Why Voter Turnout Is So Low in the United States

AN INTERVIEW WITH

ALEXANDER KEYSSAR

INTERVIEW BY

Adele Oltman

From the very founding of the United States, elites have worked to disenfranchise and suppress voters — because they know a mobilized electorate of workers and poor people would transform the country.

In recent years, states around the country have passed numerous laws restricting the right to vote. But this effort to contract the franchise — a fundamental assault on political democracy — is not unprecedented. Since the founding of the United States, elites have used their power to disenfranchise and suppress the vote of those they’d rather not see at the ballot box.

In the following interview, historian Alexander Keyssar, author of The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, discusses the long history the franchise fights in the United States with historian Adele Oltman. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

TO READ THE ENTIRE INTERVIEW:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/10/voter-turnout-disenfranchisement-suppression-alexander-keyssar

Wealth Inequality is Inherent in Markets

A recent Scientific American article, The Inescapable Casino, discusses models of wealth flow in markets. Depending on the model the results vary from significantly different from reality to amazingly close to exact reality over at least the last 30 years. The results have important implications for both political policy and political ideologies.

For all tested models, accurate or not, wealth invariably flows to a top few, with most people winding up with less or even in poverty unless government steps in and diverts wealth flow to the top. What wealth distribution models finally show depends on what assumptions are built into them. The accurate models give a very good measure of (1) current wealth inequality, (2) the reasons for the degree of inequality and (3) the chances of winding up at the top or bottom. The fundamental insight is this: Markets are like casinos that we cannot leave and it is a proven fact that the longer a person stays and plays in a casino, the higher their chances of losing. That is the reality of market economies for everyone.

The basic wealth flow model points to a situation where, for each economic transaction a person, company, group or nation makes, both parties to the transaction are equal in all respects, including power, knowledge, ability, intelligence, social situation and everything else. Obviously that does not come close to reflecting reality, e.g., poor people have less power and usually less information than most or nearly all companies and rich people. The end result of the pristine "libertarian" model (my term, not anyone else's) is pure oligarchy where rich people have almost all the wealth and power. That seems to accord with semi-current (2010) data.

Refined market models & three truths about them

The researchers refined their model by incrementally including three factors. Including each factor one at a time made the models outputs more and more accurate until they were essentially the same as reality. That is about as good as it can get for models of reality.[1]

If you add to the model three factors, it predicts reality about as close as mathematical models can get. The three factors account for:

1. Taxes, subsidies and inherent advantages that wealthy people and entities have over regular people, e.g., lower cost of borrowing and more knowledge for wealthy people and legal entities compared to regular people;

2. Initial wealth advantage, e.g. a person inherits at least $400 million from dad or any other source; and

3. Negative wealth, which reflects the drag on upward economic mobility from a person owing more than their assets are worth.

With all three factors in the model, the researchers describe their results like this:

Moreover, only a carefully designed mechanism for redistribution can compensate for the natural tendency of wealth to flow from the poor to the rich in a market economy. Redistribution is often confused with taxes, but the two concepts ought to be kept quite separate. Taxes flow from people to their governments to finance those governments' activities. Redistribution, in contrast, may be implemented by governments, but it is best thought of as a flow of wealth from people to people to compensate for the unfairness inherent in market economics. ..... Any single agent in this economy could have become the oligarch—in fact, all had equal odds if they began with equal wealth. In that sense, there was equality of opportunity. But only one of them did become the oligarch, and all the others saw their average wealth decrease toward zero as they conducted more and more transactions. To add insult to injury, the lower someone's wealth ranking, the faster the decrease. ..... In the long run, all participants in this economy except for the very richest one will see their wealth decay exponentially. ..... In fact, these mathematical models demonstrate that far from wealth trickling down to the poor, the natural inclination of wealth is to flow upward, so that the “natural” wealth distribution in a free-market economy is one of complete oligarchy. It is only redistribution that sets limits on inequality. The mathematical models also call attention to the enormous extent to which wealth distribution is caused by symmetry breaking, chance and early advantage (from, for example, inheritance).

If the models are correct, wealth tends to trickle up and various factors weigh against against most people, including being born poor, i.e., markets are not fair, and success is not based on just hard work. 

That raises questions: 
1. Are the models just baloney and of no relevance to the real world, e.g., increasing wealth of rich people and entities does not necessarily cause wealth to trickle down?
2. If the models are right, should government help to distribute wealth down to counteract it's innate mathematical tendency to trickle up?
3. Are the scientists right that it is only redistribution by government that sets limits on inequality, or would wealthy interests limit inequality on their own, e.g., in the name of fairness and/or something else?

Footnote:

1. In real life, there's usually or always a caveat(s) or exception(s). In this case, the caveat is the fact markets are a complex adaptive system, discussed here before. That means there necessarily is inherent unpredictability and even models that give great results now can, and must be, be wrong sometime in the future. That does not negate all of the value of (a) short-term predictions, or (b) modeling of data based on the past.  It just injects some caution.

Shifting With the Landscape

Most of our political system is beyond our direct control, so while we might exert some small influence on it, it's usually drowned out overall.

Sure we can vote, but the impact is limited. We can campaign, but it's the same problem: It's bloody difficult to get enough people to agree with much less commit to a thing.

As it happens, our most effective options tend to be right in front of us.

The trick is to play the field. First, use the system rather than trying to change it and you'll often get more mileage out of your effort.

I'll give you some examples:

I'm trans. In my state there have been protections on the books for people like me since 2006. However, starting in 2015 people have been attempting to roll those back. One of the issues is laws around restroom usage. I got my birth certificate changed so any such law would force me into the women's restroom. Given that most people perceive me as a woman, regardless of me being male, this solves the problem for me in perpetuity. I no longer have to worry about such laws.

I'm queer, and I am concerned about the expansion of religion into government, especially with men like Mike Pence so close to the levers of power. One option in front of me is to start a church for queer folx, and lobby for rights using the very same "religious freedom" laws that are used to cast us out.

I don't like paying taxes toward endless wars and enriching the very wealthy. My options are (aside from running afoul of the IRS) to be very rich, or very poor. Very poor is easy enough if you can be comfortable with what you have and you're not inclined to want.

What other ways can you use the existing system in order to get what you want, despite the law?

Any ideas?

Climate Change Today: Not a Natural Cycle

One of the arguments that many climate science deniers use to deny that modern climate change is a man-made problem is to characterize it as just a natural cycle. That argument helps maintain the veneer climate science deniers need to reject or downplay climate change as a serious problem. In a short article, Climate Clincher, Scientific American summarized a paper published in July showing that current climate change is not part of a natural cycle.

Researchers analyzed 210 data sets of various ways to measure temperatures such as lake sediments and glacier ice for the last 2000 years. The results show that the current warming is unlike every past period of warming and cooling because all data sets show warming now everywhere on Earth. In past warming or cooling periods, there were always some indicators showing warming and some showing cooling. The current data shows only warming almost everywhere on Earth’s surface with few areas of cooling. That is unprecedented for the last 2000 years. It constitutes evidence that this period of warming is not part of a natural cycle.

Despite the Climate Clincher title, this data is unlikely to change many, if any, climate science denier minds. This topic is impervious to evidence or logic for people inclined to reject the political implications of anthropogenic climate change. Just as satellite data analysis showed warming to a high degree of confidence changed few or no minds, this new analysis is unlikely to make any noticeable difference in terms of government attitudes or policy. That data showed there is only about a 1-in-3.5 million chance (a ‘five sigma’ level of confidence) that the warming currently observed is due to random chance instead of human activity. That standard of confidence is what physicists require to accept as real a fundamental new finding such as the Higgs boson.

This new data analysis will not turn out to be a climate clincher for people who deny climate science. Nonetheless, for people with the moral courage to actually face reality for what it is, it doesn't hurt to have another bit of evidence that climate science is not making a huge mistake.