Tag Archives: society

Election 2014: ethical standards

Media coverage of the election campaign so far has been dominated by allegations and revelations of unsavoury behaviour by various politicians and hangers-on.

The recent revelations by Nicky Hager  were shocking to me. I don’t believe that “everyone is doing it”, as some commentators and political actors claim; the sooner the people involved are flushed out of the system, the better. However, unless we do something to change the practice of politics, it is likely to happen again (with more secrecy, making it even more damaging).

Several commentators have called for more focus on policy, and less on people. In general, I agree with this. However, maybe this is misguided (I also suspect that in many cases it is self-serving, because “their” side is on the receiving end for once). Trust and ethical issues are certainly important in politics, and one can even argue that they are increasingly important, as more and more government decisions are made in a less than transparent way, and become technically difficult and hard for voters to understand. No amount of policy discussion will be useful if those charged with making major decisions on our behalf have ethical standards as low as have been revealed recently.

Debates about ethics in politics are often hijacked by spurious arguments about aspects of morality that are largely irrelevant. The Len Brown saga showed that politicians can behave poorly in their “private” lives. However salacious media coverage of his affair failed to follow up some important questions. Some small irregularities involving free hotel rooms were all that came out of the weeks (months?) of coverage. Despite complaining to the NZ Herald, I never saw any satisfactory investigative journalism or commentary on what I saw as a key issue: a candidate for local government with a recent conviction for dishonesty was put forward by her party without disclosing her past to the voters, and the media didn’t find out until after she became (in)famous for other reasons. As someone who voted for her, I feel completely taken advantage of.

In every profession (medicine, teaching, engineering, …) there are ethical standards, which carry severe penalties if broken. I am not sure whether there can be a more prescriptive code of ethics for politicians, for one reason because it is not supposed to be a profession (although at national level it largely is). An alternative to having to trust is to use greater transparency. We should have more information about what our representatives are doing, so as to judge their performance better. However I don’t see how the kind of behaviour that has been revealed recently can be prevented by increasing transparency.

This is why we have the press, the “fourth branch of government”. Recently it has become abundantly clear just how low the NZ mass media have sunk in the area of news and current affairs, and how intellectually weak their reporting is. Without a serious commitment (backed up by real money) to public service broadcasting, it is unlikely to improve. I am really surprised that this is not a bigger election issue. In the short term, issues such as the electoral system, public broadcasting, free speech and even education may not seem the most essential. In the long term, unless they are dealt with properly, everything else degrades because the quality of decision-making goes down. If I am reading the financial statement correctly, Radio NZ and TVNZ receive at most 1/4 of the government funding per capita of the ABC in Australia.

The reaction to a satirical column  by Toby Manhire shocked me. I thought I had some idea of the intellectual level of New Zealanders, or at least those who comment online. The fact that such a large percentage of readers did not recognize the article as satire was extremely depressing. Manhire’s columns are always worth reading, and almost always satirical, so this reaction was really unexpected. New Zealand culture has many very good features, but critical thinking and introspection have never been among them. Without help from high quality journalism, it becomes even more difficult for the public to concentrate on important issues. I must add that the weak tradition of public intellectuals in NZ, acting as the “critic and conscience of society” as universities are supposed to by law, exacerbates the situation.

We need to pay attention to the part of the body above the neck if this country is to thrive.

Kiwifoo 2014

I was invited this year to KiwiFoo camp run 11-13 April by Nat Torkington and his crew in Warkworth. Before I went, I expected from reading others’ accounts of past camps that it would be (over?)stimulating and not to be missed, and so it proved to be. The opportunity to mingle with and listen to a diverse group of around 200 intelligent and articulate people (mostly with a common belief that technology can make the world better) doesn’t come along often. Certainly it is the first time I have seen journalists, bureaucrats, politicians, scientists, entrepreneurs, programmers and teachers thrown together in this way. Although there is always the danger of sessions degenerating into discussions about society that generalize from the experience of the participants (who are certainly not representative of NZ society) without sufficient data, this must be how major changes in society start. I hope that many good actions are inspired by our discussions.

If you ever get an invitation to KiwiFoo, accept it!

Paradoxes of runoff voting

The New Zealand Labour party will soon have an election for leader of its Parliamentary caucus. The voting system is a weighted form of instant runoff using the single seat version of Hare’s method (instant runoff/IRV/alternative vote). IRV works as follows. Each voter submits a full preference order of the candidates (I am not sure what happens if a voter doesn’t rank all candidates but presumably the method can still work). In each round, the voter with smallest number of first preferences (the plurality loser) is eliminated, and the candidate removed from the preference orders, keeping the order of the other candidates the same. If there is a tie for the plurality loser in a round, this must be broken somehow.

The NZLP variant differs from the above only in that not all voters have the same weight. In fact, the caucus (34 members) has a total weight of 40%, the party members (tens of thousands, presumably) have total weight 40%, and the 6 affiliated trade unions have total weight 20%, the weight being proportional to their size. It is not completely clear to me how the unions vote, but it seems that most of them will give all their weight to a single preference order, decided by union leaders with some level of consultation with members. Thus in effect there are 34 voters each with weight 20/17, 6 with total weight 20, and the rest of the weight (total 40) is distributed equally among tens of thousands of voters. Note that the total weight of the unions is half the total weight of the caucus, which equals the total weight of the individual members.

IRV is known to be susceptible to several paradoxes. Of course essentially all voting rules are, but the particular ones for IRV include the participation paradoxes which have always seemed to me to be particularly bad. It is possible, for example, for a candidate to win when some of his supporters fail to vote, but lose when they come out to vote for him, without any change in other voters’ behaviour (Positive Participation Paradox). This can’t happen with three candidates, which is the situation we are interested in (we denote the candidates C, J, R). But the Negative Participation Paradox can occur: a losing candidate becomes a winner when new voters ranking him last turn out to vote.

The particular election is interesting because there is no clear front-runner and the three groups of voters apparently have quite different opinions. Recent polling suggests that the unions mostly will vote CJR. In the caucus, more than half have R as first choice, and many apparently have C as last. Less information is available about the party members but it seems likely that C has most first preferences, followed by J and R.

The following scenario on preference orders is consistent with this data: RCJ 25%, RJC 7%, CRJ 10%, CJR 30%, JRC 20%, JCR 8%. In this case, J is eliminated in the first round and R wins over C in the final round by 52% to 48%. Suppose now that instead of abstaining, enough previously unmotivated voters decide to vote JRC (perhaps because of positive media coverage for J and a deep dislike of C). Here “enough” means “more than 4% of the total turnout before they changed their minds, but not more than 30%”. Then R is eliminated in the first round, and C wins easily over J. So by trying to support J and signal displeasure with C, these extra voters help to achieve a worse outcome than if they had stayed at home.

The result of the election will be announced within a week, and I may perhaps say more then.

Reverse liaison

As I understand it, many languages are pronounced “incorrectly” in such a way as to make it easier. Liaison in French is very common: saying “les amis” without pronouncing the final “s” of “les” would require a pause or glottal stop. I have just noticed that it is very common in American English to do the reverse in some situations, and I have absolutely no idea why. I have heard many people pronounce phrases like “get off” with a glottal stop instead of the “t” of “get”, and also words like “button” have a break between the two “t”s. This seems very weird – why pronounce words in a nonstandard way when that makes it harder to say, not to mention ugly-sounding? I first noticed it in an episode of Dora the Explorer several years ago, and assumed it was an idiosyncrasy of the voice actor in question. But it seems to be very common, and I even heard a reporter on National Public Radio doing it today.

What theory accounts for this illogical and inefficient behaviour? Wikipedia tells us that it is not confined to the US, which I had known for much longer, having as a child seen too many TV programmes involving Cockney characters.

Full unemployment

A post at our departmental blog has reminded me that for many years I have been surprised at how unrealistic politicians’ claims of achieving full employment are. Technology and the market economy are driving in the other direction. For thousands of years people have been trying to work less. And in reality many jobs are of low quality and rather unattractive. Developed countries would have trouble even harvesting their own produce without cheap immigrant labour, for example. As less developed countries develop, the pool of cheap labour is reduced. Eventually we may have many tasks to do, but no one willing to do them. This may require an increase in the price of labour of fruit pickers and janitors, more use of automation, or clever redesign to eliminate the job altogether.

The creative destruction that means that many unskilled workers (e.g. in retail) lose jobs, while many other roles are created (e.g. in software development) may not reduce the number of jobs overall, but it certainly makes it tough for the unskilled. One problem is income, which in developed countries is less of a problem because of social transfers through the tax system. A bigger problem may be that idle hands do the devil’s work. If I didn’t have to work in order to maintain my current income level, I would probably do much the same as I do now, because a research career is a rewarding one (I might teach less and not do so much administration, and spend more time trying to help young children learn). I have an infinite number of things to learn about, and that is fun. However if one is unskilled and poorly educated, the sheer amount of free time might be hard to fill. I wonder how much of poor outcomes in terms of crime, health, etc of the underclass in developed countries stems from this basic deficiency of not knowing how to handle free time.

RIP Paul Callaghan

Dead of cancer at 64. I never met Paul Callaghan, New Zealand’s greatest public intellectual and by all accounts a thoroughly good human being. His vision for this country struck a chord with me. A basic obituary is in the NZ Herald.  Let’s hope that his work is not wasted. Productivity growth through better use of the mathematical and physical sciences is what we need.

2011 referendum simulator: experience so far

Several months ago I realized that the 2011 referendum in NZ on the voting system for parliamentary elections was coming soon. Geoff Pritchard and I developed a simulator with the aim of enabling voters to understand the consequences of a change to another system. In order to do this in a way that is useful to the non-expert, some simplifying assumptions must be made. We had substantial media coverage and some criticism.

Initial surprises:

  • How few people bothered to read the detailed FAQ before criticizing.
  • How many people thought that the simulator was trying to “back-cast” historical elections, and were certain that our results were unrealistic, without giving any evidence.
  • How much the criticisms, even unfounded ones, helped to clarify my understanding of what we had actually done, and suggested further research.
  • How short the attention span of internet visitors is.

In particular I want to respond to comments by David Farrar on his well-known site Kiwiblog. The relevant extract:

Now in 2002 National actually won 21 electorate seats out of 69 or 70. So this model is saying if there were 50 extra electorate seats, National would win 11 fewer seats!!

Why? Because they have come up with a formula based on the last 50 years or so of FPP elections, which they applied to the party vote figures for 2002. They ignored the actual electorate vote. It is a classic academic approach.

The more pragmatic approach, which is what others have done, is to say well if National won 21 electorate seats in 2002 out of 70, then if there 120 seats, their estimated number of seats would be 21*120/70, which is 36 seats.

In fact we did not look at any of the historical FPP elections The “formula” is based completely on the MMP party vote from the 2008 election (so yes, we did ignore the electorate vote, for what we think are good reasons).

However this got me thinking about how we might try to validate our assumptions. One way which I don’t (yet) claim is rigorous, but makes at least as much sense as the above, is to apply the simulator (the FPP part) to the historical FPP elections, and scale the 120 seats down to whatever it was historically (80 for many years, then increasing over time). The results surprised me greatly, as they are much better than expected, and this cries out for explanation (“further research”, always good for academics). Here they are. Note that these simulator results explicitly do not use any historical data, seat boundaries and parties have changed, etc.

1969: Real result was Nat 45 Lab 39; simulator scaled was Nat 46.9, Lab 37.1
1972: Real was Nat 55 Lab 32; simulator scaled was Nat 54.4, Lab 31.6
1975: Real was Nat 55 Lab 32; simulator scaled was Nat 55.1, Lab 31.9
1978: Real was Nat 51  Lab 40 SoCred 1; simulator scaled was Nat  47.5, Lab 44.5.
1981: Real was Nat 47 Lab 43 SoCred 2; simulator scaled was Nat 48.3, Lab 43.7
1984: Real was Nat 37 Lab 56 SoCred 2; simulator scaled was Nat 37 Lab 58.
1987: Real was Lab 57, Nat 40; simulator scaled was Lab 50.2, Nat 46.8
1990: Real was  Nat 67, Lab 29, NewLab 1; simulator scaled was Nat 71, Lab 26
1993: Real was Nat 50, Lab 45,  NZF 2, Alliance 2; simulator scaled was Nat 53.6, Lab 45.4

Competitive NZ?

Shaun Hendy’s blog has some more comments on the theme of science, technology and innovation, prompted by our slide down the World Economic Forum rankings. His idea that scale is the main problem seems consistent with what I see in Europe – it is so easy to confer with the right people here (low spatial transaction costs!) Government policies have a huge role to play. The comparison made in the comments with Singapore is interesting, although it is very easy to run a country when you don’t have to be democratic about it. I have been talking to yet another successful Israeli – the amount of money and hard work put into science and technology there is staggering.

I think it is likely that the real problem is just culture. We don’t value investment in these things enough, owing to ignorance and different values to some extent (sport and leisure more important than intellectual pursuits). I hope things change soon – I don’t really want to leave, but the pull of the rest of the world is growing for people like me.

Straight and crooked thinking

My Otago colleague Mike Atkinson recommended this book which he remembered from his youth. Written in 1930 by Robert Thouless, a psychologist at Cambridge, it is a superb exposition of errors of thought, dishonest rhetorical tricks, and how to combat them (the reviewers on Amazon.com seem to agree with me). Thouless believed in the existence of parapsychological phenomena (ESP) but was severe on purported experimental proofs of this existence. The examples in the book show his frustration with politics. It isn’t often that I find a kindred spirit from the past. Our lifespans overlapped considerably – I wish I had met him.

The book is out of print and hard to find (I found it in our university library). If anyone knows how to get such books reissued, please let me know.