Political Inequality
Market probabilities on US presidential nominations have changed greatly in the last week, due to the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries. This illustrates how the US primary system gives early states far more influence:
The voting weights implied by the estimated model demonstrate that early [primary] voters have up to 20 times the influence of late voters in the selection of candidates, demonstrating a significant departure from the ideal of "one person, one vote."
This inequality is well known. Pundits often praise it for giving obscure politicians a chance, and making politicians interact personally with individual voters. Few express sympathy for other states, whose efforts to be as early were actively beaten down this last year by the parties.
But consider all the ink spilled over possible tiny inequalities in rates of "hanging chads," or in distance to voting places. Or consider the horror many express at Bryan Caplan’s suggestion to give more votes to the better educated. These might give you the impression that we are quite averse to political inequality.
In fact, however, we tolerate enormous inequality in political influence. In addition to primary timing inequalities, a Marginal Revolution commentor notes:
A voter in Wyoming has 3x the voting influence of a voter in California in the general election.
And there is vast variation in political influence among voters in the same district, due somewhat to gerrymandering, but mostly to unequal information about which politicians favor which policies, and which polices are good for whom. We are well aware of these inequalities and mostly just don’t care.
Many people think governments help to reduce social inequality, but the more government intervenes in society, the more it replaces private inequality with political inequality. And my guess is that inequality in political influence is larger than, for example, consumption inequality.
As I noted a year ago, inequality discussions focus almost entirely on the smallest (#6) of these eight kinds of inequality:
Inequality across species
Inequality between actual and possible humans
Inequality across the eras of human history
Non-income inequality, such as of popularity, respect, beauty, sex, kids, political influence
Income inequality between the nations of a world
Income inequality between the families of a nation
Income inequality between the siblings of a family
Income inequality between the days of a person’s life
Humans clearly do not have a generic aversion to inequality; our concern is very selective. I suspect our distant ancestors often formed coalitions that complained about inequality of transferable assets, as a way to coordinate a veiled threat to take those assets if they were not offered freely. So we care mostly about income inequality within a nation that is correlated with existing political coalitions, since we can threaten to use coalition politics to transfer income within a nation between such groups.
Added: I supposed I should also include inequality between the worlds of a universe.
Boris and Arne, Boris' calculation also suggests great tolerated inequality of political power.
Paul, it seems clear to me most understand and don't care, but a survey to clarify would be fine.
William and Chuck, you lost me completely.
Robin Hanson writes "Or consider the horror many express at Bryan Caplan's suggestion to give more votes to the better educated. These might give you the impression that we are quite averse to political inequality."
I think you'd be much closer to the mark if you compared the intense negative reaction to David Friedman's proposals for letting the market sort out policy questions, or various milder broad negative reactions to various forms of people choosing policy by "voting with their feet"; those attitudes seem closer to an ideal of everyone having an inalienable share of coercive political power, and the proposals they oppose seem like a much closer parallel to decision markets.
One doesn't need to romance the idea of everyone having a right to impose majority rule in a district to intensely dislike the idea of giving more votes to the well-educated. Legally-mandated credentialism schemes in general, and voter qualification schemes in particular, have nasty theoretical instabilities that have an even nastier habit of showing up in the real world. I'm skeptical that having the government appoint a Predictor Certification Board and jailing any non-certified predictors would improve prediction quality; does that suggest to you that I'm motivated by a dream that no consensus be arrived at without giving equal weight to every uninformed person's opinion?