Fixing the Voting System

C.G.P.Grey lays out the problems with the U.S.A’s current “first past the post/winner take all” voting system and then explains how to fix them:

The problems:

  • Minority rule: You can win with less than half the vote (at least in the beginning).
  • Inevitable, unavoidable, two-party system evolves over time.
  • Third-parties become spoilers; the better a third-party does the worse it is for their voters because it takes away votes from the other party they would favor.

The solutions:

1. The Alternative Vote/Instant Runoff.

2. Mixed Member Proportional Representation.

The Case Against the Electoral College

C.G.P Grey makes the case against the Electoral College in video form. He starts with how the Electoral College Works and continues with a well reasoned polemic against it: he’s big into democracy — one person, one vote.

How the Electoral College Works

The Trouble with the Electoral College

Harry Potter and the Making of the Peace

Here’s a wonderfully serious piece in the magazine Foreign Policy on what the wizarding world should do to recover and reconcile now that Voldemort has finally been vanquished.

… if history teaches us anything (consider the bitter legacy still lingering from the 17th-century Goblin Wars or the recent experience of American Muggles in Iraq and Afghanistan), it is that the defeat of Voldemort by Harry Potter may have been the easy part. Indeed, one might even say it was child’s play. The hard work of postwar stabilization still lies ahead.

— Malinowski et al, 2011: Post-Conflict Potter in Foreign Policy.

It’s a bit long, but it’s worth reading at least through the first section on, “Transitional Justice and Reconciliation”.

This section points out that, sure, Voldemort’s henchmen need to be prosecuted before the law (and not just detained without charge), but it will be a lot more difficult to deal with the thousands who supported Voldemort in greater or lesser ways. After all, some of these only did what they did under threat. The article recommends a Truth and Reconciliation Commission like in South Africa.

Among their other recommendations are:

  • the breaking the monopoly of the Daily Prophet on the news media,
  • a Comprehensive Curse Ban Treaty,
  • more transparency at the Ministry of Magic,
  • a Charter on the Rights of Witches and Wizards,
  • “that the Wizengamot, the high council of Magical Great Britain, be split into separate legislative and judicial bodies,”
  • and closing Azkaban immediately.

You’ll notice that a number of these recommendations focus on expanding the rights of the individual and build in more checks and balances into government and the media. These, and the overall emphasis on building mechanisms to prevent future conflict, align well with the ideas of peace education. It might also be an interesting focus for a class discussion/Socratic dialogue.

I’d be curious to hear from any Harry Potter fans who might come across this post and have the time to read the article (even though school’s restarted and the homework’s being piled on).

Government and Geology in Nashville

At the capitol building in Nashville.

Earlier this spring, we had an excellent immersion trip to Nashville. The primary purpose was to visit the capitol and meet with Memphis’ State Representative Mark Kernell.

State Rep. Kernell was kind enough to spend some time answering and asking questions of our students.

But we also had time to visit the Abintra Montessori School in Nashville (who returned the visit last month), and have an excellent hike along a limestone-bedded stream in Montgomery Bell State Park. The hike, however, was not without some controversy.

Bedding planes and joints.

Coon Creek Immersion: Visiting the Cretaceous

70 million year old shell and its imprint collected at the Coon Creek Science Center.

Just got back from our immersion trip to collect Cretaceous fossils at the Coon Creek Science Center, and hiking in Natchez Trace State Park.

It was an excellent trip. Despite the cold, Pat Broadbent did her usual, excellent job explaining the geology of Coon Creek and showing us how to collect and preserve some wonderful specimens. Back at the cabins, we looked at some of the microfossils from the Coon Creek sediments (and some other microscopic crystals); similar fossils can tell us a lot about the Earth’s past climate.

Back at the Park, we traced a streamline from the watershed divide to its marshy estuary, and cooked an excellent seafood dinner as we learned about the major organ systems.

Dinner was delicious.

Our trip was not without difficulties, however. The group learned a bit more about self-regulation, governance and the balance of powers, as a consequence of “The Great Brownie Incident,” and the, “P.E. Fiasco.”

We were also fairly well cut off from the “cloud”: no internet, and you could only get cell reception if you were standing in the middle of the road in just the right spot in front of Cabin #3.

But more on these later. I have some sleep to catch up on.


View Coon Creek Immersion in a larger map

Too many Young Adults: Reasons for Revolution

A successful democratic revolution may well need a relatively wealthy and educated population, however, one of the main things that seem to drive revolutions themselves is just how many young adults there are in a country.

… countries in which 60 percent or more of the population is under the age of 30 are more likely to experience outbreaks of civil conflict than those where age structures are more balanced.
— Madsen (2011): The Demographics of Revolt

When there are lots of young people getting to the age when they are just trying to find jobs and start families, but the country’s economy can’t grow fast enough to provide all the jobs they need, then you have a lot of dissatisfied, disaffected people with time on their hands; it’s a tinderbox ready for any spark.

I recently attended a talk by Jennifer Scuibba where she laid out the case. Scuibba’s blog, also has a
a very good set of links that look at the age demographics of the current revolutions in the Arab world.

One of the links goes to a report by Richard Cincotta and others (Cincotta et al., 2003) that used this type of demographic analysis to figure out which countries were most likely to end up in conflict.

Countries at risk of civil war (Cincotta et al., 2003).

They talk about the demographic transition, “a population’s shift from high to low rates of birth and death,” as being a key factor in reducing the likelihood of conflicts. Therefore, they suggest:

… a range of policies promoting small, healthy and better educated families and long lives among populations in developing countries seems likely to encourage greater political stability
Cincotta et al., 2003: The Security Demographic – Population and Civil Conflict After the Cold War

If civil conflict leads to a successful democratic transition, then political stability is probably not a net benefit.

However, once there is a democratic revolution, the same large cohort of young people still exists, which could make a country like Egypt unstable for quite a while, until it goes through the demographic transition. After all:

…countries do not become mature democracies overnight. They usually go through a rocky transition, where mass politics mixes with authoritarian elete politics in a volatile way. Statistical evidence covering the past two centuries shows that in this transitional phase of democratization, countries become more aggressive and war-prone, not less …
— Mansfield and Snyder (1995): Democratization and War

The Economy and Revolution

Vali Nasr’s interview on NPR’s Morning Edition talks about what it takes to make a successful revolution. Particularly, they focus on the need for a vibrant, educated, middle-class for a successful transition to democracy.

Another key, and I think essential point, is that the Egyptian protesters share the same global-citizenship values that Brazilians, South Koreans, and even Europeans and American, share. That they have these values, from years of communication with the outside world, offers the best chance that this revolution will be successful.

Edmund Burke supported the American Revolution, but opposed the French Revolution because the former was a conservative revolution, the colonists were fighting to regain rights that had lost, while the latter were trying to impose an ideal of democracy and equality that they had no experience with. He was right; the French revolution lead to the Terror then eventually to Napoleon and the restoration of the aristocracy.