.)
I think that having damagingly uninformed opinions about the values of your actions (e.g. “I’ll lose the election and the other guy is evil”) counts as either corrupt (in terms of not monitoring information diet to take care not to betray people) or stupid (in terms of being unable to do so.)
If someone were to accept significant bribes, and then, say, donate all of the money to a highly efficient charity such as SIAI, NFP, or VillageReach, after doing a half-hour or longer calculation involving spreadsheets, then I might not count them as corrupt. However I think the odds that this has actually EVER occurred are practically insignificant.