5 ms·
How does this system deal with the logarithmic value of dollars, and the asymmetry in who has them? When you get ln(X) happiness from X dollars, you are sacrif
by Strilanc 11y ago
How does this system deal with the logarithmic value of dollars, and the asymmetry in who has them?
When you get ln(X) happiness from X dollars, you are sacrificing 1/X happiness per dollar spent. A billionaire buying a thousand votes is paying ln(10^9 - (10^3)^2) - ln(10^9) ~= 1 milli-utilon, but a thousandaire buying ten votes is paying ln(10^3 - 10^2) - ln(10^3) ~= 100 milli-utilons.
It seems like billionaires, who easily get a factor of a thousand advantage in marginal votes-per-happiness cost over 99% of the population, will massively distort a quadratic voting market.
Uniformly redistributing the voting cost makes that effect smaller, but I don't think it overcomes the logarithmic effect.
- SamReidHughes 11y agoBillionares are vastly outnumbered by thousandaires. For example, in an FPTP election their ability to buy 31600 votes would, nationally, let them move the 50 yard line, towards which politics converges, 0.001% to the left or right.
- rosser 11y ago> Billionares are vastly outnumbered by thousandaires. While true, the billionaires' liquid and un-accounted-for dollars vastly outnumber the thousandaires'. If Joe Average has to choose between voting on something and paying his mortgage, while Jim Squillionaire is choosing between voting and buying another jet (yes, hyperbole; my point still obtains), guess whose votes you're more likely to see...
- SamReidHughes 11y agoI just explained why spending $1 billion on votes won't affect the outcome of politics, in the other sentence of my post, that you didn't quote. That's part of the reason the cost of votes is nonlinear in this scheme.
- PepeGomez 11y agoYou didn't explain anything, you only provided a cryptic analogy.
- SamReidHughes 11y agoDon't you have your square roots memorized? 31600 is approximately the square root of a billion. The U.S. population is about 316 million.
- glenweyl 11y agoThat is the point of the software!
- sukilot 11y agoThat's easy to fix with a social security-like scheme that forces everyone to spend at least $1000 on voting.
- thomasahle 11y agoI have never seen this log model for the value of model. In the plots I've seen, it always appears that the happiness peaks when you have around twice the money of your peers. Do you have any references?
- glenweyl 11y agohttp://www.nber.org/papers/w14282 http://www.nber.org/papers/w14282
- saalweachter 11y agoHow would you feel about "exponential voting", which would be like quadratic voting but the cost is 2^N instead of N^2?
- glenweyl 11y agoExponential voting would be too close to 1p1v in effect, as we argue in the paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531