How bad can the electoral college be?

I was curious as to how poorly the electoral college could reflect the popular vote, so I whipped up a program to compute it (assuming only two parties). Below you see the map as it would need to be for the red candidate to win (yeah, yeah, I notice I'm showing the Republican candidate as winning unfairly, but that was just random). The best (or should that be worst?) answer involved all the districts of Nebraska and Maine voting together so I didn't need to split their electoral votes in the picture, although the program did explore those options. While there are some odd states voting together, for expediency I'll ignore that detail since it's not impossible demographic or political shifts could lead to such a result. In order to carry the red states with just over 50% in each, only 21.61% of the popular vote would have to be obtained (21.3% if you count the US territories which currently aren't represented in the electoral college). You can see many of the least populated states are chosen, maximizing the error. I knew the electoral college was bad, but this is astounding! To have a candidate defeated who had more than 78% of the vote would simply be unacceptable.


To force a tie you need just a slightly smaller percentage of popular vote: 21.52% (or 21.2% if counting the US territories).


Next I took the election results for each of the past three presidential races (the last three all used 2000 census data) and changed my program to look for the minimum subset of the electoral votes actually carried by the winner that still ensured victory. All three required less than 25% of the popular vote for victory (the 2004 minimum solution required 271 electoral votes, not just 270). We can also approach the inherent unfairness of the electoral college another way, by assuming each state's electoral votes per percentage of population is the same. This makes all states more equal, but the very "all or nothing" nature of the system would still allow victory with (270 / 538) * .5 = 25.09% of the popular vote, since you only need just barely over 50% of each state to win all its electoral votes. For this last calculation I ignored the proportional vote system of Maine and Nebraska for simplicity. The rough bottom line is this: a candidate for president can win 75% of the popular vote and still lose the electoral college.

2008: winner is in blue
270 electoral votes
24.0566% of popular vote actually required (includes US territories)


2004: winner is in red
271 electoral votes
24.33% of popular vote actually required (includes US territories)


2000: winner is in red
270 electoral votes
24.575% of popular vote actually required (includes US territories)

New Show Rating Booster System

An ounce of viewership is worth a pound of petitioning

A campaign to revive a cancelled show is like waiting until cancer is at stage IV before treating it. Much better to avoid the situation altogether by identifying good shows and spreading the word to fans who would like such content, as well as notifying them about schedule changes (an often identified reason new shows fail to attract a viewership). The mechanics of such a system are fairly straightforward, being similar to standard recommendation systems (although critic rated techniques like those employed by Clerkdogs (now defunct) could identify matches sooner which matters a lot in this context), and it would be a much better use of their energies. Since shows do compete for time slots and production resources, it's a lot like a political campaign, and getting out your base can definitely yield a disproportionate influence. Such an approach would still only be a bandaid on an inherently flawed production system, but that's another issue.

GDP is a Terrible Indicator of Progress

GDP loves a toxic waste dump.

This post is an edited version of one on my private blog February 7th, 2008.

Gross Domestic Product is used as the primary measure of a country's growth. The problem is that it is simply a measure of economic activity (i.e. money changing hands) and makes no attempt to characterize that activity. For more about its shortcomings, I recommend this article from The Atlantic.

This a symptom of a practice which is commonplace in economic theory: if there is a factor that is difficult to quantify or is subjective, economists often will neglect it, thereby assigning it a value of zero. CO2 emissions are probably the best known example of that. If they had been valued fifty years ago, things would be quite different. That particular example would've required a great deal of foresight, and there were powerful special interests at work but it is still indicative of the general methodology.

So, what to do about this? Well, I propose that we admit that economics is, as a general rule, a gross parody of the real complexities that underlie society and we apply high level goal-driven restrictions based on probability to attempt to value intangibles. For example, we can't tell how bad CO2 emissions might be, but it's got to be more than zero, so give it an actual cost now and refine it later. Cancer research is intrinsically more valuable than beanie baby manufacture, so bias things so as to favor such more worthy pursuits. Fast food is unhealthy, so penalize its consumption (or reward the consumption of healthier alternatives). Exercise is lacking, so enact incentives to encourage it. For the free market to have a prayer of working well, it needs to know what direction a positive outcome lies in. This new approach would benefit even the wealthy among us as improvements in the standard of living resulting from technological improvements will always outstrip the short-term increases obtained by amassing more wealth.

I would also propose a new economic progress indicator: the number of hours a week that an average citizen must work to provide a set standard of living (subject to environmental concerns, health impacts, and other constraints) for himself and one child. The goal should be to reduce this number over time. It could include, if desired, bureaucratic barriers that force people to work longer than they need too and of course the standard of living should be updated with time to reflect advances in technology. This is merely a yardstick; someone could always work more than they needed to in order to purchase luxuries. There are other proposed progress indicators, but by making free time the parameter to be maximized it sidesteps the need to assign it an explicit value.

What If Striking a Balance with Traditional Regulation Isn't Possible?

This is a combination and extension of posts on my private blog from February 16th and April 9th, 2009.

A common concern in devising financial regulation is that you want to make it comprehensive enough to cover future instruments that may be developed and to eliminate loopholes, while not destroying the opportunity for innovation. By grouping financial instruments by similarity of principles you can make some broad generalizations, but since investors are extremely adept at exploiting loopholes, I think this approach is doomed. Clamp down to cover all contingencies and you stifle innovation, ease up and the loopholes undermine your original intent. Since it's so difficult, I decided to explore the situation where one assumes that it is in fact impossible and then see where that led in devising a regulatory framework. What follows is one possible approach.

Those mechanisms that have a proven track record and are well understood can have tailor made controls, but I'm constrained by my working premise from specifying controls on less well established financial instruments. That being the case, I have no choice but to concentrate on limiting their potential for damage. One way to do that is to require that unregulated investments be backstopped by holdings in the regulated sphere. This is similar in spirit to the capital requirements imposed on banks now and guarantees that even if things blow up the bulk of the market will not be crippled. Completely exempting some instruments from oversight may seem extreme, but remember the working premise is that this is effectively what occurs anyway via loopholes. Over time new innovations that are fully explored and have well developed track records can have appropriate regulation crafted for them, not only removing the backstopping requirement, but allowing them to backstop other unproven investments.

The incentives for firms is changed under this arrangement. Rather than trying to come up with opaque ways around existing regulations, there is benefit to providing a clear theoretical explanation and real world data for new inventions in order to expedite their regulation and official sanction. Obviously companies could attempt to evade the backstopping requirement by hiding economic activity, but since that's theoretically a way to evade any system of regulation I'm not going to explore it specifically.

There is a practical advantage to having a specific ratio of regulated to unregulated assets as it's an easily manipulated parameter that can be changed with market conditions. Compare this to the current system: having congress change whole regulation systems in very specific and involved ways. Usually, small changes are introduced as complete overhauls are too difficult to achieve, leading to a patchwork of complicated laws that are onerous to comply with, have unintended consequences, and leave plenty of loopholes. If the Fed were in control of the ratio (perhaps within certain limits without congressional authorization), it could provide another powerful tool for fine tuning regulatory requirements as well as adapting to changes in the economic situation.