FWIW, I think the young lacking life experience and crystallized intelligence is pretty clutch. This argument rests on the young having not only a greater stake in future but being able to make sensible decisions about what to do with it. I would at least suggest that 18-25 yo voters not have a multiplier.
I do like reducing the influence of the old who know very well when voting that, for instance, climate change will not really affect them. But I think any vote weighting scheme has to take stakeholding and competence into account.
I would at least suggest that 18-25 yo voters not have a multiplier.
Yes. As a reductio ad absurdum of Will’s idea, why not give toddlers an extreme multiplier? Well, we know toddlers don’t make good judgements. But it’s not like your ability to make good judgments suddenly turns a corner on your 18th birthday. So as long as we’re refactoring voting weights for different ages, we should also fix the 18th birthday step function issue, and create a scheme which gradually accounts for a person’s increased wisdom as they age.
[Edit: A countervailing consideration is that if you make your scheme too wonky, it may not gather broad support.]
(I also think randomly selecting a small number of voters jury selection-style, to address the public goods problem inherent in becoming an informed & thoughtful voter, would probably be a higher-leverage improvement… but that’s another discussion.)
There is already a proposal to use sortition to form a third legislative house, of citizens who would have responsibility for deliberating on whether legislation would harm future generations: Rupert Read’s ‘Guardians of the Future’ (2012)
This seems more promising than re-weighting the value of votes of certain groups whose self-interest is presumed to lie more in the future given that i) voters tend not to vote much on the basis of self-interest, ii) to the extent that slightly younger generations have a greater interest in the future it is only in the very near future, which seems roughly equally compatible with disastrous policies iii) we have little, if any, reason to suppose that younger generations are epistemically capable of judging what policy would best serve their self-interest >50 years out.
The deliberative council idea has advantages over vote reweighting on all three counts: i) the citizens would be tasked explicitly with judging whether policies would aid or harm the future, rather than voting in whatever way in the hope that their vote proxies future interests, ii) they would be tasked with considering the long run future not just their self-interest (which extends maybe 50 years into the future, but which, due to time preference, might on average be a lot shorter), iii) such a deliberative council would have ample time and access to expertise (deliberative fora tend to give participants access to a variety of experts to help inform their deliberations) and be explicitly and implicitly (e.g. by the setup) to deliberate about what would produce the best interests- these kinds of setups have been widely used participants seem to tend to deliberate pretty well and reach relatively informed judgments (at least compared to the typical voter): see some case studies.
That said I think there may still be grounds to reject even this proposal, primarily that one may still be concerned about (iii) the epistemic question, even in these comparatively ideal circumstances.
I mentioned this in response to Larks too, but one thing to bear in mind is that even using the the weighting scheme I suggested in the post—which seemingly strongly favors young people—that would move the median voter (in the US) from age 55 to age 40. So, at least assuming the median voter theorem is approximately accurate in this context, the key epistocratic question is about 40yr olds vs 55yr olds.
And if I had to choose now, I would also prefer a tapering system, where vote-weight starts off lower, then increases, and then decreases again. A benefit of that system is that you could make the ‘voting age’ a gradual progression rather than an immediate jump. Perhaps 12yr olds get a very weak vote, which scales up until 25, then scales down after 35.
one thing to bear in mind is that even using the the weighting scheme I suggested in the post—which seemingly strongly favors young people—that would move the median voter (in the US) from age 55 to age 40.
How do you get this result? Are you just saying with these multipliers applied to the current age distribution of voters, the median US vote would be cast by a 40 yo? Or if this anticipating the response to the multipliers? Like, for example, does this take into account that young people would probably vote more if their votes counted 6x more?
I’m not knocking the overall idea, but I am skeptical that young people will be that much better at resisting short-term political temptations than old people. If young people got huge vote multipliers, politicians would only pander to their weaknesses more. I guess like most people commenting here I have the most faith in middle-aged people. I like the idea of a more gradual tapering up and down of the vote multiplier, but a system that complicated is probably doomed.
Maybe parents should get huge vote multipliers. Seems to me they usually care about the future a lot more than the young people who are on track to outlive them.
Bryan Caplan’s book “The Myth of the Rational Voter” explains that voters being merely ignorant or irrational is not a big issue. The uniformed voters will make random mistakes in voting that cancel each other out, and elections are still decided by the median informed voter. If that is true, younger voters’ greater ignorance (/higher intelligence) will cause them to contribute less (/more) to the pool of informed voters.
What we should really care about are biases, where people are consistently making mistakes in one direction, that are common across the population (or the age group in this case). Age might be a factor. Caplan proposes four biases: Anti-market bias, Anti-foreign bias, Make-work bias, Pessimistic bias.
FWIW, I think the young lacking life experience and crystallized intelligence is pretty clutch. This argument rests on the young having not only a greater stake in future but being able to make sensible decisions about what to do with it. I would at least suggest that 18-25 yo voters not have a multiplier.
I do like reducing the influence of the old who know very well when voting that, for instance, climate change will not really affect them. But I think any vote weighting scheme has to take stakeholding and competence into account.
Yes. As a reductio ad absurdum of Will’s idea, why not give toddlers an extreme multiplier? Well, we know toddlers don’t make good judgements. But it’s not like your ability to make good judgments suddenly turns a corner on your 18th birthday. So as long as we’re refactoring voting weights for different ages, we should also fix the 18th birthday step function issue, and create a scheme which gradually accounts for a person’s increased wisdom as they age.
[Edit: A countervailing consideration is that if you make your scheme too wonky, it may not gather broad support.]
(I also think randomly selecting a small number of voters jury selection-style, to address the public goods problem inherent in becoming an informed & thoughtful voter, would probably be a higher-leverage improvement… but that’s another discussion.)
You mean like sortition? https://www.sortitionfoundation.org/what_is_sortition
There is already a proposal to use sortition to form a third legislative house, of citizens who would have responsibility for deliberating on whether legislation would harm future generations: Rupert Read’s ‘Guardians of the Future’ (2012)
This seems more promising than re-weighting the value of votes of certain groups whose self-interest is presumed to lie more in the future given that i) voters tend not to vote much on the basis of self-interest, ii) to the extent that slightly younger generations have a greater interest in the future it is only in the very near future, which seems roughly equally compatible with disastrous policies iii) we have little, if any, reason to suppose that younger generations are epistemically capable of judging what policy would best serve their self-interest >50 years out.
The deliberative council idea has advantages over vote reweighting on all three counts: i) the citizens would be tasked explicitly with judging whether policies would aid or harm the future, rather than voting in whatever way in the hope that their vote proxies future interests, ii) they would be tasked with considering the long run future not just their self-interest (which extends maybe 50 years into the future, but which, due to time preference, might on average be a lot shorter), iii) such a deliberative council would have ample time and access to expertise (deliberative fora tend to give participants access to a variety of experts to help inform their deliberations) and be explicitly and implicitly (e.g. by the setup) to deliberate about what would produce the best interests- these kinds of setups have been widely used participants seem to tend to deliberate pretty well and reach relatively informed judgments (at least compared to the typical voter): see some case studies.
That said I think there may still be grounds to reject even this proposal, primarily that one may still be concerned about (iii) the epistemic question, even in these comparatively ideal circumstances.
I mentioned this in response to Larks too, but one thing to bear in mind is that even using the the weighting scheme I suggested in the post—which seemingly strongly favors young people—that would move the median voter (in the US) from age 55 to age 40. So, at least assuming the median voter theorem is approximately accurate in this context, the key epistocratic question is about 40yr olds vs 55yr olds.
And if I had to choose now, I would also prefer a tapering system, where vote-weight starts off lower, then increases, and then decreases again. A benefit of that system is that you could make the ‘voting age’ a gradual progression rather than an immediate jump. Perhaps 12yr olds get a very weak vote, which scales up until 25, then scales down after 35.
How do you get this result? Are you just saying with these multipliers applied to the current age distribution of voters, the median US vote would be cast by a 40 yo? Or if this anticipating the response to the multipliers? Like, for example, does this take into account that young people would probably vote more if their votes counted 6x more?
I’m not knocking the overall idea, but I am skeptical that young people will be that much better at resisting short-term political temptations than old people. If young people got huge vote multipliers, politicians would only pander to their weaknesses more. I guess like most people commenting here I have the most faith in middle-aged people. I like the idea of a more gradual tapering up and down of the vote multiplier, but a system that complicated is probably doomed.
Maybe parents should get huge vote multipliers. Seems to me they usually care about the future a lot more than the young people who are on track to outlive them.
Bryan Caplan’s book “The Myth of the Rational Voter” explains that voters being merely ignorant or irrational is not a big issue. The uniformed voters will make random mistakes in voting that cancel each other out, and elections are still decided by the median informed voter. If that is true, younger voters’ greater ignorance (/higher intelligence) will cause them to contribute less (/more) to the pool of informed voters.
What we should really care about are biases, where people are consistently making mistakes in one direction, that are common across the population (or the age group in this case). Age might be a factor. Caplan proposes four biases: Anti-market bias, Anti-foreign bias, Make-work bias, Pessimistic bias.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter