Political structures and political rules really need to make sense: Infomocracy, by Malka Older

 If the title of the post was insufficiently indicative, I am going to grumble this morning.  I read an irritating novel.  I read many irritating novels, and sure, in theory I can put them down any time I choose, but there is such a thing as hate-reading, and when I do so, I get the joy of hate-writing, when I grumble from an informed perspective on this pretentious, little blog which nobody reads.  Malka Older wrote a novel.  Infomocracy.  It had some nuggets of interest, but she never bothered to connect thoughts which needed to be connected, and so ultimately, it was a failure of a novel.  I shall blather about political science, public choice economics, and several other disciplines, along with my own research.  If you choose to read the novel after my blatherin', that's on you because you cannot un-know what I shall try to teach you.

Malka Older really should have known better.  She is educated in political science-adjacent fields.  Oh, well.  Regardless, I strongly suspect that at some point in her education, someone taught her "the Tiebout hypothesis," which is a foundational concept in public choice economics.  The idea is as follows.  Suppose you have freedom of migration within a metropolitan area, and municipalities have variation in tax rates and services.  In the hypothetical world of perfect freedom of movement (a classic economics-style assumption), everyone can choose to live in a jurisdiction with a bundle of tax rates and services which suits their preferences.  One can see this within the Cleveland metropolitan area, subject to constraints.  Shaker Heights is renowned for its school system, with high property taxes and city income taxes to pay for it (Ohio has city income taxes, because it is run be evil motherfuckers).  Other municipalities have much shittier school systems and lower tax rates.  Got kids?  Do you love them?  Move to Shaker Heights.  If you either don't have kids, or just don't love them, live elsewhere.  Yes, I am saying that everyone outside Shaker Heights either has no children, or doesn't love them.  Or technically, I'm not saying that.  Charles Tiebout said it, but you can observe it, empirically.

The Tiebout hypothesis can be expanded to services beyond schools, with sufficient variation in municipality expenditures, and as long as there is freedom of movement, you get efficient outcomes, so yay, Chucky Tiebout.

I am nearly certain that at some point, Malka Older learned about Chucky, and came up with the core idea of Infomocracy, which she calls "micro-democracy."  Nation-states dissolve, and in their place is a system of "centenals," which are blocks of 100,000 people each (no, she never takes redistricting/reapportionment seriously, and yes, that pissed me off), and each centenal has its own party/government.  So, a centenal in a densely populated area of a city can be governed by the "Heritage" party, and adjoin another centenal governed by the "Liberty" party.  Cross the street, and the laws change.  With no barriers to immigration, globally enforced, everyone can live somewhere governed by whatever system they want.  Tiebout at the global level, and I will note that there is even a brief conversation in which characters agonize about creating electorally homogeneous units through this process, which is exactly what I have always argued in my own research on redistricting, which Older really needed to consult.  Or at least something on the actual process of re-drawing lines.

Regardless, the idea of Tiebout at the global level is actually an interesting premise that runs into the brick wall of mathematics when you set each unit at a hard limit of 100K.  After all, Tiebout operates through migration, and every act of migration changes the population of two centenals, and now neither are 100K!  That's before talking about births or deaths.  The very mechanism by which Tiebout operates turns the whole process into a mess with that equal population requirement.  So why is it there?

Because there is something else stupid and incoherent about the system Older devised.  The "Supermajority."  If you know anything about politics, you know what that word means.  If you are Malka Older, and you wrote this book, you do not know what this word means, but you use it in a way that only allows readers to infer your meaning, demonstrating so many other ignorances, plural.

OK, so here's the rest of the deal.  The central concept of Older's system is maximal localism.  Everyone lives under the government they choose, in order to leverage Tiebout.  In order to make that work, any global government could do little more than enforce freedom of emigration, and other basics.  Otherwise, you step on Tiebout, and the concept isn't working anymore.  However, the whole plot of the book revolves around an election for "the Supermajority."  Normally-- like, for anyone who speaks politics-- a supermajority is a threshold set above 50%.  For example, the Senate has a supermajority threshold for cloture: 60%.  Constitutional amendments have a supermajority threshold.  2/3.  That's what a supermajority is.  A threshold that is more than a mere majority.

What Older has constructed is some convoluted and incoherent system of federalism, wherein there is local control of the centenals, but then there is the global governing office:  the Supermajority.  There are fuckloads of problems here, from a political science perspective.  First, MAXIMUM TIEBOUT!!!! doesn't work if that global government does jack fucking shit.  It is supposed to be a system of localism, and if it really is, then why the fuck should anyone care about what Older is absurdly calling "the Supermajority?"

Once upon a time in America, political power was concentrated more at the state and local level, so the federal government was not particularly important.  If power is held at the local level rather than the global level, then global government can't matter.  Logically.

We're not done.  Remember that equal population requirement for centenals?  Remember the question of why?  Near as Older describes-- which is vague-- it is a system close to the electoral college, where voting is done by centenal.  But it is winner take all.

And there are fuckloads of parties.  Because the point is maximal local choice.  Which would be fine if the system really were MAXIMUM TIEBOUT!!!  That falls apart as soon as you start worrying too much about a winner take all election for the one-world-government "Supermajority" office.

None of this works.  If you have a winner-take-all, plurality system, you get a two-party system.  We call this Duverger's law.  But Older's system not only has fuckloads of parties competing in a winner-take-all contest at the global level, coalitions are expressly forbidden by law without a complete absorption of one party by another!

No, Malka.  That is not how electoral math works.

And with that many parties, no.  PR, coalition governments, a PM, sure.  This monstrosity?  No.

The parties, themselves, make no sense except as leftist blather.  "Liberty," of course, is villainous because freedom is both a lie and evil.  "Heritage," too, sucks because anything traditional is bad.  One of the ostensibly sympathetic protagonists starts off working for a party whose motivating principle is "policy."  What kind of policy?  Oh, none, really, just... policy.  As opposed to... well, they think public policy should be considered important.

Seriously, that's the platform.  "Policy."

Technocratic policymaking, versus anyone who references either tradition or the classical liberal value system running from Locke through John Stuart Mill... yeah, it takes modern, leftist foolishness to say that "policy," unspecified, is a viable platform in that or any context.  Yes, really, that's how she wrote the book.  The closest to a specific policy is that some dumbass proposed a tunnel running through the mantle of the Earth for mass transit, and the policy party says maybe that could be a bad idea.

Oh, and the first tunnel would go to Japan, where there are constant earthquakes.  You know the term, "ring of fire," right?

This is what counts as a "policy" debate in the book.

Characters?  Well, there's, um...

Oh, fuck, it doesn't matter.  There's Ken, who is a campaign operative-type.  Look, the whole book basically throws out all political science, except Tiebout, in favor of what I call the Politico electoral model, which says that you can ignore "facts" and social scientific research because the campaign consultants and strategists know the real truth.  Campaigns are games of strategist versus strategist.

They're not, but if you never bother to read about so much as the existence of political science research on electoral politics, this kind of thing sounds cool and worldly to you.  Older encountered Tiebout, and from there, she was done.

Plot?  There's a group trying to undercut the electoral system, and there's a plot to steal the election, and... I do not care.  I honestly spent the whole novel doing the mental hand-roll gesture as the universal signal for "get to the point," although for me, the point was "resolve these social scientific issues and explain your electoral rules, please."

There was really only one point of creativity, and it was mostly unintentionally interesting.  Older devised a new psychological disorder which she called "narrative disorder."  She writes that in the future, people are diagnosed with this thing called "narrative disorder," as a type of neurodivergent thing.  Mishima, the badass operator (according to the rules of modern science fiction, all badasses must be women, and Older complies) has "narrative disorder."  What is "narrative disorder?"  Basically, it is an obsession with narratives, and propensity to formulate conspiracy theories as narratives.

Is this a thing?

No.

Might some future meeting of the American Psychiatric Fraud and Malpractice Association concoct either narrative disorder or something like it?  Sure.  They've done worse.

And what happens if they just put "narrative disorder" in the DSM?  For shits and giggles?

It's not a thing.  But what if they said, "trust us, it's a thing?"

Would people self-diagnose, and claim to have narrative disorder?  You bet your narrative-disordered ass, they would!  And today, they'd brag about it on TikTok!  Then, every teenaged girl who sees someone looking for sympathy points with a TikTok video would start thinking she has narrative disorder, and she makes her own TikTok video about her narrative disorder, and 'round and 'round it goes!

This is called the nocebo effect.  I have had the unethical idea of running this experiment-- creating a fake disorder, and seeing if kids will give it to themselves-- for a few years now, which obviously means that ChatGPT and I would get along great.  Could I do this?  Not without getting fired, and probably thrown in jail, so I think I'll pass, but I love the fact that at least unintentionally, Older throws it in her book.  Narrative disorder is bullshit, but if you write it into the DSM, certain demographics will claim it.

How about instead of talking yourself into a disorder, you go work out, meditate, do the shit that works?  Just a thought.

Anyway, I'll wrap up with the observation that Infomocracy recalls a book that was so terrible that when I tried to get through it years ago, I really did put it down.  Too Like The Lightning, by Ada Palmer.  That one was somehow nominated for a Hugo, but it was garbage.  Rather than merely Tiebout, Palmer created a system in which people just announced their own allegiances.  It was worse than that, and in fact, one of the worst books I have ever read.  (Truthfully, I couldn't finish it.)  Older deserves some credit for the fact that her dissolution of nation-states in favor of a global structure is based on something mathematically defensible:  Tiebout, rather than Palmer's nonsense, but Older was not willing to follow through with the math.  Had she done so, Infomocracy actually could have been quite good.  The plot eventually turns on fact-checking campaign claims, election fraud, a premature claim of victory in order to mess with the process, and a lot of things that could have been read as prescient when the book came out in 2016.

Instead, that was all buried in a morass of a political scientist with two thumbs and no tolerance for mathematical mistakes.

This guy.

Yes, I just did the "this guy" thing.  I know, it doesn't work in text.  Whatever.

Eddie Pennington, "Information, Please," from Eddie Pennington Walks The Strings and Even Sings.