Gumballs and Open Borders

A FaceBook friend of mine pointed to the video Immigration, World Poverty, and Gumballs.

Looking for it later by search engine, I see I am not the only one who saw holes in the reasoning. I'm going to ignore what everyone else has to say and just talk about it from my perspective as a US citizen expatriate (not ex-patriot) married to a Japanese citizen, with children who are effected by the Japanese no-dual-citizenship policies.

The borders of the US have been effectively closed since before I got married. I had to prove that the woman I intended to marry would not become a dependent on the state with all sorts of financial info and family affidavits, etc., just to get her into the states for our marriage and my last year of college.

(What finances? I was a struggling student trying to do what Linus Torvalds was doing at about the same time. I had no finances.)

She got her green card, but it cost me time spent at the local immigrations office that could have been better spent on my studies, at bare minimum. And it didn't exactly give her an image of a country willing to accept her, which was no small part of her motivation to return to her country.

In order to even consider having the family move back to the states where there is much more profitable work available for someone like me, I would have to prove things I can't prove about my own financial stability.

Or we would have to go in for some other purpose than staying, then stay anyway and apply from there.

No, just because the kids would have been free to come and go until they were twenty does not mean that their mother would have been free to come and go.

The borders aren't tight closed against me, but they are effectively closed.
This is not a new situation. The borders have been closed for over twenty years.

Okay. Back to the gumballs.

People are not gumballs. Representing even a million people with one gumball robs the argument of significant meaning.

That said, I will acknowledge that Roy Beck's conclusive proposal to help the impoverished people of the world where they are has some merit -- conditionally. I'll mention some of the conditions a few paragraphs down.

The question of open borders is not strictly an immigration question.

Many of the gumballs people coming into the country do not simply move to the US and stay. They send money back home, which helps their relatives and friends where they are.

Yeah. Where they are.

And not a few get training and experience in living in (relative) freedom in the US and take that training, and a lot of basic technical expertise, back with them when they return to their homelands.

Which helps them where they are.

And this is not largess given from above. This is people using their freedom to find creative solutions to the problems back home. This is the best way to help people where they are, in the same way teaching a man to fish is more help than giving him a fish.

If you want people to be dependent on you, give them fish. If you want them to be friends, but independent, take them fishing, show them how you do it, have fun with them. Give them feel-good experiences that will lead them away from trying to overfish the rivers, away from the tendency to try to take control of the market in fish.

People are not gumballs.

With that introduction, here is what I see has to happen if we really want to help people where they are.

We have to first recognize that the things we do in the States are not all appropriate things to teach other people to do. We export a lot of our cultural baggage, and that just weighs the people in poverty down even further.

I want to be specific about that, to give concrete examples, but many of the examples are hot-button topics in the current US.

Let's just admit that young children under ten feeding themselves by selling their bodies may not be what we intended to export, but that's how our indiscriminate use of money and our sexual revolution is hitting the dirt over there.

(There is nothing unusual about this. Japan also saw some of the same things happening, in the early 1900s. You can see it when you read the works of some of the prominent Japanese novelists of that period, for instance, in a novel called Sound of the Mountain -- 山の音、 Yama no Oto -- by Yasunari Kawabata, the main character talks about seeing a young Japanese boy on the train traveling in the company of an older foreign gentleman, and about his feelings when he assumes the worst.)

Helping people where they are means such things as going over there yourself, living for years as they live. Sharing things you know, sure, but also learning from them.

It does not mean giving them money with expectations. If you want to invest or give them grants, find out what they want to do. Get people who know the country and the culture to help you figure out if it's something you want to support them in. If it is, some conditions about the purpose of the money may be in order, but trying to tell them how to accomplish their plans is questionable help at best. Expectations such as making a certain amount of profit by a certain time are definitely out of order.

Then, after you have invested, keep your hands off, but keep in touch. If they tell you they are having problems, ask how what kind of help they need. Always avoid imposing your solutions on them, even when they think they want you to. Get them to tell you what they need.

And always be ready and willing to learn from them what you can. Letting them tell you what they are doing helps them understand what they are doing. Letting them tell you what their problems are helps them understand those problems. Letting them tell you the solutions they've considered helps them understand the solutions well enough to pick the ones that will work.

Sometimes, it requires bringing them to the States for a few months or years to experience a different way of doing things. If you are really going to help them where they are, you need this option, and it doesn't work if you have to wait six months or two years from the time you decide it's a good idea until the time you can bring them to the States to do the work that they need the experience with. Well, six months may not be too bad, but two years (or more) definitely defeats the purpose.

It's not the money or the ideas or the technology that ultimately helps. It's the opportunity to use their own creativity, and the experience they gain doing so.

Now, back to the question of borders.

You can't do this kind of help when your own borders are closed.  It just doesn't work.

Help is a two-way street, one gumball person at a time, and closed borders prevent that.

Revisiting the Vote -- Voter Fraud

(This is a bit of a different way of thinking about vote fraud.)

I presented An Awkward Proposal for an Amendment to Correct Election Processes some time back.

Re-reading it now, I can find numerous holes in it. Some day I'll re-work the proposal, but today I want to think about voter fraud.

At this point in time, both the major US political parties are accusing each other of voter fraud. Dead voters, multiple voters, non-citizen voters, influencing absentee ballots, cutting voter districts to water down the opposition, ..., ..., ...

Thinking about ways to protect against voter fraud, I realize that most protections would have results worse than the fraud itself.

That is, being a computer scientist, I tend to quickly think of the vulnerabilities induced by electronic voting and by improper use of absentee ballots and such. I also tend to think about safeguarding the processes as they exist, and those tendencies are reflected in the post I link above.

But that does not really get at the source of the problem.

In order to get into the proper frame of mind to consider what to do about voter fraud, we should start with a realization of something I will point out in a few paragraphs. To get there, we should start with an understanding of what a voting process is.

Many times, it is described as a way to get a consensus of opinion from a body of people.

But what people mean by "consensus of opinion" varies widely.

For some, obtaining a consensus means getting support for their side. For them, the election process is a process of influencing opinions.

For others, obtaining a consensus means finding out whose side is supported by the majority. For them, the process is a statistical experiment, and influencing the result is the opposite of what they want to do.

For yet others, obtaining a consensus blends both of these concepts as a way for the members of the body of people to communicate with each other and come to a decision. This is not quite a middle-of-the-road approach, because it still leaves open the question of whether the winners have a responsibility to keep listening to the electorate or not.

Some ancient philosopher said, "Vox populii vox dei." And the Greek politicians tried to incorporate that concept in their government, in spite of the disagreement of many of their philosophers.

So, is the voice of the people the voice of God?

For those who consider the Book of Mormon to have some meaning, there are several salient verses. One reference is Mosiah 29:  26-27:

26 Now it is not common that the voice of the people desireth anything contrary to that which is right; but it is common for the lesser part of the people to desire that which is not right; therefore this shall ye observe and make it your law—to do your business by the voice of the people.

27 And if the time comes that the voice of the people doth choose iniquity, then is the time that the judgments of God will come upon you; yea, then is the time he will visit you with great destruction even as he has hitherto visited this land.

How is this different from vox populii vox dei?

One, it happens that the voice of the people chooses evil on occasion, especially when they are become so corrupt that there really isn't any help for them any more.

(Jonah, who had to have a whale return him to his duty, wanted Nineveh to be so corrupt, but even they weren't quite there yet.)

Two, with all the negatives, it is not common that the voice of the people desireth anything contrary to that which is right leaves a wide range of right possibilities for the people to be in favor of.

That the people usually don't choose the worst option does not mean that the people always choose the best.

You don't have to be a believer in the Book of Mormon to understand that much.

Why do I think this is important?

It demotivates the belief in the magic of winning, and the magic of winning is one of the enemies of freedom and of meaningful consensus politics.

With this emphasis on winning demotivated, perhaps it will be easier to understand the truth.

Statistics tell us that when sampling a population, a difference of a few percent is not likely to be meaningful. In general, 1 or 2% is near-equivalent to a tie.

A good statistical process will guard against biasing the result.

While that means that voter fraud should be guarded against, it would also mean that campaigning poisons the result. People change their votes based on all the argument and other exchange of rhetoric, and people are known to vote against their own opinions for a variety of reason.

Electoral processes have certain statistical natures, therefore 1 to 2% differences just are not meaningful. Ever.

But they are not, and, as long as we are dealing with humans, will never be proper statistical experiments. Therefore, even differences of 5% or more should be considered effective ties, at best.

Also, since any population should have some differences of opinion, large majority results are also indications of too much tampering with the sampling processes.

In plain English, 90% or more of the vote should be indication that something went wrong.

I'm going to stop there, and propose something really bizarre.

Our focus on who wins encourages fraud.

Can I repeat that? Heh. Well, go back and read that last one-sentence paragraph again.

If we had some way of recognizing a tie, we wouldn't be so concerned about things like the hanging chads in Florida in 2000. And if we had some way of reviewing wins by too large a margin, the majority would be demotivated in their attempts to make their majority position unassailable.

So I have a few proposals:

Any election where the difference between the top votes is less than 5% should automatically go back for a run-off. 

The first run-off should be subject to the same rule.

If, in the second run-off, the difference is less than 2%, the top vote getters should be considered to have tied. In the case of an office, the top vote-getters should share the office according to an agreement they work out together. The voters should have another ballot to approve the agreement, and if the ballot fails, the court competent to review the election should review the agreement and make recommendations.

In the case of regulations and laws, etc., the body competent to implement the regulation or law, etc., should review it, seeking a new regulation or law that will more effectively reflect the opinions of the various sides. Then the new regulation or law, etc., should be voted on again, with the same rules of effective tie. After the second effective tie, the competent court should review the question and determine whether further rewriting and election will produce useful results, and, if not, should have power to determine that the question has been rejected.

Any election where the top vote-getter gets more than 80% of the vote should be automatically reviewed for tampering by the court competent to do so. Opposition voices should be heard first and last in the review.

The court would have power to order a new election, if it determined that too much improper influence of any sort had been brought to bear during the election.

In any election where the top vote-getter gets more than 90% of the vote, the court should consider whether the top vote-getter should be disqualified from standing in the subsequent election for reconsideration. Reasons other than fraud may be considered, but the court must make its reasoning public.

In any election where the top vote-getter gets more than 95% of the vote, the top vote-getter should be automatically disqualified from standing in the subsequent election for reconsideration.

These kinds of rules would help to discourage the source of the problems that lead to voter fraud, and would also help to discourage the polarizing debates and voter hate that accompanies bad-faith electioneering.