Privatizing Public Lands – Claim your 0.3 acres now!

BLM Public Lands Statistics show that the federal government holds about 643 million acres – about 2 acres for each person.

But what would you really get if these lands were transferred to the states and privatized by sale? Asset sales would distribute land roughly according to the existing distribution of wealth. Here’s how that would look:

The Forbes 400 has a net worth of $2.4 trillion, not quite 3% of US household net worth. If you’re one of those lucky few, your cut would be about 44,000 acres, or 69 square miles.

Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison alone could split Yellowstone National Park (over 2 million acres).

The top 1% wealthiest Americans (35% of net worth) would average 70 acres each, and the next 19% (51% of net worth) would get a little over 5 acres.

The other 80% of America would split the remaining 14% of the land. That’s about a third of an acre each, which would be a good-sized suburban lot, if it weren’t in the middle of Nevada or Alaska.

You can’t even see the average person’s share on a graph, unless you use a logarithmic scale:

landpercaplog

Otherwise, the result just looks ridiculous, even if you ignore the outliers:

landpercap

Remembering Jay Forrester

I’m sad to report that Jay Forrester, pioneer in servo control, digital computing, System Dynamics, global modeling, and education has passed away at the age of 98.

forresterred

I’ve only begun to think about the ways Jay influenced my life, but digging through the archives here I ran across a nice short video clip on Jay’s hope for the future. Jay sounds as prescient as ever, given recent events:

“The coming century, I think, will be dominated by major social, political turmoil. And it will result primarily because people are doing what they think they should do, but do not realize that what they’re doing are causing these problems. So, I think the hope for this coming century is to develop a sufficiently large percentage of the population that have true insight into the nature of the complex systems within which they live.”

I delve into the roots of this thought in Election Reflection (2010).

Here’s a sampling of other Forrester ideas from these pages:

The Law of Attraction

Forrester on the Financial Crisis

Self-generated seasonal cycles

Deeper Lessons

Servo-chicken

Models

Market Growth

Urban Dynamics

Industrial Dynamics

World Dynamics

 

 

 

Dynamics of Term Limits

I am a little encouraged to see that the very top item on Trump’s first 100 day todo list is term limits:

* FIRST, propose a Constitutional Amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress;

Certainly the defects in our electoral and campaign finance system are among the most urgent issues we face.

Assuming other Republicans could be brought on board (which sounds unlikely), would term limits help? I didn’t have a good feel for the implications, so I built a model to clarify my thinking.

I used our new tool, Ventity, because I thought I might want to extend this to multiple voting districts, and because it makes it easy to run several scenarios with one click.

Here’s the setup:

structure

The model runs over a long series of 4000 election cycles. I could just as easily run 40 experiments of 100 cycles or some other combination that yielded a similar sample size, because the behavior is ergodic on any time scale that’s substantially longer than the maximum number of terms typically served.

Each election pits two politicians against one another. Normally, an incumbent faces a challenger. But if the incumbent is term-limited, two challengers face each other.

The electorate assesses the opponents and picks a winner. For challengers, there are two components to voters’ assessment of attractiveness:

  • Intrinsic performance: how well the politician will actually represent voter interests. (This is a tricky concept, because voters may want things that aren’t really in their own best interest.) The model generates challengers with random intrinsic attractiveness, with a standard deviation of 10%.
  • Noise: random disturbances that confuse voter perceptions of true performance, also with a standard deviation of 10% (i.e. it’s hard to tell who’s really good).

Once elected, incumbents have some additional features:

  • The assessment of attractiveness is influenced by an additional term, representing incumbents’ advantages in electability that arise from things that have no intrinsic benefit to voters. For example, incumbents can more easily attract funding and press.
  • Incumbent intrinsic attractiveness can drift. The drift has a random component (i.e. a random walk), with a standard deviation of 5% per term, reflecting changing demographics, technology, etc. There’s also a deterministic drift, which can either be positive (politicians learn to perform better with experience) or negative (power corrupts, or politicians lose touch with voters), defaulting to zero.
  • The random variation influencing voter perceptions is smaller (5%) because it’s easier to observe what incumbents actually do.

There’s always a term limit of some duration active, reflecting life expectancy, but the term limit can be made much shorter.

Here’s how it behaves with a 5-term limit:

terms

Politicians frequently serve out their 5-term limit, but occasionally are ousted early. Over that period, their intrinsic performance varies a lot:

attractiveness

Since the mean challenger has 0 intrinsic attractiveness, politicians outperform the average frequently, but far from universally. Underperforming politicians are often reelected.

Over a long time horizon (or similarly, many districts), you can see how average performance varies with term limits:

long

With no learning, as above, term limits degrade performance a lot (top panel). With a 2-term limit, the margin above random selection is about 6%, whereas it’s twice as great (>12%) with a 10-term limit. This is interesting, because it means that the retention of high-performing politicians improves performance a lot, even if politicians learn nothing from experience.

This advantage holds (but shrinks) even if you double the perception noise in the selection process. So, what does it take to justify term limits? In my experiments so far, politician performance has to degrade with experience (negative learning, corruption or losing touch). Breakeven (2-term limits perform the same as 10-term limits) occurs at -3% to -4% performance change per term.

But in such cases, it’s not really the term limits that are doing the work. When politician performance degrades rapidly with time, voters throw them out. Noise may delay the inevitable, but in my scenario, the average politician serves only 3 terms out of a limit of 10. Reducing the term limit to 1 or 2 does relatively little to change performance.

Upon reflection, I think the model is missing a key feature: winner-takes-all, redistricting and party rules that create safe havens for incompetent incumbents. In a district that’s split 50-50 between brown and yellow, an incompetent brown is easily displaced by a yellow challenger (or vice versa). But if the split is lopsided, it would be rare for a competent yellow challenger to emerge to replace the incompetent yellow incumbent. In such cases, term limits would help somewhat.

I can simulate this by making the advantage of incumbency bigger (raising the saturation advantage parameter):

attractiveness2

However, long terms are a symptom of the problem, not the root cause. Therefore it probably necessary in addition to address redistricting, campaign finance, voter participation and education, and other aspects of the electoral process that give rise to the problem in the first place. I’d argue that this is the single greatest contribution Trump could make.

You can play with the model yourself using the Ventity beta/trial and this model archive:

termlimits4.zip