Jerry Cayford has an interesting article in the curren issue of 3 Quarks Daily: Final Five and U.S. Competitiveness.
The opening paragraphs:
California’s primary is in about two weeks, and it’s a mess. The panic is slightly subsiding, though, since Democrats have started polling in one of the top two spots in the race for governor. For months, Republicans were polling first and second, with eight Democrats trailing because they split the vote. The California Democratic Party chair even urged low-polling candidates to drop out so as not to be spoilers.
This can all look like an amusing soap opera. Will the Democrats shoot themselves in the foot, again? But studying it led me to literature I hadn’t found before, coming from a quarter I hadn’t expected: the Harvard Business School (HBS). An HBS study of American economic competitiveness shows that a surprisingly short path leads from an amusing soap opera to the gravest of questions: why is American society failing?
The final paragraph;
Do you want to repair crumbling roads and bridges, lower infant mortality rate, or fix K-12 education? The single most effective remedy is “nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections.” Are you trying to improve health care, life expectancy, or public transportation? Your method is “Final Five Voting.” The powerful message of HBS’s U.S. Competitiveness Project is that electoral reform is our main tool to end dysfunctional politics, strengthen U.S. competitiveness, and stop America’s decline. Want paid leave and walkable cities? Or—updating from 2019 to today—do you seek to compete with China on anything at all, unwind predatory monopolies, or develop more useful, less dangerous artificial intelligence? All of it. The basic aspects of a civilized life. The answer is the same. Put your effort into nonpartisan top-five primaries and ranked choice voting in general elections, aka Final Five Voting.
It's clear to me that we really do need to change the system. Would that work, is it sufficient, a start? Who knows. How do we get there?
Here's a comment I made:
Thinks for this (and the links). You've given me something to think about. I especially like the phrase, “political industrial complex.” That seems exactly right.
Here’s what I’ve been thinking. For all my life I’ve believed that America is a democracy, whatever that is. I’ve been something of a leftist at least since my mid-teens, I marched against the war in Vietnam (and was a conscientious objector); I did not jump for joy when Clinton was elected; but I did manage a little hop when Obama was elected. That didn’t last long. Trump 1 was a disaster. Through all this I kept telling myself: “Yep, we’re still a democracy, still a democracy, yessiree, still a democracy...” And all this time I’d read here and there: “No, America is not, a democracy; it’s an oligarchy ruled by rich people and corporations.”
Trump 2 has got me rethinking. On the one hand, the corruption is so extreme and so naked. That’s one thing. But at the same time we have the rise of AI and the link between AI and the Trump administration through Elon “the world’s richest man” Musk, David Sacks, who was tech advisor to the president until quite recently, and the various entrepreneurs and executives who’ve been glad to kiss the presidential ring. The AI business is tightly controlled by a small group of tech bros (& maybe a woman or two in there somewhere) who control an enormous amount of money. As a result we’ve got an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power around the presidency pumping money through the political industrial complex.
Take that in conjunction with the political industrial complex and it’s beginning to look like the country is one giant board game where the oligarchs are the game players and the rest of us are just pieces on the board (or NPC’s). It’s Plato’s cave reconstructed with 21st century technology. The oligarchs are running a shadow play and we think it’s the real game. It’s not.
Excellent article.
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