The prospect of better physical devices, such as logic gates or solar cells, often generates huge interest and investment. Of course there are many more physical devices where improvements generate much less interest, because we haven’t yet found nearly as much use for those devices. But even so, for devices we often use, small improvements can be very big news.
Opinion polls that try to ascertain if the electorate is x/100-x on an issue use at least 1000 participants. A more common divide would be 55/45 and there a sample of 50 people would certainly not be considered statistically significant. But really, a parliament of 1000 people isn't really problematic: the US has ~435 people in its lower house, India has ~550. For the US with a 1000 person lower house, per-capita representation would still be lower than that of many mid-sized countries.
If the electorate were 70/30 on an issue, you wouldn't need 1000 voters to get it "right" reliably.
If the electorate is 49.999/50.00001 though, you might need hundreds of thousands of voters. But at this point, I kind of throw my hands up and say who the f*ck cares. The marginal EV (practical or philosophical) of getting the vote "right" is basically nil and not enough to outweigh the superiority of a concentrated electorate over a dispersed one.
Smaller parliaments lower the price of bribery. Yes, in a 50-person parliament an MP COULD ask for outrageously high bribes because he holds so much power but that's not what happens in reality. MPs simply accept bribes that represent large amounts to them personally (if your MPs aren't multimillionaires, and they're not likely to when they're randomly selected, they may settle for bribes of hundreds of thousands or even just tens of thousands of dollars/euros). Still that shouldn't be a problem since you'd need a parliament of >1000 people to get a good random sample anyway.
I would think 50 voters would be harder to buy off. If big pharma came and offered Joe Bob $10,000,000 to vote a certain way, everyone would hear about it. Everyone would be pissed. There would be nonstop clamoring for X Y and Z to all be done. One way or another, things wouldn't work out for big pharma. So big pharma wouldn't do this in the first place.
I've thought about this. One big problem is that while you can't buy off a million voters, you can buy off 50 voters. So you'd need to basically move these people into isolation for a few weeks. Expensive, but certainly cheaper Han actual elections.
Also, its probably unconstitutional, the "one man one vote" rule would be very difficult to overrule.
If something like Uber was possible 10 years ago then that whole political dance could have taken place back then. But I have to disagree with you that something like Uber was possible in the past: a high mobile internet penetration seems crucial and that has only existed for a few years.
"while many are excited by Uber achieving new value in cheaper-if-nominally-illegal cab services, most of those gains could have come decades ago from just deregulating cabs, an option in which there was little interest"
It wasn't an option. In most places deregulating cabs is political suicide, so it doesn't happen. You can't isolate the policy from the political apparatus. A policy that doesn't have a feasible political implementation isn't a solution at all.
What's exciting about Uber is that they managed to solve that problem by allowing politicians to deregulate the cab industry while giving them plausible deniability.
I think a major factor in the reluctance to adopt a new social innovation versus a new tech innovation is that there are *far* more confounding variables in the wild for the former. If a firm has established a working technical prototype in-house, you can have more confidence that you can implement an exact copy in your own business, as well as have more confidence that the risk involved is mainly limited to the hit to your tech budget.
For a social innovation, you can't be nearly as sure that you can implement an exact copy of a laboratory innovation in your neck of the woods. You can't be nearly as sure that the confounding variables in your environment will be the same as the laboratory environment. And you can't be nearly as sure that the impact of black swans will be mainly limited to a particular budget -- some have the potential for quality-of-life impacts beyond monetary concerns.
It mostly kept declining for the first half of the 19th century (in industrialized Europe), especially in the cities, and far more people were living in the cities than before. There is a marked improvement in height in the second half of the 19th century and life expectancy at birth shot up in the early 19th century (people who would be middle-aged or older in the second half of the 19th century).
Guess when most of the progressive reforms took place...
It sounds like a marketing problem. You have to establish that people have a problem, and that your piece of social tech can solve it.
Consider Agile software development. There was a known problem: "software projects often take longer than expected, and when they're finished the customers don't always like them". Agile proposed a solution: "work in small increments so it's easy to estimate, and show it to your customer early so they can change their minds up front." Well, the problem might not have existed, and the solution might not have worked, but people thought it did and thought it might, and that was enough.
I think this principle applies to all your examples. Solar cells break our dependence on fossil fuels. Uber cabs actually show up when you call them. Prediction markets...help me make decisions, under certain conditions? As an executive, I feel like my decisions are pretty good already. If they weren't, how would you know? How would _I_ know? Again: these problems don't have to be real. But people do have to believe in them.
Exactly! Also the standard should not be set by what came before but by what would have been possible at the time itself. There didn't have to be poorhouses, there didn't have to be slaves, there didn't have to be 7 year old kids working the mines and the factories, there didn't have to be a ban on condoms, there didn't have to be a ban on married women working (which would have taken some pressure off of the laborers) and there didn't have to be an idle aristocracy/gilded elite, but all those things existed and they only went away because of laws and transfers of resources through taxes. The efficiency in agriculture itself was not a bad thing, the way the elite responded to it was bad, and on that front things haven't changed that much.
So here's a partial answer to Robin's question: don't treat questions of collateral damage as an afterthought, meet them head on and include solutions to them in your reform proposals, and then just maybe you can start to reverse public perception about social innovation pushed by elites. But don't expect centuries of bad experiences to just be forgotten overnight. The Chinese government seems to have learned this lesson and it's working for them (every time public anger about where the spoils of progress go rises too high, they let go of some repression and expand social security and medical and education services).
If that comment was intended to apply to the 19th century, then it is wrong. If you look at e.g. height as a surrogate measure of general health, it hit a minimum in the 17th and 18th centuries, a loss not recovered till the 20th. http://researchnews.osu.edu...
The Progressive Era in the early 20th Century was chockablock with proposed reforms of the calendar and of spelling. Andrew Carnegie used to publish magazine articles using the simplified spelling he favored. Daylight saving time is an early 20th Century reform that has stuck.
The growing emphasis in recent decades however has been on diversity, which is usually seen as a zero sum game.
Opinion polls that try to ascertain if the electorate is x/100-x on an issue use at least 1000 participants. A more common divide would be 55/45 and there a sample of 50 people would certainly not be considered statistically significant. But really, a parliament of 1000 people isn't really problematic: the US has ~435 people in its lower house, India has ~550. For the US with a 1000 person lower house, per-capita representation would still be lower than that of many mid-sized countries.
If the electorate were 70/30 on an issue, you wouldn't need 1000 voters to get it "right" reliably.
If the electorate is 49.999/50.00001 though, you might need hundreds of thousands of voters. But at this point, I kind of throw my hands up and say who the f*ck cares. The marginal EV (practical or philosophical) of getting the vote "right" is basically nil and not enough to outweigh the superiority of a concentrated electorate over a dispersed one.
Smaller parliaments lower the price of bribery. Yes, in a 50-person parliament an MP COULD ask for outrageously high bribes because he holds so much power but that's not what happens in reality. MPs simply accept bribes that represent large amounts to them personally (if your MPs aren't multimillionaires, and they're not likely to when they're randomly selected, they may settle for bribes of hundreds of thousands or even just tens of thousands of dollars/euros). Still that shouldn't be a problem since you'd need a parliament of >1000 people to get a good random sample anyway.
I would think 50 voters would be harder to buy off. If big pharma came and offered Joe Bob $10,000,000 to vote a certain way, everyone would hear about it. Everyone would be pissed. There would be nonstop clamoring for X Y and Z to all be done. One way or another, things wouldn't work out for big pharma. So big pharma wouldn't do this in the first place.
I've thought about this. One big problem is that while you can't buy off a million voters, you can buy off 50 voters. So you'd need to basically move these people into isolation for a few weeks. Expensive, but certainly cheaper Han actual elections.
Also, its probably unconstitutional, the "one man one vote" rule would be very difficult to overrule.
Where did I say that Uber was possible in the past?
If something like Uber was possible 10 years ago then that whole political dance could have taken place back then. But I have to disagree with you that something like Uber was possible in the past: a high mobile internet penetration seems crucial and that has only existed for a few years.
"while many are excited by Uber achieving new value in cheaper-if-nominally-illegal cab services, most of those gains could have come decades ago from just deregulating cabs, an option in which there was little interest"
It wasn't an option. In most places deregulating cabs is political suicide, so it doesn't happen. You can't isolate the policy from the political apparatus. A policy that doesn't have a feasible political implementation isn't a solution at all.
What's exciting about Uber is that they managed to solve that problem by allowing politicians to deregulate the cab industry while giving them plausible deniability.
I think a major factor in the reluctance to adopt a new social innovation versus a new tech innovation is that there are *far* more confounding variables in the wild for the former. If a firm has established a working technical prototype in-house, you can have more confidence that you can implement an exact copy in your own business, as well as have more confidence that the risk involved is mainly limited to the hit to your tech budget.
For a social innovation, you can't be nearly as sure that you can implement an exact copy of a laboratory innovation in your neck of the woods. You can't be nearly as sure that the confounding variables in your environment will be the same as the laboratory environment. And you can't be nearly as sure that the impact of black swans will be mainly limited to a particular budget -- some have the potential for quality-of-life impacts beyond monetary concerns.
It mostly kept declining for the first half of the 19th century (in industrialized Europe), especially in the cities, and far more people were living in the cities than before. There is a marked improvement in height in the second half of the 19th century and life expectancy at birth shot up in the early 19th century (people who would be middle-aged or older in the second half of the 19th century).
Guess when most of the progressive reforms took place...
It sounds like a marketing problem. You have to establish that people have a problem, and that your piece of social tech can solve it.
Consider Agile software development. There was a known problem: "software projects often take longer than expected, and when they're finished the customers don't always like them". Agile proposed a solution: "work in small increments so it's easy to estimate, and show it to your customer early so they can change their minds up front." Well, the problem might not have existed, and the solution might not have worked, but people thought it did and thought it might, and that was enough.
I think this principle applies to all your examples. Solar cells break our dependence on fossil fuels. Uber cabs actually show up when you call them. Prediction markets...help me make decisions, under certain conditions? As an executive, I feel like my decisions are pretty good already. If they weren't, how would you know? How would _I_ know? Again: these problems don't have to be real. But people do have to believe in them.
If we accept those numbers, then the "horrible" 19th century was an improvement on the previous 200 years.
Exactly! Also the standard should not be set by what came before but by what would have been possible at the time itself. There didn't have to be poorhouses, there didn't have to be slaves, there didn't have to be 7 year old kids working the mines and the factories, there didn't have to be a ban on condoms, there didn't have to be a ban on married women working (which would have taken some pressure off of the laborers) and there didn't have to be an idle aristocracy/gilded elite, but all those things existed and they only went away because of laws and transfers of resources through taxes. The efficiency in agriculture itself was not a bad thing, the way the elite responded to it was bad, and on that front things haven't changed that much.
So here's a partial answer to Robin's question: don't treat questions of collateral damage as an afterthought, meet them head on and include solutions to them in your reform proposals, and then just maybe you can start to reverse public perception about social innovation pushed by elites. But don't expect centuries of bad experiences to just be forgotten overnight. The Chinese government seems to have learned this lesson and it's working for them (every time public anger about where the spoils of progress go rises too high, they let go of some repression and expand social security and medical and education services).
>Horrible compared to what came before? No
If that comment was intended to apply to the 19th century, then it is wrong. If you look at e.g. height as a surrogate measure of general health, it hit a minimum in the 17th and 18th centuries, a loss not recovered till the 20th. http://researchnews.osu.edu...
Nice
The Progressive Era in the early 20th Century was chockablock with proposed reforms of the calendar and of spelling. Andrew Carnegie used to publish magazine articles using the simplified spelling he favored. Daylight saving time is an early 20th Century reform that has stuck.
The growing emphasis in recent decades however has been on diversity, which is usually seen as a zero sum game.