Counting Representation

Democracy is great and so is the idea of representative government. The point where it starts hurting is that majority wins. By definition, majority is representative of just majority.  Even majority representing majority is questionable. Majority does represents majority when we have just two parties. But when we have more the two, we can be easily sure that majority is not represented. For example, in a three party, highly contested elections 34% would count as winning majority and it excludes 66% (real majority).  Essentially, majority of votes don't translate to majority in representation.

Surprisingly, it is easy to fix. All we need to change is what we count. The basic idea is to add the dimension of time to representation. Instead of the crude approximation of majority, we can have complete representation for everyone over time.  As popular is management circles, you only get what you measure.

How do we measure representation? As we discussed earlier, votes don't translate to majority representation. Well some of the votes do translate to representation. The votes which are cast to the winning party. The votes that are not cast and the votes that are not cast to the winning party are useless. They don't count toward representation.

Without much ado, here are the rules of the game:

1. Votes which result in representation are "spent"
2. Votes that don't get representation are "not spent"
3. Votes that are not cast are "not spent"

In other words, votes can be stored and used across elections.  Each vote is worth 5 years of representation. They work just like currency as store of "political value".  For example: say we had a two party system with 100 people and say party A won the election with 51 votes. These 51 votes are counted as spent. Rest 49 people get to keep their unrepresented vote for later use. In the next elections, 49 people will have 2 votes each and 51 will have one vote each. It is easy to see that with 98 votes, these 49 people will we able to easily get their representation.  

Given 65 years of life expectancy and 18 years as voting age, people get to vote around 10 times in their life. If the number of political parties is less that or equal to 10, even some 10% of the population will get a chance to form a government during their life time. To make this work with even larger number of parties, we will need to either have more frequent elections or allow inheritance of "political value", just like property and money.  This makes it possible for any arbitrary group of people to eventually form a government, perhaps once in few hundred years. 

It is easy to see that this method of counting representation leads to representation of all people over time. It will probably help stop the madness around "winning" elections and all that goes into it. Why? Because if you win, you make it easy for others to win the next time. If you loose, you chance of success increase over time. 

From what I could reason about, the system has two equilibriums. One: If people are cleanly partitioned into groups, over time each group gets representation and world becomes fair in terms of representation. If the groups are greedy, they will choose policies which advance their own groups. Sadly, the same strategy will be used by each of the other groups. Sad, but fair. 

The second equilibrium, would be towards enlarging or growing the size of these groups. Essentially, if the two groups can sort out their differences and work towards what is common and important for them, we get one less group and hopefully policies which work towards welfare of all the people in this larger group. The recursive logic will bring us to some manageable number of groups or even just one.  We might even see groups getting split when they cannot reconcile their differences, but that still leaves the process fair, just and representative. 

No matter which way the wind blows, we can always be sure that everyone is getting represented over time. If nothing else, it reduces the cost of running political parties and hopefully that is the money which can be used for advancement of the country and providing public goods. 

Criticism is most welcome!  

Prepaid Traffic Fine Card

The problem we are going to solve today is the corruption in the traffic police. It is obvious that given the circumstances corruption is the best strategy for both police and people.

• Let's say traffic light jump is fined at Rs 200. If a corrupt policemen charges Rs 199, it is good deal for both the driver and the policemen. Because people are not just rational but emotional too, a fair deal will probably happen around Rs 100. 
• This means that if fines are 0, their will be no corruption. The reason fine is not 0 is that our objective as a society is not just reduction of corruption, but:
• As less travel time as possible 
• Less and less accidents 

The problem is it is was hard to measure these things when traffic rules were invented. Accidents are not too hard to count, travel time across all people shouldn't be so difficult given mobile phones and GPS.  Traffic police has no incentive to solve these problems. So lets leave these things aside and just concentrate on the corruption part. 

Lets define the Prepaid Traffic Fine card. Basically drivers can buy such a card with various denominations. It could be a coupon booklet like sodexo. Lets say everyone knows their own driving style, so they know what kind of "crimes" they are likely to commit and how much they end up paying to corrupt cops. Now when I say crime, I don't mean running over people. Just the soft variety like may be 10% over the speed limit or 20% over the speed limit. Jumping a red-light by 2-3 seconds etc. Or may be 10%-20% over the alcohol limit. 

Whenever a driver is fined, he can pay his fine using this booklet. The other condition is that this booklet just like sodexo expires after a year. Now:

• Driver should always pay using the booklet because he already paid for it. 
• This money is already with the government, so nothing goes to the corrupt police guy. 

Few more cases arise.

People either underestimate or overestimate their "fine budget". If they overestimate, they have incentive to always pay using the booklet because any money they give to the traffic police guy will overshoot their "budget". If people underestimate or don't care to buy the booklet, the usual scenario applies which means government gets 0 and corrupt police guy and the driver share 50% each of the fine amount. Now lets assume that we give some discount on this booklet. 10% should be easy because government can earn 10% interest in one year with this amount. The more "interesting" or "value for money" government can make this "offer", the incentive for corruption reduces by the similar amount. For example, 50% discount means that the driver has no incentive not to buy it because that is the maximum he gets by sharing the profit with the corrupt police guy. Which means the corrupt police guy now has to ask for 25%, giving 75% to the driver. 

I think at some point, the convenience of the time saved in bargaining, social pressure, some sense of dignity, investing in the future would make this converge at much lower discount levels. So here we have the solution to the corruption by traffic police. In the super rational humans case government need to give 100% discount. In case humans act like humans, government gets money, humans get peace of mind and corrupt traffic police 0.  This fund can be used to give education to children of traffic police, bonuses, construction of roads, better technology to monitor and manage traffic, something sensible. Using average of Rs 500 per two wheeler and Rs 2000 per 4 wheeler, Bangalore traffic police will have about Rs 370 crores to work with per year.