Churchill, “satisfied nations”

Toward the very end of his Edward Said Memorial Lecture: The Unipolar Moment and the Culture of Imperialism (61:45 minutes into the clip) Noam Chomsky mentions that after WWII

“the U.S. shouldered the responsibility that was eloquently described by Winston Churchill, the responsibility to protect the interests of the satisfied nations whose power places us above the rest, the rich men dwelling in peace within their habitations to whom the government of the world must be entrusted”.

Chomsky is quoting from Churchill’s 1951 book, Closing the Ring, p. 336. Here is the paragraph:

Stalin then asked what could be done for Russia in the Far East. I replied that Russia had Vladivostok, but he pointed out that the port was ice-bound, and also depended on the Straits of Tsushima. At present the only exist that the Russians had was Murmansk. I answered that I wished to meet the Russain grievance, because the government of the world must be entrusted to satisfied nations, who wished nothing more for themselves than what they had. If the world-government were in the hands of hungry nations there would always be danger. But none of us had any reason to seek for anything more. The peace would be kept by peoples who lived in their own way and were not ambitious. Our power placed us above the rest. We were like rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations.

Political equality in a large group

This post is aimed at being the first part in a long-delayed “attempt to embark on” “a methodical analysis of the set of possibilities for achieving political equality”.

Part 1: Optimal decision-making, group rationality

… in which it is argued that groups, in an ideal setting, can achieve rational decisions. Group decision making constrained by practical circumstances should therefore be designed so as to produce decisions that approximate the decisions that would have been made under ideal conditions.

It is sometimes asserted that groups cannot form good policy. When such notions are expressed by the less educated, they are are attributed to the authoritarian sentiments of the unsophisticated. When such ideas are proposed by the educated, they are considered evidence of hard-headed realism. Elite speakers often mention Arrow’s “impossibility theorem” (what Arrow called the ‘General Possibility Theorem’) and claim that it “shows” that group rationality is impossible.

Effective U.S. federal tax rate vs. income

The congressional budget office provides data about the distribution of the federal tax burden (including income tax, social security tax and excise tax) among the different income groups. The chart below shows the 2005 distribution. The area of the entire chart represents the total household income in 2005 ($9.7 trillion).

The chart is divided by solid lines into 5 vertical bars, corresponding to the five household income quintiles, sorted in order of increasing household income from left to right. The bars’ widths correspond to the total income of the quintile (i.e., income per household in the group times the number of households in the group). The top income quintile is split with a dotted vertical line into the two groups – the top 1% on the right and the rest of the top quintile (percentiles 80 to 99) on the left. Those subgroups within the top quintile are broken down further into the following percentile brackets (not marked with vertical lines): [80-90], [90-95], [95-99], [99-99.5], [99.5-99.9], [99.9-99.99], and [99.99-100].

Each bar has a shaded portion corresponding to the share of the income group’s income which is collected as federal taxes. Thus the total shaded area corresponds to the federal tax total ($2 trillion = 20.5% of $9.7 trillion).

The tax rates increase from 4.3% for the bottom quintile to 32.1% for the [99.9-99.9] percentile bracket, before dipping slightly to 31.5% for the top hundredth of percentile.

Obama’s name recognition history

The case of Rudolph Guiliani suggests that mass media cannot dictate to the public who to vote for. However, since it is impossible to vote for a candidate one has never heard of, mass media cannot help but determine who the public will not vote for.

Senator Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president in January 2007, yet even by by February 2006 over 40% of the people heard enough about Obama to have an opinion about him.

For comparison, a different Democratic congressmember running for the nomination, Dennis Kucinich, never managed to have more than 35% name recognition, even during the height of the primary season.

(The points marked with ‘k’ show the proportion of people recognizing Kucinich.)

Data: pollingreport.com: Newsweek, NBC and Gallup series.

Implementation of democratic mass media

The aim of this post is to provide some particulars for the proposal for democratic media which I made:

Using public funds, “media sections” (TV and radio channels, newspapers, book publishers, etc.) are created and sustained. The media sections are controlled by citizen-editor boards, a role that would rotate within the entire population. Each citizen-editor board has a budget and complete control over a section – i.e., over a certain part of the public media – in the same way that present-day editors and media outlet owners have today.

Palestinian and Israeli fatalities by month 2000-08

The following chart was generated using B’Tselem data. The data does not cover December 2008. The number of Israeli deaths was higher than the number of Palestinian death on the same month once during 99 months covered (June, 2001).

The totals for the years and for the entire period are:

Period	Israeli	Palestinian
2000 (Sept. – Dec.)	41	279
2001	191	469
2002	420	1032
2003	185	588
2004	108	828
2005	50	197
2006	23	662
2007	13	390
2008 (Jan. – Nov.)	31	452
Total	1062	4897

The functions of mass media

When considering the form that democratic media could take, it is important to consider whether mass media – with its inherent potential for non-democratic effects – has any useful functions that are not anti-democratic. This question is akin to the question of whether government has any functions that are not oppressive. In an analogy to the anarchist position which claims that any governmental activity is necessarily oppressive, one could claim that the only functions of mass media are anti-democratic, i.e., those of allowing a privileged minority influence over the rest of the population. That position would claim that all mass media should be abolished (in the same way that the anarchists want to abolish government altogether) and people should rely exclusively on non-mass (or intimate) forms of media. In this view, the best that a democratic control structure over mass media could produce would be neutralizing those anti-democratic functions, leaving the entire organization useless.

A proposal for democratic media

The term “censorship” describes the act of suppressing certain ideas by those who control some distribution channels. Despite regular attempts by interested parties to limit the term to describe very restricted or extreme cases of suppression of ideas, the term is usually, and very reasonably, understood to cover any attempt at reducing the circulation of an idea, by any person or organization. The negative view, which most of the population, as well as official ideology, take of censorship therefore encompasses any such activity. According to this view, the desirable media system is democratic – i.e., one which allows all people an equal opportunity at presenting their ideas and having them considered by others.

The implicit universal rejection of censorship notwithstanding, much of the communication patterns that dominate Western society are inherently censoring activities. The members of the elite group that influences (to varying degrees) the content of wide circulation media – publishers, broadcasters, advertisers, editors and reporters – routinely make decisions that amount to suppressing some communications, containing certain ideas, in favor of other communications, containing different ideas. Those decisions, although usually purporting to reflect only objective accepted standards, are in reality almost completely subjective. They therefore reflect the ideas and biases of the very select and atypical group of people who make them.

Share of income of top percentiles of U.S. households

Note: This post deals with the proportion of total US income taken up by the households controlling the most income. The percentiles of the income distribution are given in a different post: Household income distribution, 2007.

The chart below is based on data of Saez and Piketty (Table A3), who rely on IRS publications.

The year 2006, the latest year for which data is available, has seen concentration of income by the top percentiles which has not been observed since the late 1920’s. Following a three-decade long process of increasing concentration of income by top percentiles, in 2006, a tenth of the U.S. population controlled half the national income, a hundredth of the population controlled a quarter of the income, a thousandth of the population controlled an eighth of the income and one ten-thousandth of the population controlled one-sixteenth of the income. Thus, the top x percentile group controls about 2 times more income than the top x/10 percentile group.

It is important, however, to note that even at the years of least concentration – the late 1950’s to the late 1970’s – the top percentiles controlled very disproportionate shares of the national income. The top 10% controlled at least one third of the income throughout the 20’s century. During those “golden years” of income dispersal, the top x percentile group controlled about 3 times more income than the top x/10 percentile group. The change in the share between the “golden years” and today is therefore not very significant at the top 10% level, but, by the repeated multiplication by a factor of 3/2, it is much more significant at the top 0.01 percentile level (these households now control (1/2)⁴ = 1/16 of the income, as opposed to controlling a mere (1/3)⁴ = 1/81 of the national income in, say, 1960).

One interesting implication of the fact that half the national income goes to the top 10% of households: if the national income were re-distributed so that each household received an equal share of the national income, the income available to each household would then be equal to the income of the household which currently is at the 90% percentile of the income distribution. Thus each household in the U.S. would, in such a situation, be making over $100,000 annually.

Update (22-Oct-2009): Added data for top 400 households for the years 1992-2006, made available by the IRS. The top 400 households (out of about 150 million) represent the top 0.0002667% of households. This tiny fraction of the households controlled in 2006 over 1.3% of the entire national income. The pattern of income share of top income groups described above holds tolerably well for this group as well: (1/2) to the power of log₁₀(400 / 150 million) = 2.1%.

Flyer 2008 elections

Lottery-Based Democracy: the Original and Still the Best

In our society elections and democracy are considered inseparable. In fact, this connection is far from clear. The ancient Greeks, for example, thought that elections are part and parcel of an oligarchy¹. It was oligarchical Sparta, rather than democratic Athens, that elected its government.

The Athenians had a very different system: political offices were distributed using a lottery. The lottery method – known as Sortition – could be implemented here. If Congresspeople were drawn at random from the U.S. citizenry Congress would not be an elite body made predominantly of rich, male, white, old lawyers. Rather, it would look like a statistical sample of the people: it would contain 50% women, 25% hispanics and blacks, rich and poor, young and old, straight and gay, and very few lawyers².

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More information on the sortition system can be found on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition, and other online resources. One such resource is A Citizen Legislature by Ernest Callenbach and Michael Phillips – a book with a specific proposal for using sortition to select the U.S. House of Representatives. The book is available at http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC11/Calnbach.htm.

Please contact me, Yoram Gat, with any comments at:

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Notes:

[1] “[T]he appointment of magistrates by lot is thought to be democratic, and the election of them oligarchical, democratic again when there is no property qualification, oligarchical when there is.” Aristotle, Politics, book IV, 9.

[2] Of the 535 members of the 109th Congress there were 71 (13%) blacks and hispanics, 82 (15%) women, and 228 (43%) lawyers. The average age in Congress was 57, vs. 37 in the population. Sources: http://www.c-span.org/congress/109congress.asp, 2006 population data – Statistical abstract of the U.S., 2008, Table 6, Table 7.