Can socialism save capitalism?

Can socialism save capitalism?

Maybe not. But in the United States, capitalism is not about to save itself.

Covid-19 is not slated to disappear, nor are the other serious diseases caused by the novel coronavirus. Moreover, global interconnectivity and climate change are liable to cause further unpredictable and severe stresses to our enterprises and our supply chains. From all indications, we are now at the beginning of a global depression. Each nation will struggle to get back on its feet, cooperating with other nations where possible and competing with them where necessary.

To get through this, we will surely need more direct help to citizens who have lost jobs or are furloughed from them, and to enterprises that have been disrupted. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve has already spoken of this. Unfortunately, the President, his economic advisors, and most of the Republicans in Congress are proceeding on the theory that we can ease ourselves out of this crisis by gradually returning to our old normal. This is clearly inadequate.

But what is the alternative? The political resistance to making further direct payments and loans to sustain our disrupted economy and relieve those who can no longer pay their expenses comes from fear of the political consequences of these steps as much as from the hope that carefully timed re-openings will solve the crisis. That fear takes two forms—fear of exploding the federal deficit, and fear of a drift towards socialism. I can’t address the deficit issue—liberals claim that conservatives are hypocrites for allowing budget-busting tax cuts but balking at increased public spending during times of low inflation, which past experience has shown to yield positive long-term results. Conservatives have some sort of counter-argument that I’m not going to try to describe here. The other fear, of government interference stunting private enterprise, has animated American conservatism for the last forty years. Here again there’s an argument about macroeconomics that is beyond my competence and the scope of this essay.

There is general agreement that the $2 trillion stimulus that Congress passed and the President approved in March was a necessary step (though there is plenty of anger about which businesses got help, and which didn’t). In order to take the next necessary step, however, we’ll need to address the fears that conservatives and some moderates have about the aftermath of large-scale government intervention. Re-normalizing federal and state government regulation of broken markets, instituting a single payer healthcare system, reversing income inequality and combatting racial and ethnic discrimination are currently the defining goals of the Democratic Party. The fears of conservatives and the hopes of liberals need to be put on the table, or we’ll keep talking past one another, accomplishing nothing until next January, when it will be much harder to undo the damage.

Look--America’s democratic socialists and old-school liberals are not hoping for state control of the means of production. The left, broadly, understands that fully state-controlled economies are so inefficient and so prone to corruption as to guarantee misery and loss of freedom. We get that. Are we hell-bent on confiscating large portions of the wealth that savvy investors have built up through careful allocations of capital resources? Well, maybe. While we’re in the process of delivering life support to people and businesses, we’re going to be talking about wealth inequality. Whether and how to address that problem will be part of the conversation. So will endemic racism, and the oppression and demonization of immigrant workers and families.

In March, we hit the pause button on the US economy. Now the situation is different. We need to push reboot. If easing back to normalcy isn’t an option, we’ll have to reconfigure our economy to adapt to new conditions. Analogies to 1932 are justified—back then, we had a Democratic-controlled House, a Republican-controlled Senate and White House, and a similar set of concerns on both sides. Congress and the President worked out a compromise relief plan, The Reconstruction Finance Corporation Act, in January 1932, and a further direct stimulus bill in July. The consensus was that this relief was necessary, but voters ultimately found it insufficient. Roosevelt crushed Hoover in the November election, and Democrats gained a whopping 12 seats in the senate. (I’m reposting Todd Tucker’s April 24 Politico article on 1932 here.)

Democrats see in the present crisis an opportunity to redefine the role of government in American life. If the GOP continues to minimize the scope of the problems we are facing, the right may be heading towards an historic and ignominious defeat.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/04/26/what-donald-trump-could-learn-from-herbert-hoover-207034

Is it 1972 yet?

I was not yet a voter in 1972, but I remember that bummer year, and the parallels to 2020 are bugging me out.  At that time there was a cold civil war happening within the Democratic Party.  Few people talked about it openly at the time, but an awful hangover from 1968 drove the process.  To recap: in the spring of 1968, LBJ withdrew following his weak victory over Gene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary.  Three weeks later MLK was assassinated. Bobby Kennedy entered the race, fracturing the anti-war movement, and was assassinated in June on the night of the California primary.  Meanwhile, vice president Hubert Humphrey entered the race as a centrist, and secured the nomination with the brutal assistance of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and the rest of the Democratic establishment.  The general election race between Humphrey, Nixon and George Wallace was an unholy mess, but among the factors contributing to Humphrey’s razor thin loss was the fact that a significant chunk of McCarthy and Kennedy supporters, disgusted with Humphrey and alienated by the process, did not vote in the general election.

In 1972 the anti-war left largely coalesced around George McGovern’s candidacy. (What would have happened if more voters had taken Shirley Chisolm’s run seriously?)  Ed Muskie was the establishment candidate this time, and just like in 1968 he suffered a humiliating win in New Hampshire, thanks in part to Muskie’s emotional reaction to smears that had been perpetrated (as we later learned) by Nixon’s operative Donald Segretti (a K-Mart knockoff of Roger Stone.)  Muskie withdrew, Humphrey stepped in.  George Wallace, who was competing for the Democratic nomination in this cycle, won 8 primaries, including Maryland and Michigan.  Humphrey actually ended up with a slightly higher popular vote total than McGovern, 25.77% to McGovern’s 25.34%, with Wallace at 23.48% and Chisolm at 2.7%.  But McGovern had won most of the primaries, and secured the nomination on the first ballot.  Afterwards the party establishment half-heartedly fell in line behind McGovern, but it was no use.  The Nixon campaign sold worried voters on the notion that McGovern was practically a socialist.  Nixon was re-elected in a landslide.

OK, you see where I’m going.  I love Bernie (though TBH I would still prefer Warren), and I believe that he has a chance to prove the pundits wrong and win in November.  But there are two competing strategies to get there.  One strategy is to stay true to the vision, and attract new and alienated voters to the cause on the strength of Sanders’ consistently progressive message.  The other strategy would have Bernie gradually pivot in his messaging in order to attract moderates, independents and disaffected Republicans to his side in the general election.  You really can’t do both (Warren has tried to do that, and it hasn’t worked so far).  And there’s good evidence that the first, more straightforwardly progressive strategy is likely to fail—the pundits are unfortunately correct on this point.

Getting back to the 1972 analogy, the subtext here is that a lot of Sanders’ coalition believes, with some justification, that the Democratic Party establishment is fundamentally corrupt.  And much of the party establishment plainly despises Sanders.  The moderates want a candidate with broad appeal, and Biden, Bloomberg, Buttigieg and Klobuchar are all competing in that lane as of today.  This means that Sanders could win the nomination, just as McGovern did, with as little as 25% of the total primary vote.  

If Bernie doesn’t clear that bar, and nobody else does, we’ll have a contested convention.  That could be as ugly as 1968, or as futile as 1972.  In the best case, the delegates could winnow the candidates in successive ballots, or by an instant runoff process (if the rules would permit that).  We’d end up with a compromise candidate who might not be the person with the plurality or the most delegates going into the convention, but who was arguably more broadly acceptable than a factional candidate could be.  If that person isn’t Sanders, they’ll need consummate skill to placate progressives and attract independents at the same time.

The biggest problem for any Democratic presidential candidate lies in a fundamental asymmetry between the way the GOP and Democrats win state and national elections.  Ezra Klein has given the best analysis of this state of affairs: because the GOP is as ethnically and ideologically homogenous as the Democratic Party is diverse, and because the Electoral College and the provision of two Senators per state both significantly favor the GOP, Democrats usually cannot win elections the way Republicans do, by appealing primarily to their base.  Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both succeeded by running hard down the middle. 

Republicans candidates always play to the fear that Democrats in power will take away the little that you have, and give it to the undeserving.  This plainly racist appeal actually works on working class voters of all races.  Clinton and Obama were nimble enough to overcome it.  So far, Bernie doesn’t seem to be moving in that direction.  Yesterday, responding to AOC’s suggestion that a compromise on Medicare For All would still be a win for Democrats as long as it established a public option, Sanders responded that the four-year phase-in outlined in his plan “is, in a sense, already a compromise.”  Are skeptical voters really going to buy that?  I doubt it.  

Given that Trump is plainly dishonest, incompetent, corrosive to our political institutions, a horrible human being, and a total hypocrite when it comes to addressing the real needs of the people who voted for him, you would think that defeating him would be a straightforward process.  But given the extent of polarization both within the Democratic Party and in the general electorate, it won’t be.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/opinion/sunday/democrats-republicans-polarization.html

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So Long, Sucker--Blind Ally variant (game)

So Long, Sucker is a game by Mel Hausner, John Nash, Lloyd Shapley and Martin Shubik.  It was first published as a one-page paper in 1964.  It may be the only existing game designed by two Nobel prize winners (Nash and Shapley)  ( ftp://ftp.kanga.nu/users/claw/odd/games/Contrib/SoLongSucker.pdf)

The essence of the game is that it requires both strategic cooperation and defection in order to win.  It can be played recreationally in its original form.  I have added two additional mechanics, 'blind ally' and 'blackmail', and expanded the player count to include five or six players.  

So Long, Sucker:  Blind Ally Variant with Blackmail Mechanic

 

0)     Equipment

42 playing chips, seven each of six colors, 36 cards, six each of six colors, 36 blackmail chips, six each of six colors, six blackmail cards, two each of three types, and these rules.

1)       Setup:

i)      Each player takes chips of one color (7, 6 or 5 chips for 4, 5 or 6 players, respectively).

ii)     Each player takes one card of each color in the game.  Place the card corresponding to your chip color face up in front of you. Shuffle the other cards and arrange them face down in front of you in a row.  Look at these cards but don’t reveal them.  The card on the right is the color of your ally; if that player wins and you are the last to be eliminated, you also win.  The card on the left is the color of your enemy; if that player is the last to be eliminated, you lose.  The other colors are neutral with respect to you.

iii)   Select someone to be the first player.

iv)    Shuffle the Blackmail cards ( 2 each of 3 kinds) and place them in the playing area, along with the blackmail tokens (6 each in the 6 colors).

2)       Playing the game:

i)      On your turn, place a chip onto the playing area (starting a new pile), or on top of any existing pile.

ii)     If no chips are captured (rule iv), give the next move to any player whose color is not in the pile you just played on.

iii)   If chips of the colors of all of the players are in the pile just played on and there is no capture, the next player must be the person whose most-recently played chip (by color) is furthest down in the pile.

iv)    A pile is captured when a chip is played directly on top of a chip of the same color.  Play immediately passes to the player whose color was matched (except when a capture blackmail card is used).  That player must kill one chip of their choice out of the captured pile, and takes control of the other chips in the pile.  Then that player gets the next move. Killed chips are taken out of the game.

v)     A chip is a prisoner when held by a player other than its original owner.  Any prisoner in a player's possession may be killed or transferred to another player at any time. Transfers cannot be retracted.   A player may not transfer or kill chips of their own color, except when choosing a chip to kill during a capture.

vi)    A player is defeated when they are given the move, but have no chips to play. 

(1)   Defeat is not final until every player holding prisoners has refused to rescue the defeated player by transferring prisoners.

(2)   After defeat, the next move rebounds to the player who gave the defeated player the move.

vii)  The defeated player's chips remain in play as prisoners, but are ignored in determining the order of play.  If a pile is captured using the chips of a defeated player, the entire pile is killed, and the move rebounds to the capturing player.

3)     Blackmail

After a chip is played on a pile in which all active players’ colors are represented, and there is no capture or defeat (rule 2.iii), the player who placed the chip takes a blackmail card if one is available, shows it to the player who will take the next turn, and places a blackmail token (not a playing chip) of the next player’s color on the card.  The player who received the card may play it on any of their subsequent turns.  Played cards are discarded.  There are six Blackmail cards, two of each of three types:

i) The owner of the card captures using a playing chip of the blackmailed player’s color.  The owner retains control of the turn

            ii) All players return all prisoners of the blackmailed player’s color to the blackmailed player.  Kill one returned chip.

iii)            The blackmailed player transfers all prisoners of one color (chosen by the owner of the card) to the owner of the card.

4)       Order of play (restated):

i)      If a capture occurs, the player whose color made the capture completes the capture and takes the next move (unless a capture blackmail card was played, in which case the initiating player retains control).

ii)     If a player is defeated, the player who gave the defeated player the turn goes again.

iii)   If no capture was made and all players are represented in the pile that was just added to, the player whose most-recently played chip (by color) is furthest down in the pile takes the next turn.

iv)    Otherwise, the player who just played selects the next player from among those whose color is not represented in the pile that was just played on.

5)       Winning the game:

i)      The winner is the last surviving player, except as follows:

ii)     If the last eliminated player was the surviving player’s enemy, the surviving player also loses. 

iii)   If the surviving player is the last eliminated player’s ally, the last eliminated player also wins. 

iv)    If both of the above conditions are met, the last eliminated player is the sole winner.

6)      Strategy:

i)      Coalitions, or agreements to cooperate, are permitted if they are openly negotiated.  (Players may confer only at the table during the game—no secret agreements are allowed.)

ii)     There is no penalty for failure to live up to an agreement.

iii)   Letting other players hold chips of your color as prisoners gives you opportunities for capture.

iv)    It is possible to win even though all of your chips have been killed.

v)     Remember that blind alliances and antagonisms are not necessarily reciprocal.

7)     Multiple Round Games:

i)      After each round, for each player, subtract the number of players whose ally they were from the number of players whose enemy they were, and adjust the number of chips they receive at the start of the following round by that amount.  (For instance, a player who was an ally to one player and enemy to two others gets one extra chip, while a player who was an ally to two players and an enemy to one player gets one less chip.)

A paradox of ranked choice voting

A paradox of ranked choice voting

In a multi-choice election, ranked choice voting offers participants the ability to give a detailed account of their preferences.  However, there are different ways to evaluate ranked voting results, which will provide different outcomes.  These different ways of counting ranked votes are equally fair, assuming that each participant’s ballot is counted by the same method.  But in an election in which certain options or candidates are polarizing (tending to be at the top of a large group of voters’ rankings and at the bottom of the rankings of another large group) and other options are compromise choices, tending to be somewhere in the middle of most voters’ rankings, the way in which these rankings are weighted in determining the outcome will effect the result of the election.

Consider the following case, in which four voters are choosing among four options (or candidates) A, B, C and D.  Each voter has made a different choice from among the 24 possible ways to rank these four choices.  Here are their votes:

	1	2	3	4
1st	A	A	B	C
2nd	B	C	D	D
3rd	D	D	C	B
4th	C	B	A	A

In this case, A is the polarizing option, D is the compromise option, and B and C have garnered responses that are evenly distributed among the rankings.   If we assign 3 points to each 1^st place ranking, 2 points to each 2^nd place ranking, 1 point to each 3^rd place ranking and 0 points to 4^th place rankings, we find that all four options are tied, with 6 points each.

If, however, we give extra weight (4 or more points) to each first ranking, the polarizing candidate will win the election.  Conversely, if we weigh 4^th place rankings more heavily, subtracting 1 or more points for each 4^th place vote while keeping the other rankings at 3, 2, and 1 points respectively, the compromise option will prevail.

More generally, in choosing among 4 options, only the relative weighting of the 1^st and 4^th rankings will affect the outcome.  (Mathematically inclined readers can take a moment to confirm for themselves that this is correct., and then consider what happens when the range of options increases.) In our example above, there is no way to weight the rankings such that candidates B and C will beat both A and D. 

While we tend to think of voting as an expression of preferences, of selecting a favorite among available options, in practice our choices are often more crucially about avoiding the worst options.  How we decide to weight the results of ranked voting may be as important as the voting itself for the process of establishing and maintaining consensus.