Trump and Clinton: Proof that the U.S. Voting System Doesn’t Work →

Clinton and Trump may have won primaries, but are they really representative of what the American people want? In fact, as we will show, it is John Kasich and Bernie Sanders who are first in the nation’s esteem. Trump and Clinton come last.

So how has it come to this? The media has played a big role, of course, but that Trump versus Clinton will almost surely be the choice this November is the result of the totally absurd method of election used in the primaries: majority voting.

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With majority voting (MV), voters tick the name of one candidate, at most, and the numbers of ticks determine the winner and the order of finish. It’s a system that is used across the U.S. (and in many other nations) to elect presidents as well as senators, representatives, and governors.

But it has often failed to elect the candidate preferred by the majority.

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With MV, voters cannot express their opinions on all candidates. Instead, each voter is limited to backing just one candidate, to the exclusion of all others in the running.

Bush defeated Gore because Nader voters were unable to weigh in on the other two. Moreover, as we argue further on, majority voting can go wrong even when there are just two candidates.

The point is that it is essential for voters to be able to express the nuances of their opinions.

The article goes on to describe another system (Majority Judgment) which takes a lot more of this information into account,

We need to rethink party democracy →

There are two other changes in the political culture that I think will make a return to parties especially difficult. One is the way we've come to embrace neutral administration. Rosenblum describes the historical roots of anti-partisanship, which kind of gets at this idea. But now several generations of Americans have grown up with a fairly extensive administrative state and with a Hatch Act that regulates political activity among federal employees.

For people under 40, we've also only ever known a political world with another layer of post-Watergate sunshine reforms. We expect that official party organizations will be neutral in nomination contests and can't accept that the rules might be designed to favor certain types of candidates because the party thinks that's how it can achieve its main goal: winning political office.

If the broad cultural expectation is that broad participation and neutral administration are necessary to make something legitimate, then, as much as it pains to me to say it, those ought to be taken into consideration in how party politics works. This could be a good opportunity to reform the election system, including nominations, in ways that are badly needed. Some uniformity across states and some updated technology would serve us well.

What If We Just Gave Poor People a Basic Income for Life? That’s What We’re About to Test. →

So where do we go from there? The organization that we founded,GiveDirectly, has decided to try to permanently end extreme poverty across dozens of villages and thousands of people in Kenya by guaranteeing them an ongoing income high enough to meet their basic needs—a universal basic income, or basic income guarantee. We’ve spent much of the past decade delivering cash transfers to the extremely poor through GiveDirectly, but have never structured the transfers exactly this way: universal, long-term, and sufficient to meet basic needs. And that’s the point—nobody has and we think now is the time to try.

This idea of a basic income guarantee is being debated around the globe, with pilots being considered by Finland’s center-right government and Canada’s liberal party, and support from across the political landscape, including libertarians from the Cato Institute and liberals from the Brookings Institution. The Swiss will vote in a referendum on June 5 on whether to make a basic income the law of their land. The stakes in these debates are enormous, with trillions of dollars of social spending under review. Should we move from a patchwork system of overlapping poverty-reduction programs, administered separately to address different issues (nutrition, housing, employment) to simply guaranteeing a basic income? What would happen if we did?

The Economy’s Crisis Ended Under Obama, But Its Long-Term Problems Didn’t →

...By virtually any measure, the economy is far better than when Obama took office. (How much credit Obama and his policies deserve for that improvement is a separate debate.)

But Obama has made less progress on a set of deeper, structural problems that began years or even decades before the recession. Among them: slow growth in wages and productivity; rising inequality; falling labor force participation, especially among men; and the decline of manufacturing and the failure to find a new source of middle-class jobs to replace it. The bubble-driven boom of the mid-2000s papered over some of those problems — laid-off manufacturing workers got jobs in construction, families offset reduced incomes by borrowing against their homes — until the housing bust revealed them. The recovery has done little to address these issues; many of them have gotten worse.

1 in 3 antibiotics prescribed in U.S. are unnecessary, major study finds →

The finding, which has implications for antibiotics' diminished efficacy, translates to about 47 million unnecessary prescriptions given out each year across the country to children and adults. Most of these are for conditions that don't respond to antibiotics, such as colds, sore throats, bronchitis, flu and other viral illnesses.

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The overuse of antibiotics has led to the frightening rise of drug-resistant superbugs in recent years...

Study Urges CDC to Revise Count of Deaths from Medical Error →

A study by researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine says medical errors should rank as the third-leading cause of death in the United States — and highlights how shortcomings in tracking vital statistics may hinder research and keep the problem out of the public eye.

The authors, led by Johns Hopkins surgeon Dr. Marty Makary, call for changes in death certificates to better tabulate fatal lapses in care. In an open letter, they urge the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to immediately add medical errors to its annual list reporting the top causes of death.

Based on an analysis of prior research, the Johns Hopkins study estimates that more than 250,000 Americans die each year from medical errors. On the CDC’s official list, that would rank just behind heart disease and cancer, which each took about 600,000 lives in 2014, and in front of respiratory disease, which caused about 150,000 deaths.

Medical mistakes that can lead to death range from surgical complications that go unrecognized to mix-ups with the doses or types of medications patients receive.

But no one knows the exact toll. In significant part, that’s because the coding system used by CDC to record death certificate data doesn’t capture things like communication breakdowns, diagnostic errors and poor judgment that cost lives, the study says.

Facing Privacy Tradeoffs to Restore Trust and the Rule of Law →

The traditional balance of strong law and weak surveillance technology has been disrupted on both fronts since the arrival of cheap computing power and the global Internet. Today, the rule of law in the area of privacy is relatively weak, but technology shows surprising strength. First, weakness and gaps in both privacy and surveillance law have grown. Since the emergence of the Internet and smartphones, the US Congress has not managed to update consumer privacy law at all, and even changes in sectoral laws governing health and finance have been limited. Our most important surveillance laws, Title III and ECPA, remains frozen in the pre-Internet 1980s, and arguably even took a step backward with the Patriot Act.

...New information technology mostly tips its hand toward the possibility of great privacy intrusion. So our only option to restore the proud place of the rule of law is to be very explicit about what privacy protections we want with respect to both government and private action. First, we need to be very specific about the privacy-utility balance we expect with respect to specific uses of personal data. With the passage of CISA, for example, there will an increased flow of cybersecurity threat information to the government. Some of this will be personal data and some may be potential evidence of crimes. As DHS makes rules about how the personally identifiable information component of threat data is handled, it is important that there be very clear rules that limit onward usage and storage of threat data. Those rules have to be clear enough to set expectations with citizens about what will and will not be done with personal data.

Second, rules must be designed so that they can be enforced in large-scale data flows. CISA is but one context in which the volume of data flow requires that rules be susceptible to machine-assisted accountability. As Susan Hennessey argued yesterday, it is not reasonable to expect manual human review of every transaction, so rules must be sufficiently concrete that computers can automatically identify those transactions that are clearly compliant with the rules, and those that are clearly not. Human judgment can come into place for any transactions that fall into a gray area.

Yes, the Economy Is Rigged, Contrary to What Some Economists Try to Tell You →

The second way in which it is rigged is our trade policy. First there is the size of the trade deficit. This is the result of policy choices. Instead of forcing our trading partners to respect Bill Gates copyrights and Pfizer's patents, we could have insisted they raise the value of their currency to move towards more balanced trade. But Bill Gates and Pfizer have more power in setting trade policy than ordinary workers.

Also, contrary to what Mankiw tries to tell folks in his column, the trade deficit did play a big role in our loss of manufacturing jobs. As my favorite graph for the day shows, manufacturing employment was roughly constant at around 17,500 million from the late 1960s until 2000. During this period, there was substantial growth in manufacturing productivity, as Mankiw says. This growth caused manufacturing employment to decline as a share of total employment, but to remain roughly constant in absolute terms.

However, from 2000 to 2006 manufacturing employment falls by more than 3 million, or close to 20 percent. The change was the explosion in the size of the trade deficit, as an over-valued dollar made our goods less competitive. This plunge in employment devastated lives and whole communities. It was a clear policy choice. Importers like Walmart and outsourcers like GE benefited, as ordinary workers lost big-time.