86. Casts of Mind, War and Peace Edition

Note: This post is the eighty-sixth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

Paul Krugman had a post up recently about the U.S. Civil War and some of what he said struck me as relevant to his cast of mind, in the sense that some people have a 'guardian mindset' and some people have a 'commercial mindset.' Economists are typically the purest examples of the commercial mindset.

Here's a few quotes from his post,

"It’s the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War ...I’ve long had a special fascination, not with how the war began, but with its end. ...mainly, I think, it’s because of the symbolism of that final surrender: Lee the patrician, in his dress uniform, surrendering to the not at all patrician U.S. Grant, still muddy and disheveled from hard riding. It was, in a very real sense, the victory of modern America — of a democratic nation, in manners as well as politics — over an aristocratic ideal.

And the way modern America won was characteristic. Southerners were better warriors — man for man, they almost always outperformed Union armies, although the gap narrowed over time. But the North excelled at the arts of peace — that is, in industry and ability to get things done.

America’s other great moral war, World War II, was similar. ... the truth is that Americans were never as good at the art of war as the Germans. What we were good at was the art of production, of supply.

...

So anyway, I’m devoting a bit of time today to thinking about the muddy roads south of Richmond where, 146 years ago, the seal was put on creating the kind of nation I believe in."

It's a bit of an odd sentiment - the nation Paul Krugman believes in is one that is good enough at the Commercial life that it can 'buy its way to victory' in the Guardian world of warfare.

It's clear that Krugman understands the distinction between the Guardian approach of the patrician South vs. the Commercially minded North and that he prefers the Northern approach, but he doesn't spell out why - maybe because it was successful in the Civil War and World War II?, but you get the sense that his loyalty would remain the same even if the North had lost the Civil War and the U.S. had lost World War II.

Of course, it's also not really clear that it was the economic strength (per person) of the U.S. that was decisive in World War II. The Soviet Union was communist at the time, not exactly conducive to the kind of nation that Paul Krugman would believe in, and yet they seemed to do quite well in World War II as well.

Anyway, people can and do quibble endlessly about who accomplished what in past wars, but what is interesting to me is that Paul Krugman views democracy and strong commercial activity as going hand in hand in opposition to an aristocratic (hierarchical) society which is better equipped with warrior virtues, and that in his mind one (commercial society) is preferable and modern while the other (aristocratic society) is inferior and pre-modern.

In 'The Republic' Plato outlined how one type of government leads to another, with the aristocratic type giving way to a capitalist type which gave way to Democracy which finally gave way to tyranny, so that is consistent with Krugman's view that democracy and capitalism should be successors to the aristocratic type of society - although I doubt he'd agree that tyranny will be the new modern, leaving behind the old outdated democracy (or maybe he would, he's been paying as much attention to U.S. politics as anyone over the past decade).

Anyway, this is a bit of rambling post, the main thing I wanted to do was highlight how a commercial vs. guardian mindset lurks behind much of what is written on the topics of politics and what course society should take. Once your mind is tuned to look for the undercurrents of commercial syndrome or guardian syndrome casts of mind, you will see them everywhere (at least you will of you are like me, anyway).

107. The Righteous Mind, Part 4

Note: This post is the one hundred and seventh in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

This week the topic is the book, "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt. Having read the book, I highly recommend the NY Times review of it as an excellent summary.

Note that we have encountered the work of Jonathan Haidt before, albeit indirectly, in this earlier post which discussed an essay by Steven Pinker, which was written as a reaction to Haidt's work.

Today's post covers the third of Haidt's three main arguments, that people are 90% chimp and 10% bee, meaning that people are a mix of self-interested and group-interested.

In this section of the book, Haidt eventually defines 'moral systems' as,

"interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible."

This definition follows a lengthy argument by Haidt trying to justify the notion that people could have evolved to be cooperative in nature (10% bee), which he no doubt felt was necessary because this is a controversial position to take in the current academic environment. But I didn't need any convincing on that score, so I'm not going to dwell on that aspect of this section of the book.

Instead, let's look more closely at the definition of moral systems spelled out by Haidt.

The first point to make is that it seems a bit narrow, in denyng the possible existence of morality outside of a social context. I tend to agree more with Francis Fukuyama, who, if we recall from an earlier post in the series, stated that,

"The capacity for hard work, frugality, rationality, innovativeness, and openness to risk are all entrepreneurial virtues that apply to individuals and could be exercised by Robinson Crusoe on his proverbial desert island. But there is also a set of social virtues, like honesty, reliability, cooperativeness and a sense of duty to others, that are essentially social in nature."

More recently, we saw that Ayn Rand spokesman John Galt made the point even more clearly,

"You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island - it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim ... that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today - and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves."

Ayn Rand, in a point echoed more recently by Joseph Heath, emphasized further that there are situations (e.g. corporations that might mutually benefit from cooperative price-fixing) where the pursuit of self-interest at the expense of cooperative behaviour is the best course of action. True, Haidt might argue that this falls under the 'regulation' of self-interest, but it doesn't seem like this sort of thing is what he had in mind.

More generally, Haidt suggests the existence of moral systems, denies that he is a moral relativist who believes that all moral systems are equally valid, and identifies two distinct moral casts of mind present in the population ("WEIRD" and "Normal") but he never makes any sort of attempt to categorize what sort of moral systems might exist or what might make one moral system superior to another.

This is not really criticism, Haidt has already covered a lot of ground, it's just that he went quite far, but mostly stopped short of addressing the questions I've been pursuing in this series. Why do some moral systems apply in some contexts and not others, what makes one moral system superior to another, etc.

Haidt spends a chapter explaining his viewpoint (which I mostly share) that religion may be wrong (supernaturally speaking) but is nevertheless useful (here on earth) because it helps bind communities together and support cooperative efforts (such as feeding the poor or inquisiting heretics). Throughout the third section of the book he emphasizes that our groupish behaviour typically applies only to whichever group we identify with, not with the human race as a whole, but that experimental results have shown as people become more groupish in a situation, the increased love for the in-group outweighs any increased hate for  out-groups.

Haidt briefly (page 266) seems to suggest that religion is beneficial to trade, "In the medieval world, Jews and Muslims excelled in long-distance trade in part because their religions helped them create trustworthy relationships and enforceable contracts." However, he doesn't go on to note that Christians were certainly quite religious during the medieval period as well, or that in modern times, the nations with the highest standard of living tend to be the least religious. Similarly, he doesn't spend any time on the relationship between religion and scientific inquiry. Coming from an Irish background, I can see that religion supports social cohesion, but I might take some convincing that greater religiosity coincides with greater commercial trade.

---

Putting the three different sections of the book together, Haidt has presented three reasons why we struggle to agree on what is right: 1) We have instinctive moral reactions to situations that we rationalize, rather than coming to a rational conclusion based on disinterested reasoning, 2) different people have different sets of moral instincts, and 3) by our nature we are tribal, in the sense that we define ourselves and choose our actions based on the groups that we belong to, not just on our individual situation.

Earlier on in the book, Haidt suggested that rather than aiming for some grand rational argument that would teach us how to all act morally (as he thought Plato was engaged in in The Republic) we should instead try to design society in such a manner that we would naturally behave in a moral manner (which is what Plato actually was engaged in in The Republic). But where Plato set out an elaborate scheme for disentangling two sets of people to follow two distinct moral systems, according to their nature, Haidt has little to offer beyond suggesting that U.S. congressman should bring their families with them to Washington rather than leaving them at home, so that there is more socializing across party lines. But despite the lack of solutions offerred it's an interesting book that just might change the way you think about how you think so it's worth a read.

Electoral Reform in Canada

This post is not about the question of what the best electoral system is, or whether we should adopt proportional representation. Instead, I am assuming that part (see here for my clearest exposition on why), and considering the political question of how best to get proportional representation implemented in Canada.


There have been 4 referendums on electoral reform in Canada recently and I sincerely hope that there are some academic types out there studying and analyzing this period in Canadian politics.

In reverse chronological order, they were:

Province / Year / % of eligible votes cast in favour of electoral reform
B.C. / 2009 / 39%
Ontario / 2007 / 37%
P.E.I. / 2005 / 36%
B.C. / 2005 / 58%

The two B.C. referendums were on switching to a Single Transferrable Vote (STV) system, while the Ontario and P.E.I. referendums were on switching to a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) type system.

Here is a collection of thoughts in no particular order:

1) The technical details are very important, so for the most part, reform is only likely to happen if the party in power wants it to happen, or if it can be politically outmaneuvered by reform forces. Even if a party is pressured into starting some sort of reform process, constant vigilance and effort will be required to make sure they do not sabotage it in some way, either deliberately or accidentally.

2) If a referendum is held for reform, the most important technical detail is the threshold for support. Reformers need to push back against the notion that countries can declare independence with a 55% vote but it takes 60% support to change the electoral system.

3) It may be better to try and turn the First Past the Post system against itself. Supporters of FPTP argue that it is good because it allows us to 'get things done' without the pesky need to get a majority vote in favour. If a political party could be persuaded to support reform as part of their platform, then they could win election with the usual 35-40% of the vote and simply implement the reform that was part of their platform.

4) Fair Vote Canada may want to emulate the tactics of the Taxpayers Federations in attempting to browbeat party leaders into signing 'pledges' to support reform during the election campaign when leverage against parties is at its peak. These sorts of political promises to at least hold a referendum on reform were key in getting reform implemented in New Zealand.


5) After the question of the need for a referendum and the threshold for a referendum, the next most important technical detail is the wording of the question.

The 2005 B.C. referendum asked the following question:

"Should British Columbia change to the BC-STV electoral system as recommended by the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform?

-> Yes

-> No"

The 2009 referendum asked the following question:

"Which electoral system should British Columbia use to elect members to the Provincial Legislative Assembly?

-> The existing electoral system (First Past the Post)

-> The single transferrable vote electoral system (BC-STV) proposed by the Citizen's Assembly on Electoral Reform"

I believe it was the change in wording of the question which accounted for the large majority of the drop in support for reform from 58% to 38% from 2005 to 2009. I realize it is perhaps insulting to accuse at least 20% of the voting public of being so irrational as to choose an electoral system based on how the question is posed to them, but nonetheless I believe that to be the case. If true, it certainly casts doubt on the legitimacy of using referenda to decide such questions since there would be such a large percentage of the population seemingly incapable of understanding what they are being asked.

At any rate, a little bit of polling could establish:
a) The impact of the question on people's willingness to support reform
b) The specific wording of the question that would most tend to encourage people to vote in favour (I suspect that the B.C. 2005 question, which framed the question as whether to positively accept a recommendation from a citizen's assembly would be close to ideal, as opposed to the 2009 question which asked people whether to keep the status quo or vote for some strange sounding proposal

I don't know what Fair Vote Canada's finances are like, but my opinion is that this type of research (which would have global applicability and thus could be coordinated through Fair Vote Org) has the best chance of producing concrete results towards achieving reform.

6) In Canada, the failure of 4 referendums in 4 years to achieve reform makes it difficult to pursue further reform in the short term. One solution may be to emulate the Conservative strategy for achieving Senate reform, and try to break the problem down into achievable 'bite-size' chunks.

6 b) One of the best candidates for this gradualist approach might be to support a switch to instant-runoff voting. Although instant runoff voting would not cure problems of disproportionality it would accomplish a few things:

- it would show that changing the way we vote doesn't cause the end of the world (much in the same way that getting rid of the penny would likely lead to increased support for getting rid of the nickel)

- it would eliminate the need for strategic voting

- by eliminating the need for strategic voting, it would weaken the forces working against 3rd, 4th, 5th, etc. parties, reducing the pressure from the FPTP system to reduce us back to two parties - a pressure which is in turn a threat to reform, since the more the party system fragments, the more parties supporting reform there are likely to be, the less power the main parties will have, and the more dysfunctional the current archaic FPTP system will be shown to be

One advantage of instant runoff voting is that, unlike proportional representation which is typically supported by those parties which will never gain the power under the current system to implement it, instant runoff voting tends to support centrist parties which in turn tend to win elections, meaning it may be possible for reformers to ally with a centrist party which would see instant runoff voting as being in their interest which would likely guarantee passage of this reform.

6 c) Following this train of thought, it might be possible to package reform 'products' that are suitable to different parties. An agreement to support Senate Reform in return for support on Electoral Reform for Right Wing parties, a package to implement PR for parties that normally are disadvantaged by the old FPTP system, a package that includes instant runoff voting for a centrist party with rivals on either side of the left-right spectrum.


7) In terms of gaining support for reform in a referendum, having politicians in an MMP type system get elected based on party lists is a very big weakness. I don't like this aspect of MMP much myself, and I'm as strong a supporter of reform as they come.

It is critical, in my opinion, to find another way to choose the candidates that make up the numbers in an MMP type system

- My favourite option would be to simply take the 'best seconds,' so that if, for example, the NDP was due 5 additional seats under MMP than what it was awarded under the old FPTP system, instead of having the 5 NDP candidates pulled from a list made by NDP party members/leaders, we would simply take the 5 NDP candidates who got the highest percentage of the vote in their riding without being elected under FPTP.

The primary advantage here is that it removes the party list from the equation.

Secondary advantages are that it requires very little modification from the current system and that it is simple, easy to understand, and seems like a fair way to go about things.

The one drawback I see is the notion that some ridings may get more MP's than others, but I think this could be mitigated a bit, and is outweighed by the positives. I imagine the electoral reform experts out there could offer more possible solutions to this dilemma.

8) Reformers need to work as closely as possible with all political parties, and indeed should join parties and try to change them from the inside as well. Situations like the one in 2005 where the B.C. Green Party decided to commit suicide by not supporting reform should be avoided where possible. Parties on a growth curve and likely to have to battle against FPTP's biases could be a particular focus of outreach (e.g. the B.C. Conservative Party)

9) On the communications front, I think that reformers can do more with electronic media. The referendums have proven that the mainstream media is implacably opposed to reform but that media is dying. In the 2005 B.C. referendum I tracked the opinions of bloggers on reform, and, as you might expect given that the more youthful, urban and informed people are the more likely they are to support reform, the bloggers who offered an opinion were overwhelmingly in favour (by a margin of 57-15, i.e. 79% support).

The ideal situation would be for there to be a 'Michael Geist' of electoral reform. i.e. A blogger supporting electoral reform, that focusses on Canada and is written by someone who is respected, tireless, intelligent, read by many, candid, politically savvy, and influential. No, I don't have anyone in mind, but I think that having someone (ideally a few someones) who can serve as a go-to place for information and tactics on supporting reform as well as serving as a focussing device for directing the support of all the reformers out there can be very effective, as Geist has shown.

Of course, there is no point in giving up on the MSM, as even though they are dying, they are still pretty powerful and the people they do reach tend to be the ones who vote. Meetings with editorial boards, consistent letter writing, both 'to the editor' and directly to columnists on the political beat are probably still effective tools in the battle for public opinion.

10) Still on communications, there is a need for consistent framing and messaging as well. You might notice that I almost never refer to our current outdated, outmoded, archaic, antique electoral system without inserting an adjective suggesting that it is past its best-before date. There's probably more scope for this sort of thing, both negative terms for the current system and those who support it, and motherhood-esque terms for reforms and those who support them (sadly, 'pro-choice' is taken - Americans are the experts at this sort of thing and are likely the best source of ideas in this area).

11) One last point on communication, the development of clear visuals, phrases, youtube videos, etc. that drive home key points of the reform message and counteract some of the concerns people have, should be a priority.

For example, in B.C. the videos that explain STV are useful tools in both informing voters and in fighting the notion that STV is 'too complex'.

Another example of a useful graphic might be one showing a map of the world over time, with the various parts of the world changing to some friendly colour as countries around the world adopt various forms of proportional representation (perhaps with titles for major reforms such as the switch to MMP in Germany and New Zealand, the adoption of PR in Wales, Scotland, Norther Ireland, etc.)

This would serve to counter the idea I feel many people have that our current system is 'normal' and that any proposed reform is some sort of aberration that has never been tried before.

It would also help to create an air of inevitability around the notion of reform which is also helpful, in my opinion.

12) Supporters of reform need to get behind whatever reform is offerred rather than quarreling amongst themselves or letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Supporters of MMP in B.C. who voted against STV because they preferred MMP are stuck with FPTP for the foreseeable future.

One way to avoid this problem is to follow the New Zealand example of first having a referendum to decide which reform is best, and then voting on whether to implement it or not. You may still get some people opposing reform, but I think they are less likely to do so when they know their preferred option was defeated in a referendum, as opposed to having been excluded by a citizen's assembly process or by some internal political party policy development process.


I'll end this rambling post on a point of optimism for the future of reform. As I mentioned earlier, the results in B.C. and Ontario both showed the highest support for reform in the most urban ridings which also tend to be the youngest ridings. This suggests that support may rise naturally over time as the population becomes more urban and as the opponents of reform die off. There is a common expression that science 'advances funeral by funeral' and it might be the same sort of long term battle that is required to get electoral reform adopted in Canada.

Casts of Mind

"perhaps to be too practical is madness, to surrender dreams this may be madness"

There's a funny section in Jane Jacobs 'Systems of Survival' where she illustrates how differently someone with a commercial syndrome mindset views things vs. how someone with a guardian mindset views things. In the book, Jacobs weighs the benefits of a society like medieval Europe where people are separated by birth into either a guardian life or a commercial life vs. our current approach which allows people to do whatever they please, allowing greater flexibility, but potentially at the cost of some moral confusion.

Anyway, I only bring that up, because the most rational, most commercial syndrome minded pundit in Canada is, in my opinion, Dan Gardner, so I was wondering ahead of time how Gardner would react to the two week, irrational, Guardian syndrome festival that is the Olympics.

Gardner didn't let me down, as he churned out post after post after column after post after post after column after post after post after column after post after post after post after post after post after post after post on the Olympics, every last post critical, with all of the posts amounting at root to Gardner pleading with Canadians to stop being so irrational, taking pride in the Canadian athletes when everybody knows that you only buy medals not win them, or that athletes have to work too hard as children to become world champions or that McDonald's food isn't necessarily the healthiest choice or whatever he felt might serve his goal of convincing people not to support the irrational Olympics.

The funniest part was in the comments on this column, where commenter 'Shiner' repeatedly, politely, tries to get Gardner to admit that maybe people just like to cheer for the home team to win and if that's irrational, who cares - but Gardner was completely incapable of even acknowledging the question, getting more and more upset and snippy throughout the exchange without ever engaging Shiner's main point. To the pure rational (commercial syndrome) mind, any activity that doesn't promote comfort and convenience is irrational and rational is a synonym for 'good' or 'right'. The notion that something could be both irrational and good just doesn't compute.

Most of the time, a commitment to rationality is a good thing, as when Gardner is debunking homeopathic medicine quacks or pointing out the inefficient way we go about satisfying our obsession with security. But during the Olympics, an uncompromising commitment to rationality just seems a little silly. Speculating, I think that may be part of the appeal of the Olympics - in a world dominated by rational commercial thinking, the Olympics represent a rare outpost of acceptable guardian type activity. Anyway, not to worry Dan, the Olympics are over now, so you have a couple of years of unrelenting rationality to look forward to. :)