Money in Politics
The ever-fascinating Slate Star Codex blog takes up a truly counterintuitive problem: Everyone knows that "extremely large costs and benefits are levied and granted by government". It follows that rational people and organizations will be devoting quite a bit of money -- a substantial fraction of their budgets -- to influencing government to increase their budgets (however they make it).
It turns out that most ways people can do this are fairly well reported in the statistics -- campaign contributions, lobbying expenses, interest organizations, think tanks. SSC tallies all of these up, and it comes to something like $12 billion per year in the United States. That's not chicken feed as an aggregate, but it's only $40 per capita, and basically anybody who is politically active contributes more than that average. Indeed, he notes that the US almond industry sells more than that.
Other lines of evidence point to similar conclusions. Online news and opinion platforms sell at low prices. Opinion magazines charge for both their print and online versions. (If propaganda worked, would they be charging you to see it?) Large corporations report lobbying and contribution numbers that are large in absolute terms but rarely large in terms of their total sales. Even the infamous Koch brothers are evidence -- they're considered quite unusual among rich people in their willingness to spend money on politics, and they seem to be primarily motivated by their beliefs.
In this model, the difference between politics and almonds is that if you spend $2 on almonds, you get $2 worth of almonds. In politics, if you spend $2 on Bernie Sanders, you get nothing, unless millions of other people also spend their $2 on him. People are great at spending money on direct consumption goods, and terrible at spending money on coordination problems.
I don’t want more money in politics. But the same factors that keep money out of politics keep it out of charity too.
It turns out that most ways people can do this are fairly well reported in the statistics -- campaign contributions, lobbying expenses, interest organizations, think tanks. SSC tallies all of these up, and it comes to something like $12 billion per year in the United States. That's not chicken feed as an aggregate, but it's only $40 per capita, and basically anybody who is politically active contributes more than that average. Indeed, he notes that the US almond industry sells more than that.
Other lines of evidence point to similar conclusions. Online news and opinion platforms sell at low prices. Opinion magazines charge for both their print and online versions. (If propaganda worked, would they be charging you to see it?) Large corporations report lobbying and contribution numbers that are large in absolute terms but rarely large in terms of their total sales. Even the infamous Koch brothers are evidence -- they're considered quite unusual among rich people in their willingness to spend money on politics, and they seem to be primarily motivated by their beliefs.
In this model, the difference between politics and almonds is that if you spend $2 on almonds, you get $2 worth of almonds. In politics, if you spend $2 on Bernie Sanders, you get nothing, unless millions of other people also spend their $2 on him. People are great at spending money on direct consumption goods, and terrible at spending money on coordination problems.
I don’t want more money in politics. But the same factors that keep money out of politics keep it out of charity too.