It's interesting that it's possible to achieve proportional representation with respect to geographic distribution and party votes simultaneously. (Though, as the article notes, Iceland falls short of this ideal.)
This makes me wonder: why stop at two? Some places have explicit quotas for different ethnic or religious groups as a compromise to avoid civil war. Could they use a tripoportional system?
And why not add in even more demographic variables? Age, gender, income, level of education, ... I suppose at some point it stops being a secret election because the number of voters sharing all attributes becomes too small, or the parliament would get unwieldily large trying to represent every hyperspecific constituency.
It is possible! But with more than two dimensions, you have to allow deviations from perfect proportionality to guarantee a solution exists. The more dimensions, the worse it gets, until eventually proportionality breaks down entirely. [1] defines a method to do this and simulates the results on an election where district and party seats are distributed proportionally and divvied up by gender proportionally. The result is a better national proportionality at the expense of worse local proportionality.
Huh, TIL the Constitution doesn’t require Congressional districts. A state could technically switch to a model like this for assigning representatives at large.
The two main parties in the US are way too happy with the status for any change to happen. If there is one thing they hate more than each other it's another party.
I don't think that is actually true. It is in part redistricting that lead to the ascendancy of extremism, by putting all of the strategic emphasis on the primaries in uncontested constituencies.
"Redistricting" isn't a new recent thing, it is a process done by state legislatures to state and federal legislative district every decade that has been used for both personal and partisan advantage since the founding; the word "gerrymander" was coined in criticism of a particular instance in 1812.
I think there is a primary-related problem going on right now that could change historically held positions on the value to financial backers interests of uncontested general elections.
> California could make this change by referendum.
No, it could not, because Article I, Section 3 (emphasis added): "The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing Senators." (the last part of that about choosing Senators has its effect eliminated by the 17th Amendment, but that isn't important here.)
And Congress has exercised its authority in U.S. Code Title 2, Section 2c (emphasis added): "In each State entitled in the Ninety-first Congress or in any subsequent Congress thereafter to more than one Representative under an apportionment made pursuant to the provisions of section 2a(a) of this title, there shall be established by law a number of districts equal to the number of Representatives to which such State is so entitled, and Representatives shall be elected only from districts so established, no district to elect more than one Representative (except that a State which is entitled to more than one Representative and which has in all previous elections elected its Representatives at Large may elect its Representatives at Large to the Ninety-first Congress)."
> why would they if other states retain a system that disproportionally skews sits towards one party?
Because your constituents are better represented. California strikes me as a potent place to do this because I could see a constitutional amendment passing at the ballot box.
We need another one whose motto is "Country Over Party," and is backed by locked down solid ethics that always follows right vs. wrong with right (not politically right or left) guiding everything this entity stands for and is guided by. Present day it's neither party standing for right vs. wrong it's the b.s. Right (politically) vs. Left(politically) or Left vs. Right! Gross, there's neither party today cares about right vs. wrong or integrity just divide the country further!!!
> locked down solid ethics that always follows right vs. wrong with right (not politically right or left) guiding everything this entity stands for and is guided by
As in?
People can legitimately disagree about what is right and wrong, or what even falls on a moral continuum. Nailing down a moment’s broad truth is among the most revered roles in any society.
Can they ... poll a group of people (right and lefties) and ask...
If vandalizing a Telsa and vandalizing the US Capitol are both wrong and my focus is only the act of vandalism in asking this question. Overall, both acts are clear cut wrong!
Those who refuse to say both are wrong their brains are driven now by political emotional mind control babble where they've thrown out knowing and standing for right over wrong.
1. The original 1787 apportionment would result in a House of Representatives of ~30k members[1].
2. That's obviously unwieldy, and so we haven't had a bump in seats since ... 1910.
3. 'Factions' were viewed dimly by the Founders. I would argue in favor of two immediate changes:
- Term limits for everything, including shorter max civil service careers. Capitol Hill, like any compost heap, benefits from regular turning.
- A "bidder bunch" rule, whereby if Congress can't manage its key function--that of producing a budget--then none of these goofs (even the ones I admire) get to run for their seat when next up. There are copious talented alternative people to put on ballots. Do your job or face corporate punishment, say I.
> A "bidder bunch" rule, whereby if Congress can't manage its key function--that of producing a budget--then none of these goofs (even the ones I admire) get to run for their seat when next up
This creates an obvious and huge perverse incentive to throw a wrench into the works any time you want a do-over.
How? You don’t think you could find Democrats, today, who wouldn’t roll the dice on a new Congress? The proposal essentially gives a narrow minority the ability to call no confidence.
> Huh, TIL the Constitution doesn’t require Congressional districts.
True, but...
> A state could technically switch to a model like this for assigning representatives at large.
No, it can't because Congress itself is given the overriding power in the Constitution to regulate the "time, place, and manner" of elections to the House, and has exercised it to prohibit at-large districts (many times, with lax enforcement, but the most recent mandate, adopted in 1967, has not had the compliance problems the earlier ones often did.) The 1967 mandate was adopted under the dual specter of a some states failing to resolve districting controversies and potentially facing judicially-imposed at-large districts and several states having used at-large districts for non-federal elections to effectively disenfranchise Black voters and concerns that the same might be done to Congressional delegations as a way of blunting the impacts of new rules like the Voting Rights Act.
There was a time when senators were not elected by popular vote. The constitution leaves a lot of this up to the states and just by convention they mostly do the same thing.
The nexus of stupidity in our Republic has less often been the Senate; I’m unkeen to mess with it.
The House is a mess. So is SCOTUS. My proposal for the latter is redefining the Supreme Court as one drawn by lot from appellate judges for each case. This not only solves the appointment lottery. It also incentivises expanding the judiciary, which we need to do, and removes the modern perversion which is the Supreme Court just not bothering with controversial cases.
Most importantly, the edits to SCOTUS can be done by the Congress. The edits to the House can be done by the states. (EDIT: Nah.) Senate requires a Constitutional amendment; that window isn’t open at this time.
This is something that was defined in the Constitution, however. Article 1, Section 3 called for the selection of Senators by state legislatures. This is superseded by the 17th Amendment, and calls for Senators to be elected by the people of their states.
This is important to understand, because the 17th Amendment is an on-again-off-again political issue; Republicans have, in recent history, held most state legislatures, so repealing the 17th Amendment would basically guarantee that the Republican Party would control at least one house of Congress for the foreseeable future, and give the party greater control over who is selected to the office.
The main "feature" of the Icelandic voting system is to dilute the relationship between a voter and their representative representing their interests in their district.
Instead their vote goes to someone in the same political party in another district.
So the entire system is biased away from local representation and towards party policy decided on a national basis.
That policy is in turn heavily weighed towards the interests of geographic areas over "one person one vote". Icelandic law only starts considering that a problem once your vote counts 2x as much as mine, just because we live an imaginary line apart.
> So the entire system is biased away from local representation and towards party policy decided on a national basis.
> That policy is in turn heavily weighed towards the interests of geographic areas
Forgive me if I'm missing something, but these sound like contradictory claims to me?
As an American, I feel I'd prefer this system. The number of members of each party that make it to Congress is the main determinant of what policy gets passed. But I can only influence that indirectly, by choosing which party represents my local district. If I'm in a solid minority in the district I live in, I basically have 0 influence on the result of the election. Overall, those invisible lines let politicians crack and pack constituencies so a party with a minority of the votes still gets a majority of the seats.
In this system, the number of representatives of each party would be determined by the national popular vote, meaning I can more directly vote for which party gets the majority. Your vote does two things: it casts a vote for your party against the other parties in gaining them seats, and it casts a vote for your favorite party candidate over other candidates in the party (including those in other districts) to determine which candidates of the party earn the seats the party is given. It reduces the effect of the invisible line in weakening my vote. I'm okay with this meaning that sometimes my vote helps elect someone in a different district, since this would mean my district doesn't have enough members of my party to justify a representative of our own and because a lot of times the lines are arbitrary anyway. It would require bigger districts with multiple winners, and sometimes that the person with the 6th or 7th most votes in the district gets the 4th or 5th seat instead. This, in my mind, is the "gerrymandering correction:" it ensures those parties who were disadvantaged by the line drawing get their fair share of party members.
As for one vote counting twice as much as another, my understanding (and please correct me if I am wrong) is that the main cause of that is differences in turnout between the different districts and rounding representatives to the nearest whole number. Nothing can be done about the later (big problem in the US too -- people per district varies by hundreds of thousands of people, not to mention the disparity in the Senate). For the former, you could proportion representatives between districts based on turnout instead, but this is a bad idea since it makes it much harder to campaign in a district if you don't know how many seats are up for grabs.
I absolutely love that you need to read a list of axioms with Greek symbols in their descriptions to make an informed vote in Iceland. Sets a minimum bar of education to vote, which is reasonable.
Nah, just vote for the party you like the most. The nerds at the elections office take care of the math themselves. "Better" than US/UK/Canada where you have to consider a primary system or multiple elections or "Liberal Democrats win here" signs to not split the vote.
It does underline the comparative disadvantage of America’s uneducated population: something like this wouldn’t get through because most of the population is too stupid to grok it. We’re foreclosed from an entire domain of solutions because idiots won’t or can’t tough through understanding them.
This is true, this is an inherently more complex system. Personally I prefer the French two-round system as a balance between complexity and proportionality -- America sorta has this with primaries, although them being months in advance and the districts being gerrymandered to hell doesn't help.
I think you’re both underestimating the education of immigrants and overestimating the abilities of your neighbors.
A lot of bad shit hides in the averages. Some US states have poor or no standards, or allow kids to bypass standards through various means.
Unless they got remedial education in the military or something, the average high school graduate from a poorly performing place is much less capable than a Mexican or Filipino graduate.
That attitude smacks of anti-American racism created to justify pro-immigration ideology. It’s just a ridiculous assertion on its face. The US’s PISA score average is 1,468: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor.... Mexico is 1,220 (below Kazakhstan) and the Philippines is at 1,058, among the lowest in the world. The highest scoring latin America country is Chile, at 1,304.
You brought up “racism” when you cracked about gp somehow displaying anti-American racism.
Suggesting uneducated immigrants are a major problem is a common trope of racist discussion even if the word “race” is not specifically used. Especially in the context of a system that is currently trying to kick out immigrants who have voluntarily entered our educational system.
And our population is among the most educated in relation to which countries? Half the country is below a 6th grade reading level. A quarter is below a 3rd grade level. Abysmal for a developed country.
It’s inappropriate to compare the US education level to countries that have historically struggled economically and politically, especially when their struggles have been only exacerbated by self-serving US interference. And when enforced illiteracy is often used as a weapon to keep people down. Granted, GP made the first mistake there it seems, and you responded in kind. (Though I’m not sure because he is specifically comparing the lower percentiles. I haven’t seen data on that.)
But more to the point, you’ve previously claimed that your passion for these topics is due to a belief that ethnic identity and DEI is a threat to your children and to the American individualist culture. Yet, here you are bashing immigrants when neither ethnic identity, DEI, nor American individualism are being discussed.
> Suggesting uneducated immigrants are a major problem
@JumpCrisscross said uneducated Americans are a problem. If that’s true, then immigration must really be a problem, because most of it is from countries with much worse education. If you think “uneducated” people are a problem, then own that. Don’t hide behind this “punch up versus punch down” bullshit where it’s okay to call Americans uneducated but not people who are objectively more uneducated than Americans.
Look at the PISA scores I posted up thread. The U.S. performs around the same as Sweden. It’s not hanging with the very top, but it does fine compared to big western countries. And it vastly outperforms every Latin American country.
Uneducated immigrants are a far smaller group than uneducated natives. Believing that they are nonetheless the bigger problem is a sign of a racist perspective, albeit not a guarantee of one, perhaps it’s simply anti-immigration.
Additionally most immigrants don’t vote, so it doesn’t account for the current circus. When they do vote, they’ve become citizens by passing a test that many native Americans couldn’t pass.
Uneducation is a problem in general. Doesn’t matter who it is, immigrant or native. But uneducation is fixable problem if we as a society/culture wanted to fix it. We are currently working towards the exact opposite goal and doing it faster than ever.
PISA is not the only measurement. And it is not used by many countries, particularly Asian countries. It isn’t hard to look up other stats on US reading levels.
And again, comparing education levels outside of a historical context of politics and economics is not helpful, to say the least. And it says nothing about an individual’s ability or willingness to become educated once the opportunity presents itself, especially if they’ve already self-selected by making the effort to enter an environment that offers said opportunity. That should be obvious to a person who values and desires to protect American individualism, as you claim to be.
> Uneducated immigrants are a far smaller group than uneducated natives.
Work out the score distributions implied by the national PISA scores and you’ll see this isn’t true. Countries like El Salvador and Guatemala are more than a standard deviation below the U.S., meaning the average person from those countries would be in the bottom 10% of the U.S. scores. And the immigrants from those countries are less educated than average. So immigrants are going to be quite a disproportionate share of the bottom 10% of the U.S. education-wise.
> Believing that they are nonetheless the bigger problem is a sign of a racist perspective, albeit not a guarantee of one, perhaps it’s simply anti-immigration.
Just use your brain without trying to label everything. If you think uneducated people are a social problem, then it logically follows that it’s a problem to have low-skill immigration from places with more uneducated populations. And contrary to your point above, you don’t actually have to care about whatever historical circumstances caused them to be less educated. That doesn’t change the effect on American society.
> PISA is not the only measurement. And it is not used by many countries, particularly Asian countries. It isn’t hard to look up other stats on US reading levels
PISA is the most commonly used test for international comparisons.
Like I said, the problems hide in the averages. You don’t interview average high school graduates to work your shitty job in nowhereville - you’re talking to the 25th percentile for the most part. The 25th percentile Florida, Oklahoma or Arizona 8th grader performs 30% worse that his peer in New York or Massachusetts. I can assure you that NY and MA aren’t some paradise of educational achievement.
The people able to gtfo an emigrate from many places are usually the smarter people. The 75th percentile Filipino probably went to a Catholic school and had a better education than many US districts.
I’m sorry this upsets you, and I assure you I share your anger and disgust.
Hong Kong used to have a proportional voting system. The pro-China camp is often very efficient, sometimes winning a seat with half the votes compared to another candidate
Sadly, these tweaks don't address any of the more obvious oddities that people have with proportional representation in the legislature. While such a system won't necessarily end up with Dutch levels of weirdness, it is still possible:
If your source for "Dutch levels of weirdness" is just that article, then keep in mind that the VVD being "in power" meant that they were one of the parties in the government coalition. They have had to compromise with other parties through all of that time, and so it was not the case that those governments were only representative of a very small party of the electorate, as that article makes it sound.
(In my opinion, the Dutch system is one of the best implemented in practice, precisely because of its proportionality.)
That didn't really make sense. On the one hand, the author complains that proportional elections favor a limited number of parties, which don't always give voters good options to choose from. And on the other hand, the winner usually doesn't get the majority of seats, forcing them to negotiate with other parties instead of governing unilaterally.
Then there the focus on the left vs. the right, which is no longer as relevant as it used to be during the cold war. If you choose a single faction (such as the left, conservatives, or environmentalists), that specific faction is almost always smaller than everyone else combined. When there are multiple major issues instead of a single overarching question, political divisions become more nuanced than simple X vs. not-X.
It's interesting that it's possible to achieve proportional representation with respect to geographic distribution and party votes simultaneously. (Though, as the article notes, Iceland falls short of this ideal.)
This makes me wonder: why stop at two? Some places have explicit quotas for different ethnic or religious groups as a compromise to avoid civil war. Could they use a tripoportional system?
And why not add in even more demographic variables? Age, gender, income, level of education, ... I suppose at some point it stops being a secret election because the number of voters sharing all attributes becomes too small, or the parliament would get unwieldily large trying to represent every hyperspecific constituency.
It is possible! But with more than two dimensions, you have to allow deviations from perfect proportionality to guarantee a solution exists. The more dimensions, the worse it gets, until eventually proportionality breaks down entirely. [1] defines a method to do this and simulates the results on an election where district and party seats are distributed proportionally and divvied up by gender proportionally. The result is a better national proportionality at the expense of worse local proportionality.
[1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2109305119
> It's interesting that it's possible to achieve proportional representation with respect to geographic distribution and party votes simultaneously.
That would be interesting, but it's not even possible to achieve one of those things by itself.
Huh, TIL the Constitution doesn’t require Congressional districts. A state could technically switch to a model like this for assigning representatives at large.
The two main parties in the US are way too happy with the status for any change to happen. If there is one thing they hate more than each other it's another party.
I don't think that is actually true. It is in part redistricting that lead to the ascendancy of extremism, by putting all of the strategic emphasis on the primaries in uncontested constituencies.
"Redistricting" isn't a new recent thing, it is a process done by state legislatures to state and federal legislative district every decade that has been used for both personal and partisan advantage since the founding; the word "gerrymander" was coined in criticism of a particular instance in 1812.
I think there is a primary-related problem going on right now that could change historically held positions on the value to financial backers interests of uncontested general elections.
> two main parties in the US are way too happy with the status for any change to happen
California could make this change by referendum.
> California could make this change by referendum.
No, it could not, because Article I, Section 3 (emphasis added): "The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing Senators." (the last part of that about choosing Senators has its effect eliminated by the 17th Amendment, but that isn't important here.)
And Congress has exercised its authority in U.S. Code Title 2, Section 2c (emphasis added): "In each State entitled in the Ninety-first Congress or in any subsequent Congress thereafter to more than one Representative under an apportionment made pursuant to the provisions of section 2a(a) of this title, there shall be established by law a number of districts equal to the number of Representatives to which such State is so entitled, and Representatives shall be elected only from districts so established, no district to elect more than one Representative (except that a State which is entitled to more than one Representative and which has in all previous elections elected its Representatives at Large may elect its Representatives at Large to the Ninety-first Congress)."
Many states could, but why would they if other states retain a system that disproportionally skews sits towards one party?
> why would they if other states retain a system that disproportionally skews sits towards one party?
Because your constituents are better represented. California strikes me as a potent place to do this because I could see a constitutional amendment passing at the ballot box.
Yes but Ds and Rs will come out in force to rally their base against it. That's what happened in Colorado this past election.
We need another one whose motto is "Country Over Party," and is backed by locked down solid ethics that always follows right vs. wrong with right (not politically right or left) guiding everything this entity stands for and is guided by. Present day it's neither party standing for right vs. wrong it's the b.s. Right (politically) vs. Left(politically) or Left vs. Right! Gross, there's neither party today cares about right vs. wrong or integrity just divide the country further!!!
> locked down solid ethics that always follows right vs. wrong with right (not politically right or left) guiding everything this entity stands for and is guided by
As in?
People can legitimately disagree about what is right and wrong, or what even falls on a moral continuum. Nailing down a moment’s broad truth is among the most revered roles in any society.
Can they ... poll a group of people (right and lefties) and ask...
If vandalizing a Telsa and vandalizing the US Capitol are both wrong and my focus is only the act of vandalism in asking this question. Overall, both acts are clear cut wrong!
Those who refuse to say both are wrong their brains are driven now by political emotional mind control babble where they've thrown out knowing and standing for right over wrong.
1. The original 1787 apportionment would result in a House of Representatives of ~30k members[1].
2. That's obviously unwieldy, and so we haven't had a bump in seats since ... 1910.
3. 'Factions' were viewed dimly by the Founders. I would argue in favor of two immediate changes:
- Term limits for everything, including shorter max civil service careers. Capitol Hill, like any compost heap, benefits from regular turning.
- A "bidder bunch" rule, whereby if Congress can't manage its key function--that of producing a budget--then none of these goofs (even the ones I admire) get to run for their seat when next up. There are copious talented alternative people to put on ballots. Do your job or face corporate punishment, say I.
[1] https://thirty-thousand.org/
> A "bidder bunch" rule, whereby if Congress can't manage its key function--that of producing a budget--then none of these goofs (even the ones I admire) get to run for their seat when next up
This creates an obvious and huge perverse incentive to throw a wrench into the works any time you want a do-over.
And copious peer pressure not to be That Guy.
> copious peer pressure not to be That Guy
How? You don’t think you could find Democrats, today, who wouldn’t roll the dice on a new Congress? The proposal essentially gives a narrow minority the ability to call no confidence.
...and self-immolate. You don't work that hard to get elected and then piss it away.
> Huh, TIL the Constitution doesn’t require Congressional districts.
True, but...
> A state could technically switch to a model like this for assigning representatives at large.
No, it can't because Congress itself is given the overriding power in the Constitution to regulate the "time, place, and manner" of elections to the House, and has exercised it to prohibit at-large districts (many times, with lax enforcement, but the most recent mandate, adopted in 1967, has not had the compliance problems the earlier ones often did.) The 1967 mandate was adopted under the dual specter of a some states failing to resolve districting controversies and potentially facing judicially-imposed at-large districts and several states having used at-large districts for non-federal elections to effectively disenfranchise Black voters and concerns that the same might be done to Congressional delegations as a way of blunting the impacts of new rules like the Voting Rights Act.
Additional detail at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43739929
Appreciated as always!
There is a federal law.
There has been numerous proposals in the Congress to get rid of it, but they don't get ratified because two parties like the status quo.
People will have to make it an issue.
There was a time when senators were not elected by popular vote. The constitution leaves a lot of this up to the states and just by convention they mostly do the same thing.
The nexus of stupidity in our Republic has less often been the Senate; I’m unkeen to mess with it.
The House is a mess. So is SCOTUS. My proposal for the latter is redefining the Supreme Court as one drawn by lot from appellate judges for each case. This not only solves the appointment lottery. It also incentivises expanding the judiciary, which we need to do, and removes the modern perversion which is the Supreme Court just not bothering with controversial cases.
Most importantly, the edits to SCOTUS can be done by the Congress. The edits to the House can be done by the states. (EDIT: Nah.) Senate requires a Constitutional amendment; that window isn’t open at this time.
This is something that was defined in the Constitution, however. Article 1, Section 3 called for the selection of Senators by state legislatures. This is superseded by the 17th Amendment, and calls for Senators to be elected by the people of their states.
This is important to understand, because the 17th Amendment is an on-again-off-again political issue; Republicans have, in recent history, held most state legislatures, so repealing the 17th Amendment would basically guarantee that the Republican Party would control at least one house of Congress for the foreseeable future, and give the party greater control over who is selected to the office.
Thanks… didn’t remember that detail and admittedly didn’t check the source.
The main "feature" of the Icelandic voting system is to dilute the relationship between a voter and their representative representing their interests in their district.
Instead their vote goes to someone in the same political party in another district.
So the entire system is biased away from local representation and towards party policy decided on a national basis.
That policy is in turn heavily weighed towards the interests of geographic areas over "one person one vote". Icelandic law only starts considering that a problem once your vote counts 2x as much as mine, just because we live an imaginary line apart.
> So the entire system is biased away from local representation and towards party policy decided on a national basis.
> That policy is in turn heavily weighed towards the interests of geographic areas
Forgive me if I'm missing something, but these sound like contradictory claims to me?
As an American, I feel I'd prefer this system. The number of members of each party that make it to Congress is the main determinant of what policy gets passed. But I can only influence that indirectly, by choosing which party represents my local district. If I'm in a solid minority in the district I live in, I basically have 0 influence on the result of the election. Overall, those invisible lines let politicians crack and pack constituencies so a party with a minority of the votes still gets a majority of the seats.
In this system, the number of representatives of each party would be determined by the national popular vote, meaning I can more directly vote for which party gets the majority. Your vote does two things: it casts a vote for your party against the other parties in gaining them seats, and it casts a vote for your favorite party candidate over other candidates in the party (including those in other districts) to determine which candidates of the party earn the seats the party is given. It reduces the effect of the invisible line in weakening my vote. I'm okay with this meaning that sometimes my vote helps elect someone in a different district, since this would mean my district doesn't have enough members of my party to justify a representative of our own and because a lot of times the lines are arbitrary anyway. It would require bigger districts with multiple winners, and sometimes that the person with the 6th or 7th most votes in the district gets the 4th or 5th seat instead. This, in my mind, is the "gerrymandering correction:" it ensures those parties who were disadvantaged by the line drawing get their fair share of party members.
As for one vote counting twice as much as another, my understanding (and please correct me if I am wrong) is that the main cause of that is differences in turnout between the different districts and rounding representatives to the nearest whole number. Nothing can be done about the later (big problem in the US too -- people per district varies by hundreds of thousands of people, not to mention the disparity in the Senate). For the former, you could proportion representatives between districts based on turnout instead, but this is a bad idea since it makes it much harder to campaign in a district if you don't know how many seats are up for grabs.
Nnnneeeeeeeeerds!
I absolutely love that you need to read a list of axioms with Greek symbols in their descriptions to make an informed vote in Iceland. Sets a minimum bar of education to vote, which is reasonable.
Nah, just vote for the party you like the most. The nerds at the elections office take care of the math themselves. "Better" than US/UK/Canada where you have to consider a primary system or multiple elections or "Liberal Democrats win here" signs to not split the vote.
It does underline the comparative disadvantage of America’s uneducated population: something like this wouldn’t get through because most of the population is too stupid to grok it. We’re foreclosed from an entire domain of solutions because idiots won’t or can’t tough through understanding them.
This is true, this is an inherently more complex system. Personally I prefer the French two-round system as a balance between complexity and proportionality -- America sorta has this with primaries, although them being months in advance and the districts being gerrymandered to hell doesn't help.
The French two-round system is wildy unproportional to the point that it is just very marginally less undemocratic than first past the post.
The good thing is — you don’t have to suffer the idiots. It’s a choice
> you don’t have to suffer the idiots. It’s a choice
Sure. And I don’t anymore. But the casualty of that choice is social empathy.
And yet we push the idiots to vote.
[flagged]
I think you’re both underestimating the education of immigrants and overestimating the abilities of your neighbors.
A lot of bad shit hides in the averages. Some US states have poor or no standards, or allow kids to bypass standards through various means.
Unless they got remedial education in the military or something, the average high school graduate from a poorly performing place is much less capable than a Mexican or Filipino graduate.
That attitude smacks of anti-American racism created to justify pro-immigration ideology. It’s just a ridiculous assertion on its face. The US’s PISA score average is 1,468: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor.... Mexico is 1,220 (below Kazakhstan) and the Philippines is at 1,058, among the lowest in the world. The highest scoring latin America country is Chile, at 1,304.
> You’ve internalized an anti-American racism that’s quite shocking to see.
And you’ve internatilized an American racism that’s not so shocking to see, unfortunately.
Less than a day later, and you’re back at it. Not even a DEI specific post, but the racism still seeps out.
[flagged]
You brought up “racism” when you cracked about gp somehow displaying anti-American racism.
Suggesting uneducated immigrants are a major problem is a common trope of racist discussion even if the word “race” is not specifically used. Especially in the context of a system that is currently trying to kick out immigrants who have voluntarily entered our educational system.
And our population is among the most educated in relation to which countries? Half the country is below a 6th grade reading level. A quarter is below a 3rd grade level. Abysmal for a developed country.
It’s inappropriate to compare the US education level to countries that have historically struggled economically and politically, especially when their struggles have been only exacerbated by self-serving US interference. And when enforced illiteracy is often used as a weapon to keep people down. Granted, GP made the first mistake there it seems, and you responded in kind. (Though I’m not sure because he is specifically comparing the lower percentiles. I haven’t seen data on that.)
But more to the point, you’ve previously claimed that your passion for these topics is due to a belief that ethnic identity and DEI is a threat to your children and to the American individualist culture. Yet, here you are bashing immigrants when neither ethnic identity, DEI, nor American individualism are being discussed.
> Suggesting uneducated immigrants are a major problem
@JumpCrisscross said uneducated Americans are a problem. If that’s true, then immigration must really be a problem, because most of it is from countries with much worse education. If you think “uneducated” people are a problem, then own that. Don’t hide behind this “punch up versus punch down” bullshit where it’s okay to call Americans uneducated but not people who are objectively more uneducated than Americans.
Look at the PISA scores I posted up thread. The U.S. performs around the same as Sweden. It’s not hanging with the very top, but it does fine compared to big western countries. And it vastly outperforms every Latin American country.
Uneducated immigrants are a far smaller group than uneducated natives. Believing that they are nonetheless the bigger problem is a sign of a racist perspective, albeit not a guarantee of one, perhaps it’s simply anti-immigration.
Additionally most immigrants don’t vote, so it doesn’t account for the current circus. When they do vote, they’ve become citizens by passing a test that many native Americans couldn’t pass.
Uneducation is a problem in general. Doesn’t matter who it is, immigrant or native. But uneducation is fixable problem if we as a society/culture wanted to fix it. We are currently working towards the exact opposite goal and doing it faster than ever.
PISA is not the only measurement. And it is not used by many countries, particularly Asian countries. It isn’t hard to look up other stats on US reading levels.
And again, comparing education levels outside of a historical context of politics and economics is not helpful, to say the least. And it says nothing about an individual’s ability or willingness to become educated once the opportunity presents itself, especially if they’ve already self-selected by making the effort to enter an environment that offers said opportunity. That should be obvious to a person who values and desires to protect American individualism, as you claim to be.
> Uneducated immigrants are a far smaller group than uneducated natives.
Work out the score distributions implied by the national PISA scores and you’ll see this isn’t true. Countries like El Salvador and Guatemala are more than a standard deviation below the U.S., meaning the average person from those countries would be in the bottom 10% of the U.S. scores. And the immigrants from those countries are less educated than average. So immigrants are going to be quite a disproportionate share of the bottom 10% of the U.S. education-wise.
> Believing that they are nonetheless the bigger problem is a sign of a racist perspective, albeit not a guarantee of one, perhaps it’s simply anti-immigration.
Just use your brain without trying to label everything. If you think uneducated people are a social problem, then it logically follows that it’s a problem to have low-skill immigration from places with more uneducated populations. And contrary to your point above, you don’t actually have to care about whatever historical circumstances caused them to be less educated. That doesn’t change the effect on American society.
> PISA is not the only measurement. And it is not used by many countries, particularly Asian countries. It isn’t hard to look up other stats on US reading levels
PISA is the most commonly used test for international comparisons.
Recognizing a duck as a duck is using my brain. My mistake is trying to teach it to talk rather than quack.
Like I said, the problems hide in the averages. You don’t interview average high school graduates to work your shitty job in nowhereville - you’re talking to the 25th percentile for the most part. The 25th percentile Florida, Oklahoma or Arizona 8th grader performs 30% worse that his peer in New York or Massachusetts. I can assure you that NY and MA aren’t some paradise of educational achievement.
The people able to gtfo an emigrate from many places are usually the smarter people. The 75th percentile Filipino probably went to a Catholic school and had a better education than many US districts.
I’m sorry this upsets you, and I assure you I share your anger and disgust.
Hong Kong used to have a proportional voting system. The pro-China camp is often very efficient, sometimes winning a seat with half the votes compared to another candidate
You absolutely don't. The formula they give for calculating seats from votes is very simple and only uses a few letters from the standard alphabet.
The section further with the complicated Greek formulae is for a different voting system, explicitly not the Icelandic one.
> The section further with the complicated Greek formulae is for a different voting system, explicitly not the Icelandic one.
What? It's for all voting systems. It just defines a set of criteria that are desirable; it doesn't describe any system.
Sadly, these tweaks don't address any of the more obvious oddities that people have with proportional representation in the legislature. While such a system won't necessarily end up with Dutch levels of weirdness, it is still possible:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-does-proportional-repre...
If your source for "Dutch levels of weirdness" is just that article, then keep in mind that the VVD being "in power" meant that they were one of the parties in the government coalition. They have had to compromise with other parties through all of that time, and so it was not the case that those governments were only representative of a very small party of the electorate, as that article makes it sound.
(In my opinion, the Dutch system is one of the best implemented in practice, precisely because of its proportionality.)
That didn't really make sense. On the one hand, the author complains that proportional elections favor a limited number of parties, which don't always give voters good options to choose from. And on the other hand, the winner usually doesn't get the majority of seats, forcing them to negotiate with other parties instead of governing unilaterally.
Then there the focus on the left vs. the right, which is no longer as relevant as it used to be during the cold war. If you choose a single faction (such as the left, conservatives, or environmentalists), that specific faction is almost always smaller than everyone else combined. When there are multiple major issues instead of a single overarching question, political divisions become more nuanced than simple X vs. not-X.