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Trade Politicians Like Stocks
Thanks to Greyfox for giving us a story that confirms what I've always thought:
politicians can be traded like stocks. Much like any normal stock market, now you can bid up your favorite politician - big tax break? Buy him up! Campaign corruption? Sell! If you are a South Korean, of course.
What about politicians, or their friends, manipulating the market. If a politician played it right, he could own himself or his opponents.
And Ireland's been killing them for years. So what's your point?
Exactly right Paul. This is a totally cool way to assess the real preferences of any public. Now I'm not ready to allocate actual political power using the futures technique, but there is nothing cynical or perinicious about establishing a "poll" in which people vote with real money, and thereby reveal their preferences and provide predictive information for election outcomes. In fact it is damn clever.
when politicians see their stock price tanking and start buying their own stock back to increase the price thereby making themselves look like more solid candidates than they really are? You'll have Donald Trump and Steve Forbes neck and neck because they'll probably own 92% of their own stock and/or offer you a hell of a dividend for holding onto their stock. Then you'll have people buying on rumor and selling on news... which means that politicians will keep on having to grace us with their presence on tv, and then you'll have people making outrageous claims like they came up with the idea of the internet... oh man, it would be such a mess.
but it would be fun as hell to play!
"YES! Bribe me! Bribe me!"
I have always thought a good way to run our government would be through a system similar to a jury summoning.
At some point in your life, you are required to represent your region in congress (you are selected completely randomly). You get there, are absolutely scared shitless and work your ass off for two years until you get to go home.
While it introduces a few small problems... it does a good job of emliminating the countless problems we have with long-term politicians.
So I am not completely rooted in reality.... sue me.
Hey, that's a great idea. Unfortunately, it won't work, mainly because your plan assumes the existence of an intelligent, educated, concerned electorate. What are the odds of THAT happening any time soon? (At least, here in the U.S., anyway) :)
In any case, it seems to me that Jed 'n' Ethel Average have enough trouble figuring out how (or even whether!) various policy proposals will affect them, if they even care, without additionally guessing what "percentage" of their vote to spend on them...
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
I've heard the idea about multiple votes per person before, mostly advocated as a way to "help" underrepresented minority populations -- the theory being that, say, a black minority community could pile their votes into a single black candidate and get a seat. Why a) these theorists seem to think that white voters will be split far more than black voters, and b) "same race==good" is, er, questionable...
Single-issue people have been responsible for cluelessly obstructing vast amounts of legislation, funding, confirmations, treaties and so forth. Look at groups on all sides of the abortion issue, on the death penalty, on nuclear testing, and so forth. There's a very strong argument that candidates that avoid demagoguery tend to be take more balanced views, and generally the public seems to agree. Witness, say, recent GOP choices; "Flat-Tax" Forbes, "Isolationist" Buchanan, and "Dan-Dan-The Clueless (Family Values) Man" Quayle have been losing to folks like Dole the Senior Statesman and Bush the Guv'nor, neither of which had a particularly distinct (or, with Bush, even vocalized...) platform. On the other side of the aisle, there's Clinton, the for all practical purposes the acknowledged, utterly untouchable reigning master of dancing in the wind...
As for their obstructionism: consider the perpetual confirmation battles in Congress (depends on who's in charge. Both parties have members who apply litmus tests on Roe v. Wade; that confounded issue even affects US payments to the UN, and darn near everything else. I prefer to label 'em, more honestly, as Anti-Choice and Pro-Death, but this is long enough of a rant already...)... and so forth. Without convincing the rest, they won't be able to push through anything positive, but with just enough numbers they can block the more productive from doing work...
The other thang, Net-based voting... um, well, you need some *darn* good way of ensuring 1:1. Not only that, but you'll get lots of silly self-selection effects (as in: don't trust "what is your favorite {foo}" polls if their URL ever gets out to partisans, especially those that can code... also, the demographics of the online differ greatly from the norm methinks) even if you can somehow avoid fraud. And you'll have the more creative, diabolical folks ("Web-based voting? OK. Now we know that this precinct tends to vote our way, but that one doesn't -- so let's take down this router, and that, and...) doing things that a corrupt feller could only dream about when dealing with physical ballots and booths.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I thought all politicians were worthless. Seems that they now have some value.
Question for ya --
Is a politician who refuses to compromise on his principles, but by doing so manages to not accomplish anything (due to refusal to budge) ethical? Or has he, by knowingly and deliberately failing his people, basically broken *that* trust compared to somebody who *does* make deals, and get stuff done?
That could be debated endlessly, methinks.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
A subject line having two words equally readable as verbs or nouns - sorry, the Voices told me to do it!-)
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
Yes, I think it was something similar to that.
What basically happened was there was no single ruler or King. When an issue arose, a citizen (A man) was randomly picked to make the decision. After that, his "rule" was over.
What put an end to that nice little system was one man (forget his name), simply refused to step down.
This was at the very beginning of Athens existance... since that point, they had implemented other forms of democracy (including assemblies attending by *All* citizens, each able to voice his concerns, and issues then decided upon by elected officials).
Athens was pretty darn succesful for quite some time.
You americans have buying your politicians for years.
http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem/
I'd never heard of this before and I live in Iowa.
There's also one being run at the University of Iowa College of Business), which has links for current political markets including the 2000 Congressional, 2000 DNC, 2000 RNC, and New York Senate races. Let the games begin!
A little poking around reveals there are also a few markets open in Austrian politics.
And finally, I think that the site referenced in the USA Today article is here: http://www.posdaq.co.kr, but since it's in Korean, I'm not totally sure about that :-)
The idea is to make people put their money where their mouth is. That way you get a more honest and thoughtful opinion than just stopping random people in the street. The fact that the game players are not a random sample matters less because they reflect all the available evidence rather than just their own views.
IIRC, the idea is that you buy a future contract which will pay off according to the share of the next vote. So the current market value of these contracts reflects the (hopefully) rational expectations of the traders.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
This sounds very much like the Hollywood stock exchange, where you can 'invest' in movies, actors and directors, and you earn dividends based on box office takings. Although I must say buying and selling politicians seems like much more fun. You could even start 'mutual funds' which only invest in politicians of certain parties :-)
superblog.org: all your favourite blogs on o
Does this make dishonest politicians difficult to sell?
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Not us individually, just the PACs and the big corporations - see here
...before they were all privately held. Now the average investor can buy a politician! Why shouldn't the local ladies' investor club get a shot at some legalized graft? Why should only the Chinese get to buy and sell shares of Gore? Why shouldn't the small investor be able to buy and sell Bush on p*Trade?
Who needs straw polls when you can have IPOs?!
I say bring on Jesse "The P/E Ratio" Ventura!
Sell short Republicans!
Sell short Democrats!
Sell short Reformed!
Kill the lawyers! Maoist revolution!
Oops... That was five.
-- Slashdot sucks.
I guess it probably also suffers from the usual self-selecting sample problem of other opinion polls. I don't know how long it's been running. it'd be interesting to examine the correlation between election results and Posdaq prices.
Seems an interesting idea, though. Anyone have a URL?
Stephen
-davek
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
Sleep with an intern? Good luck explaining that to your board of directors. Win an election and there'd be dividends for all. If your senator eally screw up, he'd have to step down from John Politico, inc... And think of the fantastic IPO possibilities : "Ed Warner, the last privately held democrat in California, announced he would be going public later this year"
Of course, I'd hate to be Al Gore's CIO...
Maybe we could beowulf all the politicians together.
Etc... Man, it's really early.
"Single-issue people have been responsible for cluelessly obstructing vast amounts of legislation, funding, confirmations, treaties and so forth."
That's the beauty of it. Now, they have the TIME to spend on endless amounts of arguing, bickering and general time-wasting.
But what happens when that behaviour starts to cut into your powerbase a few days later?
Think about it.
Floris.
--- Your superiour intellect is no match for our puny weapons
The USA Today story fails to link to the URL for the game. The link is http://posdaq.co.kr, but it is useless unless you speak Korean.
--Ivan, weenie NT4 user, Jon Katz hater: bite me!
--weenie NT4 user: bite me!
"Computers are nothing but a perfect illusion of order" -- Iggy Pop
I have a suggestion. Because we are dealing with politicians, we should add the option of buying your representative a "Get Out Of Jail Free Card".
Initial Politician Offering? Would that happen when someone runs for High School Class President or for as Fraternity/Sorority President later in college?
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Why not - bid up, or down for a Dutch auction, on not only elections but individual issues, bills, referenda. Why pretend otherwise.
This is interesting. Not only is this proportional representation in the traditional sense, but the level of interest gets factored in too. I like that. It's sort of like campaign contributions would be if we all had the same amount of money! So, maybe this would be a good day to day motivator for politicians.
I'm a gnu world man.
Why is it that people come up with all kind of voting schemes to get people to -predict- the outcome of elections, rather than ways of making elections themselves more effective?
;)
As has been indicated in a previous article, mathematics prove the currenct scheme doesn't work properly, because it doesn't reflect the reality of people's opinions properly. However, I don't believe in the artificial counting schemes the authors of the articles involved seem to wish to implement.
There is a lesson to be learned here.
1) The internet is a tool. When it comes to voting, it can be a massively effective tool, as long as can be prevented that no people have uncontrollably high amounts of voting power. Slashdot is a good example of this. (Though I do think it could use a more personalized moderation system)
2) Numbers count. This may seem an oxymoron, but having "dumbed down" voting systems where people just tick a box seems, well, dumb to me. I would like a system where I can cast any percentage of my vote on any single politician, at any time of day/month/halloween whatever, and get away with it. All it needs is a little accounting on the part of the voter, and a secure way of casting the vote. We can still have the box for people with a brain deficiency. This "stock voting" proves such a system could work, and probably draw more voters than the current system.
If you add some averaging - let's say, the votes that politicians actually get are the ones averaged over an certain nontrivial amount of time, like a year, it could have a fairly quick feedback cycle.
2b) Such a system could be more tamper proof than the current voting, more realistic, and might just make politicians have a bit more of a clue.
This may seem counterintuitive, but consider the following example:
Suppose we have one big nation with 2 (read: TWO) very large parties dominating the elections under normal circumstances. Add in one small party promoting a very small (from a government perspective) goal. Now, apply distributed voting:
Normally, the votes would be flat-out distributed between the two parties. But if said small party would take aim at an issue with a large enough mindshare in the general population, in a distributed system they could get a place in congress/senate/whatever. Why? Because people could assign a few of their percentage points of their votes to very small parties! Have it run a while, and you'd have a myriad of parties promoting all kinds of diverse worthy goals in no time!
Furthermore, A four-year cycle of political campaigns would no longer have any reason for existing, because votes would be cast all the time. Voting parties would no longer work - you can choose whenever you want, so you vote at the voting party, then cast vote b later at home.
Excessive two-week political campaings no longer work either - for the same reason.
Now THAT's a system I'd like to see in action, running in paralell with the "real" votes
Floris
--- Your superiour intellect is no match for our puny weapons
IT HAS BEEN SHOWN BY MATHEMATICIANS that the approval voting system is the only one which accurately reflects each politician's degree of support by the public. I am surprised that more Slashdot "nerds", who are normally pretty sharp with respect to mathematics, do not already know about it and champion it. See the Approval Voting Home Page for details!
I think that having such a market for the American political system would be a really great idea. It would certainly make me more involved in what my representatives are doing. I'm fairly apathetic about politics, and many other people are, but regardless of my apathy, if it was framed in the way the the HSX is framed, I would certainly play and give more than the usual small attention that I do to politics.
-- benton.
Sometimes Profitable companies are unethical but we buy their stock to get more money is this how we want or government to work? just after the bottom dollar and not even thinking about the right thing?
Why does this remind me of the "Delphi Pools" from "Shockwave Rider" by John Brunner?
I also recall that, in the book, the government was found to be manipulating the pools...
The Iowa game is also (primarily?) an academic research project. Particularly, it is experimental economics, which works by getting people to make choices and reveal their preferences by using real money.
When someone buys into the Iowa game, they get a share in each candidate for each dollar they put in. They can then buy and sell at any price, and can leave bids at multiple prices for automatic execution if anyone offers (e.g., I'll take 100 at 40c, 200 at 35c, and 1000 at 25c).
After the election, every share is paid by the percentage of the vote: 35% becomes 35c, so exactly one dollar is paid in return.
"surprisingly accurate" to describe the results predicted is an understatement. I don't think they've ever been off by more than 2%.
During Perot's first run, someone bought in with $500 (rather than the typical $20), to support Perot. He sold everything else, then bought Perot, driving the price up. Right until the $500 ran out, at which point the price *immediately* dropped back to the pre-binge levels.
hawk, wearing his Ph.D. economist hat for the moment