Hey all, I just wanted to send my love out to anyone watching this still. There's a lot of pain and fear in this country today - I share it - and I hope this channel can be a source of joy and comfort in difficult times.
People who don't live in swing states. I understand that our votes despite what this video might say are irrelevant...to the presidential race. Guys, the senate and house matters A LOT.
So much that the damage from the latest hurricane isn't show on the news or how FEMA is loaning people 750 dollars as help and they say that they'll get them back when they get the insurance on the house in an area where none take flood insurance 😅 All I'm saying is this is some Obama during the swine flu kinda reporting. All because corpos have already started picking and choosing what a voter might know. I'm saying this to assure you that the corpos are making sure you will vote if you vote with them . They already made the calculations and have already invested into outreach
For a simplified cash-only calculation, this isn't bad. It glosses over all the non-money and existential issues that elections effect, like creating or evaporating industries, changing criminality, or more personal/petty/pride things.
Now what about the money spent on campaigning, though? It's like less than $100 per person, so how can our votes be valued so much less by the people running for office than for ourselves?
I'm pinning this, because I've thought about this, and I'm curious what other people make of it. One thing that occurs to me is that perhaps the people/corporations with the truly deep pockets are acting on more selfish motives. Also, expected value has some paradoxes associated with it, like the St. Petersburg paradox. Fundamentally, the point that I was trying to make in the video was that the probability of your vote being decisive is higher than you might think, especially when compared with the staggering amount of government spending involved.
The issue is, a) the money is aimed at swing voters, and b) I think there was an overestimate of the range in spending. Take Pennsylvania, for example. It's got the most money aimed at it, at about $954 million in campaigning. About, say, 5 percent of voters are swing voters, and assuming turnout's the same as last election, you've got 140,000 voters, and that works out to $6900 per swing voter spent. Even factoring in the chance of about 30% that Pennsylvania is decisive, you've got $2000 per swing voter. The other thing there is that there was an assumption that all years are created equal - they're not, it's obvious there will be more spending in an election year, to bribe the voters - and that the 2009 bailout was a political decision. Those two things sway the data massively, pulling up the money behind your vote a lot. That makes $2000 per swing voter seem somewhat realistic. And if you're not a swing voter in a swing state, your vote doesn't really matter. I would say that 20-25% of voters live in swing states, meaning that there's only about a 1% chance you even have a chance at being the deciding vote, and that chance if you make it past the first round of ineligibility is still low.
One reason might be that the money isn't going directly into the winners' pockets after they win, the winner has to spend the money altruistically (or pretend to at least).
I don't think that lobbying orgs/PACs/candidates would invest in campaigning unless it was substantially likely to produce a profit. Individual campaigns only have so many funds available, so they can't spend it to this degree - they can only spend as much as possible where it is as profitable as possible. PACs do the same, but they are less altruistic and only care about the interests of their donors. Lobbiers are even less altruistic, and they only care about their own material interests.
Campaigning is really only for swing states. Also, I don't think that it's representative of what they think the value of your vote is. There's only so much you can do before it's just annoying.
With the drastic rollback of worker protection, the massive tax cuts on the wealthy, the removal of environmental protections, the extreme restriction of access to healthcare, and many other terrible things proposed by Project 2025, you'll definitely experience more than $20k of harm in your lifetime if we let the Republicans get power. And even if you personally don't, so many other people will. Is that an ethically worthwhile trade to you?
For people in the comments who are talking about not being in a swing state, consider the following: Your vote instead of an immediate withdrawl is an investment to make the state more swing-y, the more swingy the election, the greater incentive for politicians to increase their rewards to the state, meanwhile if your election is safe, it is a rational strategy for the politician to not pledge any benefits to you and likely will give you nothing hence. Therefore, while your vote might not determine the election, there is an additional factor to consider of transforming the state into a swing state by contrarian voting, the probability of this is at a lower threshold and therefore more plausible to work and give value to your votes in future.
what do you expect people vote against their party just to decive politicians into think it's a swing state remember when your vote is significant you wouldn't betray you party and that would make politicians cater to the opposing party.
@@cf6755 I don't expect it en masse, most people are cattel and guided to their herd. I do suggest it however individually, for your personal ends. If you do not have personal ends and instead follow a party dogma, that is your perogative, to which has it's own place. In such a case however, this video is useless for you, your vote has already been guranteed and lost most of it's value.
Tough luck for the people who already want to vote for the minority party in their state. Also, I personally care about "my party" winning, so why would I want to make my party "waste" money on campaigning in my state when the only reason it looks "swingy" is my contrarian vote (which I would withdraw back to my party as soon as I started to feel that my state became too "swingy")? This factor only really makes it a valid strategy for undecided voters.
You did a linear regression of spending vs year, and then looked at the variation about that trend. But why not do linear regression of that deviation against the political party in office? That would indicate what changes in spending (if any) is predictably linked to a particular party, which I think is a much better numerator for your expected value -- if we assume all candidates follow a 'party line' that includes spending, this is the amount of spending that will change depending on which party takes office. I'm a bit surprised you _didn't_ do this, it really felt like you were building up to it.
I don't know for sure, but I assume this is because the amount of money a ruling party spends or cuts is highly dependent on outside factors. Also, political priorities shift overtime, and depend heavily on the administration rather than the party.
I looked into this idea, but as I said, the budget is so so complicated. Spending orchestrated by one party may continue to happen for many years after that party has left office. The point of this video was really to get a sense of scale, and I feel that the standard error given a decent sense of the wiggle room involved. It's not perfect, but I think perfect here is impossible.
@@marcevanstein That shouldn't factor into your analysis because that spending is not influenced by one's current vote. By that logic, every vote is worth infinity (under the assumption that the US doesn't ever fall), since every administration institutes programs with ongoing budgets.
@@michaelleue7594 A: the programs won't run truly forever. ...I would hope. Otherwise the US budget will continue growing to infinity. B: Assume that X amount of money is in long-running programs. In one year one party had the power to put those into place. Not the same year for every program, but they all had one year they originated from. In that sense they're exactly the same as the budget decisions that are decided anew from year to year. Thus: The only factor that actually matters is if a program was bi-partisan (in which case you can argue that it would have passed under either party and isn't on the line).
@@Pystro The point is to be consistent with one's axioms. If we model government spending as exponential, then yeah, it goes to infinity over an indefinite amount of time, regardless of whether or not that would be the actual truth. You can't assign a finite value to a vote based on that logic. So we instead have an axiom in the model that says we don't account for spending after the given term is over. But that axiom still has consequences for the model. You can't just ignore it when it feels wrong. Either fix the axiom or fix the conclusion.
What your video really does is try to find how much voting should be worth to an individual. The flip side is how much is your vote worth to others, and that can be found by campaign spending. It’s supply and demand. I’m genuinely curious how the two numbers compare.
Your argument is that the vote of a voter in a swing state is worth 100 times more than that of a voter in a non swing state (100-ish in NY vs 10k in GA). I would argue that this is a terrible assumption - the GA vote is worth way more than 100x a NY vote. I'll buy the idea of a GA vote being worth 10k, but a NY vote, I wouldn't even pay a penny for that. The non-swing states are not worthless, but their value is already baked into the baseline results. They only gain value if the state becomes swingy, and only to the extent that its swinginess is important.
There's a relevant footnote in one of the papers: ""The t distribution with 4 df is commonly used as a robust alternative to the normal (Lange, Little, and Taylor 1989); we use it here to allow for the possibility of unanticipated shocks. Using the t instead of the normal has little effect on the probability of a decisive vote in close states, but it moderates the results in states farther from the national median, for example, changing the estimated probability of decisiveness in the District of Columbia from 5e-85 to 2e-12, in Utah from 9e-16 to 2e-10, but changing the estimate in Ohio only from 3.4e-8 to 3.1e-8"" It seems that they are choosing a t distribution (which falls off less away from the mean) to account for the possibility of something like a large, state-specific unexpected shock. Not sure what that would look like though
a) if you buy (or suppress) enough votes, every state becomes swingy B) the way the researchers model polls is using statistical distributions with some explicit distribution. That distribution tries to account for all possibilities, even black swan events, which could drastically change outcomes
Merch idea... expand your math for each state individually. (The degree to which a state is pivotal.) Make yard sign PDF templates ... Does not even need to be partisan. Just a sign that describes the state's vote value. I'm in NC... not quite solid, not swing. What's my vote wortth?
I find it hard to believe a New Yorker's vote is still worth that much money. After all, suppose a vote in that state did barely decide the statewide election. For that to happen, the swing states would've had to have already swung the same way as New York but by very high margins, so did that voter *really* influence the national election?
I mean, there could be a localized swing effect due to pressures within a certain state. We actually saw New York shift heavily Republican in 2022, funnily enough, even though nearly every swing state shifted more democratic. While these shifts are probably more dramatic in midterms rather than general elections, I could think of a few scenarios where New York actually votes Republican due to some massive statewide crisis.
This also does not account for the fact that your individual vote swinging the election is also not the ONLY way you have impact. Your singular vote may not sway a campaign, but you are part of a group, a demographic, and politics don't happen ij the individual, but in the public. The public has a value, and so, everyone there has their individual value.
the answer is: if you're a voter in a non swing state your vote is worth almost nothing, if you're a voter in a swing state your vote is worth a whole lot
This is soo interesting. However i have one big issue with all this. Politics isn’t just about the budget. A lot of it is about nearly unmeasurable but important policy changes. A gun ban might never show up in a budget but it will have impact on each and every person both measurable and unmeasurable. Some of these will show up in more free money-say medicare and policing-but many won’t show up on the budget at all-think higher productivity due to lower child mortality.
He mentioned in the video that this is a calculation of the pure minimum immediate impact. It would be hard to calculate the real impact but it's certainly larger
my state has prediction markets putting the odds of one candidate winning at 98% - my vote matters 25x less than it would in a swing state a few years ago the candidate for the house of representatives ran unopposed, so... basically 0 value
In a state like this, primaries are much more significant. Voting in a primary can bring the candidate of the dominant party closer to what you might like. Sure, it's not gonna solve anything and get a perfect candidate, but it'll definitely prevent people you can't stand from getting into office.
It's worth noting that the prediction market is implicitly including the risk of an increased voter turnout, and by such a value of 98% is stating that there *won't* be an increase. If you want to prove that wrong, there's an easy and free way to do that -- vote regardless of the prediction markets.
I live in Pennsylvania, and in a swing congressional district to boot. I'm not voting (because both sides are 100% evil) but I wish I could sell you my vote lol.
@@bonecanoe86 I know you probably have heard this a million times and all but, as a queer person, please vote for kamala harris. I know the dems suck but they at least don't want me "eradicated from public life."
One of the assumptions you make is that only the direct economic effects are taken into account, that is why you have the "sociopath asterisk", if you take indirect economic effects into account, it might be that your vote also gets a bump from your cohort's extra spending.
Pausing after the intro because it seems like you've made a classic mistake of assuming that scale doesn't matter, based on how you take the 10:1 ratio. The problem is that how life changes doesn't scale linearly. $1000 can be life-changing, and i don't think I'd ever pass up on that to give a neighbor $10,000 or even $100,000. Like yeah, I'd pass up on a bowl of pho to give a neighbor a dentist bill or an airplane flight. But would I give up an entire doctor visit to give someone else a month rent? Would I give up a month's rent so a random stranger could get a car? Those are very different kinds of questions.
Definitely a valid point! In another comment, someone said that they feel like it's more of a square root, which I thought was interesting. Also, different people have different scales when it comes to money. For one person, $5 could be the difference between eating tonight or not, whereas for another person it could be insignificant. In the end, everything to do with economics is a grossly oversimplified model of human behavior. Which isn't to say it can't be a useful model, but it's definitely not the ground truth.
Came to say that, giving up 10 bucks so that my neighbour gets 100 is fine, but if you offered me a million dollars or an option for my neighbour to get 10 million I am taking my mill and not thinking twice about it. Square root seems like it could work well though.
@@marcevansteinfunnily enough- you get a square root if you assume a constant ratio of utility rather than cash, and you use log utility functions. And log utility is actually pretty standard because it solves a sensible sounding differential equation (also because nice to work with to be fair). So maybe the random square root dude is onto something!
This did not take into account indifference of spending on some of these things. While I can agree that this would be a decent assessment of the value of a vote if "give 1 trillion to random people in the US or not" was at stake, it does not take into account that the voter will not agree with all 1 trillion dollars being spent the way the party spends it - you may only agree with 40% of one partie's positions and 45% of the other party. This would instantly reduce the value of the money for you to 1/20. It also does not account for the fact that you may not value the distribution 1:1 - e.g. "100$ to social security" vs "100$ to public education" might be a 100:95 value evaluation for you - and almost nothing will ever be a 100:0 evaluation for you. One other thing that is not accounted for is also the general inefficiency of state-ran facilities. Take charity efficiency indices for example. They never truly run at 100%. I don't know what the fficiency index is for the government, but this will be another reducing factor. (I'm just gonna randomly guess it's around 60%) Lastly, just personally speaking, if it was 10$ to me or 10$ to a stranger, I'd easily pick the 100$. Maybe at 1$ I'd change my mind. Overall, all these factors would reduce the value of the vote for me to 0.05 * 0.05 * 0.6 * 0.1 of the value you mentioned, so 0.05 * 0.05 * 0.6 * 0.1 * 1700$ = 25cents for me.
I definitely agree with the criticism that a voter may not 100% agree with the party's fund choices, but I think the efficiency criticism falls a bit flat. If I make a $100 charitable deduction, I don't consider it as being worth less than $100 if it's not used efficiently, it's still a $100 contribution. Imo one of the best things we could do would be to directly detail to taxpayers what their money is spent on. It would help keep government spending accountable since people would feel more personally responsibility for what their funds were used on, but also if done well it would also help people feel like their money was actually used for something good (though that does hinge on the money actually being used for something good)
10:44 A good approximation for n! is sqrt(2πn)*(n/e)^n. (Stirling's approximation) Put that in the formula and, for 2n coins, it becomes C(2n,n)/2^2n = (2n)!/(n!)²/2^2n. If you replace the factorial with its approximation, it becomes (sqrt(4πn)(2n/e)^2n)/(sqrt(2πn)²*(n/e)^2n*(2^n)²). Lets solve some terms. sqrt(4πn)/sqrt(2πn)^² = sqrt(4πn/4π²n²) = sqrt(1/πn) (2n/e)^2n/(n/e)^2n = 2^2n, dividing by the (2^n)² in the bottom, it goes to 1/πn, but since 2n is the original number of coins, it's sqrt(2/π2n).
I think there's a value here that you're not accounting for, namely that your vote still influences the actions of politicians, even the ones you didn't vote for. This is why republicans who win in blue states are relatively moderate, because they are influenced by the threat of all the people who voted against them.
Clicking on this video, I thought it was going to be like: “the dems spent x dollars on advertising and swung y votes so your vote is x/y” but it was so much better ❤
When measuring the amount of money at stake, I would only look at the change of money that the candidates would make rather than the whole money supply. For example, if the left wing candidate would increase healthcare spending by 5%, while the right wing candidate would decrease spending by 2%, then you should only consider the money within that 7% change rather than the entire amount of money going to healthcare. Secondly, taxes are a big part of this and that probably should have been mentioned more. Changes in taxes affect individuals significantly and so would make this calculation vary much more from person to person. On top of that, money that isn't taxed affects the economy in ways that are hard to measure, and so how it would affect the numerator would be difficult to quantify. On the other hand, the majority of voters tend to vote for the same party, and thus in a probability calculation, their votes can be assumed. This means that a lower number of voters would matter for the election. This will make swing state votes have an even stronger effect on elections while making non-swing state votes matter even less. It would be interesting to see how this would affect the national average however. Finally, there is also a point to be made about local elections amd state elections. The money at stake is way smaller, but the effect of your vote is also way higher, so it would be interesting to see how the value of this differs compared to the national election. Looking at elections in other countries would also be interesting.
But what about cnsidering it from a corperate perspective, what about just changing where money is spent, say instead of buying some fleet vehicles from ford you get them from chevrolet, or even say military contracts.
4 year federal expenditure from 2020-2023 totaled about 25.776 trillion, voter turnout was 158,429,631, 25,776,000,000,000/158,429,631 equals $162,696.83.
It's not about buying votes, it's about buying enough votes. The value is determined by the competition if we also consider the other party buying votes.
This was once again a fantastic video from this channel! Really puts things into perspective & hope it will motivate people to join us in phone banking for a better tomorrow.
What I'm getting from this is that Florida was -$18.6 million- dollars away from a tie in 2000. correction: 268.5 votes (how many people would need to flip) * 0.9169% (government spending variation compared to GDP) * $10.25 trillion (GDP) * 2 (it can go both ways) * 2 (next time you can change your choice) / 30 million (chance that your vote will decide the election in Florida) = $35,296,920.50 Or, 3.5 million dollars if you scale for greediness.
Just because the budget has a variation of roughly 1% of the GDP, that doesn't mean that the difference between a red president and a blue president will be 1% of the GDP. How much of that 1% variation is due to random noise and how much of that is due to deliberate policy changes? Would it be better to separate the red terms and blue terms and compare them to each other?
Apparently in the last 70 years only 1 of the recessions occurred under a democrat, and businesses/stocks generally perform better. So democrats can have more money to play around with, but then can also get slammed with the bill when republicans run up the tab (as happened with all the trickle down tax cuts which increased the deficit).
2:25 Assumption 4 is not an reasonable assumption, and that is probably driving the value up by orders of magnitude. Legislative branch is a much larger impact on spending and you can only influence the ones from your state so an average 2% of them...
If Elon Must held a vote of 1 person to decide if he is going to spend 1 billion on a new boat, the vote would not be worth 1 billion just because 1 billion is at stake.
I'd be interested in how much having a somewhat known partisan split in a state effects that value. If you know that the known preference is split 60-40 or 55-45 instead of a coin flip, how much does that change the value of your vote? My intuitive guess is that even a small partisan slant (even a small one like 52-48) greatly de-values your vote - but like you mention, our intuition on these sorts of statistics and large numbers isn't necessarily very good.
4:44 There's a problem with this logic. While yes, I would agree that I'd rather give 100$ to a random person than take approxiamtely 10$, If it was with higher numbers, like 100,000$ or 1,000,000$, I am absolutely taking the 100 grand, sorry neighbour. The larger the quantity of money, just like the disparity between the 2 quantities (and other factors of course), can change my decision.
I’m taking a statistics class in grad school and it tends to kick everyone’s butts, but it was cool to see some of the things we talk about there used in this video. Also, the swing at the end to music on a mobius strip is crazy.
I have always found the premise to be silly. Your vote isn't valuable only if it swings the election. Otherwise all votes are worthless unless the election is decided by one vote, which is clearly not a good approximation. Your vote should be valued as something like: election value / estimated # votes above 50%
I have a question. Will it not be the case that both candidates want to spend money in ways you disagree with? So if let’s say both candidates spend an equal amount of things you agree with and things you disagree with then the expected value of either of them winning would be the same so your vote would be worth nothing.
I love how the video is all nuanced and telling us the numbers are just best guesses based on imperfect models and the video title states confindently that it's an exact number :)
I guess I'm just going to point things out as I see them. 1) If the value of your vote is dispersed to other people, then the value of their votes are dispersed to you as well. Statistically, this all averages out, so it doesn't need to be accounted for. 2) Why limit by category in the budget? What you should do is calculate variance on the basis of which party is in power in any given year (using ANOVA), adjust for average growth, and ignore categories entirely. 3) You aren't interested in the total variance, you're interested in the variance on the basis of who is in political power. The first number is likely to be enormous compared to the latter, so this is probably an analysis-defining error. 4) You shouldn't multiply by two if you're only accounting for the value of the presidential vote. It should be by four. 5) It isn't reasonable to assume people vote randomly, so you can't build a random variable for the probability of your vote making a difference that way. Most votes (and non-votes) are decided and calcified completely before any random influence can affect them. 6) There's a difference between saying "every" person's vote would be worth a trillion, and "the first" person's vote will be worth a trillion. After the first person's vote is bought, the value of every other vote goes down accordingly.
The problem with not counting each sector separately is bigger than it seems. With 2 candidates, one spends money somewhere where the other doesn't, but the other too. You are basically counting only with national debt
2:03 DAMN I WAS NEARLY DEAD ON! I thought "Okay, 500 billion is 500,000 million, so you have 500,000 / 17, which is basically 500,000 / 20 so that's 50k / 2 = 25k, and then add some back on because you're not dividing by quite that much so...~$30k?"
Suppose there is a referendum on a social choice with two options: A and B. Option A would cost every member of society $10,000. Option B would have no effect on anyone. How much is your vote worth? That depends on the probability that your vote will change the outcome of the election. It is impossible to say what the probability is, but it is typically very small. Let’s say there is a one in a million chance that your vote will change the outcome. In that case, the expected utility of voting for B versus A is one penny.
I think the more accurate way to measure the value of a vote is to measure the amount of spending on political advertising in a state and divide it by that state's population (if you believe in an efficient market)
I wouldn't say divide by population. Better divide by undecided voters. Population also includes people without voting rights (children, criminals, mentally unsound people) and people who don't (want) to vote. You can also exclude decided voters, so about 80% of voters
On the other hand, the fact that a vote in a swing state is somehow worth 2 orders of magnitude higher than a vote in a non - swing state really illustrates the problem with the electoral college
the federal gov does more than spend, it makes things illegal and legal, which has a gigantic monetary value. and even so, you wouldnt need to surrender your vote provided the winner holds similar values, youd only be paying for the differences. that reduces the value of your vote by a ton.
The numerator is way too high. Even if the worse side wins, they are not embezzling 100% of the budget. I'd suggest an estimate that the worse side apends money 5% less efficiently for the public good, making the value of my vote 20x less. Then, if I'm less than 100% confident about which side is the worse side, the value goes down further. A good way to sanity check your numbers is to compare to how much money is actually being spent on votes through campaigning, etc.
4:20 Honestly, I hardly even have a use for the money myself. I'd rather my neighbor have $100 than me have $599.99. If you offer me more than $599.99, I would give in, since that ($600) is pretty helpful.
@@moosey7165I agree. Though we absolutely should Make voting completely free and a national holiday. (By free I mean CONPLETELY free, as in if ID's are required then ID's must become free) anything else hinders the poorest communities ability to vote, not to mention how much making the day a holiday will help with working class peoples ability to vote.
Also, phonebanking really is not that bad. I have very, very bad social anxiety, but when you get into the swing (ha) of things, it can actually be really fun. Most people you talk to will be nice, and if you phonebank with a group like Progressive Victory, you can talk about the bad calls and get through it together.
SUPERFICIAL AND INCORRECT VIDEO. The real formula is = [ comparative advantage of your preferred candidate vs. other candidates * the probability that your assessment was correct (repeat and integrate for all possible future scenarios weighted by likelyhood) ] * the probability of your single vote making a deference = The worth of your vote. So basically, never vote.
Imagine government spending was fixed year to year and did not depend on party. Your logic would lead to the conclusion that each vote is worthless. This implies to me that your method of finding the value is incorrect. Looking at campaign donations would give you a sort of market estimate of the value of being elected. Another idea is that a company's value is rooted in the control of free cash flows. So looking at the controlable budget of the US does make sense as the value of being elected. To make it more complicated this has to be looked at on a time duration, based on the influence on and value of future cash flows
Yes there are a million different ways this model could be changed to represent more things. It’s far more complicated than this model could represent, he admitted that many times throughout the video. The important part is that no one can predict the future, so we should do what we can to protect it when there is a reasonable chance that the payoff is worth the price. This video does an excellent job proving that your vote is meaningful empirically.
Because I don't see anyone talking about it I have to say the background music throughout this video is amazing! Its totally unnecessary with the topic you're talking about and you don't draw any attention to it in the video so I have to say how cool it is! It feels like the music is speaking as part of the content while not getting in the way of the content. It really helps elevate this video and put it on another level. I hope its not lost on us how neat and how creative it is.
I'm always so happy when people notice this; I make the background music for all of these video essays, and it's almost always some sort of procedural thing that relates to the content. In this case, it was based on a single line that flips randomly (coin flips!) between two notes, changing the resulting harmony depending on how it lands, which is a kind of metaphor for the single vote flipping the result of the election.
Probably a good way to determine how much a vote worth is to look at how much politicians pay for it, because after all they basically have to buy votes with campaign money. Divide the amount of money spent on campaigns by the number of voters and I think that would be a pretty good valuation.
This was great! A timely point well made and the standard error on a GDP adjusted regression is an inspired proxy for order of magnitude government policy!
I don't know if it's because I'm Brazilian but I was expecting an answer in terms of how much I should sell my vote to a politician for in terms of how much they'll get paid if they win. Instead it's more about justifying cold calling people about things they already know.
12:19 I’m pretty sure that if the margin of votes in [a state that decides who won (that is, the winner depends on how the state voted)] that determined who won is [0.5% of (the population or the population there that voted, I can’t remember)], they do a recount or redo to account for error in counting, but I don’t know. I heard about something vaguely like it in a metaculus question.
I feel like the actual way to value a vote is to suppose all people in a state agreed to sell their vote for $X and ask what price would X have to be to cause wealthy people/corporations to start buying votes in each state? Each person/corporation would probably have their own number based on how much they care and how much money they could save with the correct president. Not just taking budget variations and dividing by the chance of a single swing vote.
The cost would really depend on who is buying my vote. If it was just a centrist then 1700 would probably be enough. If it was a far right uncanny creep then the price will be close to infinity.
wouldn't a better metric be. Total amount of votes difference times 2 (to account the probability of paying someone who was already voting that way), divided by the amount spent on campaigning. That would be really close to the amount of money someone campaigning would be willing to pay you. Given that if no one would paid the amount you say, you can't valuate it as it, because price not always translate to value nor possible value addition.
Something here doesn't add up/will never add up simply because of the distribution of that money/spending and how hard counting what all of that is worth/going. It ends up being, a small minority of people's votes are worth astronomical amounts, possibly billions, while the majority is worth quite literally nothing. I don't have numerical proof of this, but the statement I made matches my observation on both small and large scales where power is not uniformly distributed. I would be curious of other possible explanations of that trend. One criticism I do have of the actual video was not analyzing the differences between democrat and republican candidates and determining the deviation of the linear regressions of each president to determine a range of difference between voting in a republican vs democrat. I really thought that's what would happen and was a little disappointed that didn't happen. But otherwise banger video! Was very engaging.
Yes, it may be over-counting in some ways, but I think for the reasons I explained in the video, it's significantly under-counting as well. The point was to get a sense of scale. I'm interested in looking into campaign spend too, but I think it may measure something a little different. Value to the voter and value to the campaign may not be the same.
14:15 Keep in mind that canvassing is rarely about convincing people to vote one way or another. It's about reminding people to register to vote at all or check their registration to make sure they didn't get purged by Republican fascists right before an election. Instead of thinking of it as adding one or two votes to the pile, think of it as negating hundreds of negative votes that would have otherwise lowered turnout, one of the largest deciding factors in elections, lower turnouts are favorable to the minority party, aka the GOP.
Thank you for keeping this fun math video relatively a-political till the end. But because of the end... thank you for telling me my vote for red in a blue state is worth $100.
If I was the only person who was getting offered $1730 to change my vote, then sure. But if I knew that there was a billionaire shelling out millions of dollars to sway thousands of voters, boy that changes. In a normal election, I would probably need 10k, and for this one I would not move for less than 500k. That's my instinctive feeling, but the numbers actually makes sense if we're betting with the downfall of the entire country. I can't believe people are still joking in the comments that they would love that kind of money just to change their vote. The whole point is that your vote absolutely does matter and is worth a lot.
Hey all, I just wanted to send my love out to anyone watching this still. There's a lot of pain and fear in this country today - I share it - and I hope this channel can be a source of joy and comfort in difficult times.
Get in the crystal liberal
People who don't live in swing states. I understand that our votes despite what this video might say are irrelevant...to the presidential race. Guys, the senate and house matters A LOT.
I should have said this in the video!!!!!
The electoral college makes the popular vote essentially irrelevant
So much that the damage from the latest hurricane isn't show on the news or how FEMA is loaning people 750 dollars as help and they say that they'll get them back when they get the insurance on the house in an area where none take flood insurance 😅
All I'm saying is this is some Obama during the swine flu kinda reporting.
All because corpos have already started picking and choosing what a voter might know.
I'm saying this to assure you that the corpos are making sure you will vote if you vote with them .
They already made the calculations and have already invested into outreach
Let's also not forget state and local elections. They may be smaller budgets, but the odds of your vote being the decider are greater so it evens out.
@@butterflyfx57 Municipal elections also have the most real impact on your daily life.
For a simplified cash-only calculation, this isn't bad. It glosses over all the non-money and existential issues that elections effect, like creating or evaporating industries, changing criminality, or more personal/petty/pride things.
"Creating and evaporating industries" - so true, and a big multiplier effect!
Now what about the money spent on campaigning, though? It's like less than $100 per person, so how can our votes be valued so much less by the people running for office than for ourselves?
I'm pinning this, because I've thought about this, and I'm curious what other people make of it. One thing that occurs to me is that perhaps the people/corporations with the truly deep pockets are acting on more selfish motives. Also, expected value has some paradoxes associated with it, like the St. Petersburg paradox.
Fundamentally, the point that I was trying to make in the video was that the probability of your vote being decisive is higher than you might think, especially when compared with the staggering amount of government spending involved.
The issue is, a) the money is aimed at swing voters, and b) I think there was an overestimate of the range in spending. Take Pennsylvania, for example. It's got the most money aimed at it, at about $954 million in campaigning. About, say, 5 percent of voters are swing voters, and assuming turnout's the same as last election, you've got 140,000 voters, and that works out to $6900 per swing voter spent. Even factoring in the chance of about 30% that Pennsylvania is decisive, you've got $2000 per swing voter. The other thing there is that there was an assumption that all years are created equal - they're not, it's obvious there will be more spending in an election year, to bribe the voters - and that the 2009 bailout was a political decision. Those two things sway the data massively, pulling up the money behind your vote a lot. That makes $2000 per swing voter seem somewhat realistic.
And if you're not a swing voter in a swing state, your vote doesn't really matter. I would say that 20-25% of voters live in swing states, meaning that there's only about a 1% chance you even have a chance at being the deciding vote, and that chance if you make it past the first round of ineligibility is still low.
One reason might be that the money isn't going directly into the winners' pockets after they win, the winner has to spend the money altruistically (or pretend to at least).
I don't think that lobbying orgs/PACs/candidates would invest in campaigning unless it was substantially likely to produce a profit. Individual campaigns only have so many funds available, so they can't spend it to this degree - they can only spend as much as possible where it is as profitable as possible. PACs do the same, but they are less altruistic and only care about the interests of their donors. Lobbiers are even less altruistic, and they only care about their own material interests.
Campaigning is really only for swing states. Also, I don't think that it's representative of what they think the value of your vote is. There's only so much you can do before it's just annoying.
Soooo anyone wanna pay me $20k to swap my vote from D to R in Michigan?
Dont do it
With the drastic rollback of worker protection, the massive tax cuts on the wealthy, the removal of environmental protections, the extreme restriction of access to healthcare, and many other terrible things proposed by Project 2025, you'll definitely experience more than $20k of harm in your lifetime if we let the Republicans get power. And even if you personally don't, so many other people will. Is that an ethically worthwhile trade to you?
@@fabianstohr1080 no this is great. they get a megarich republican donor to buy em out, then call the police and get a republican donor to be arrested
Donald to Ronald?
@@Heligoland360 yeah, Donald Duck to Ronald McDonald. i say vote duck no matter fuck
For people in the comments who are talking about not being in a swing state, consider the following:
Your vote instead of an immediate withdrawl is an investment to make the state more swing-y, the more swingy the election, the greater incentive for politicians to increase their rewards to the state, meanwhile if your election is safe, it is a rational strategy for the politician to not pledge any benefits to you and likely will give you nothing hence.
Therefore, while your vote might not determine the election, there is an additional factor to consider of transforming the state into a swing state by contrarian voting, the probability of this is at a lower threshold and therefore more plausible to work and give value to your votes in future.
what do you expect people vote against their party just to decive politicians into think it's a swing state remember when your vote is significant you wouldn't betray you party and that would make politicians cater to the opposing party.
@@cf6755 I don't expect it en masse, most people are cattel and guided to their herd.
I do suggest it however individually, for your personal ends.
If you do not have personal ends and instead follow a party dogma, that is your perogative, to which has it's own place. In such a case however, this video is useless for you, your vote has already been guranteed and lost most of it's value.
@@cf6755 You should not "have a party" That is sheep mentality, you should decide which one you vote individually each time.
Tough luck for the people who already want to vote for the minority party in their state.
Also, I personally care about "my party" winning, so why would I want to make my party "waste" money on campaigning in my state when the only reason it looks "swingy" is my contrarian vote (which I would withdraw back to my party as soon as I started to feel that my state became too "swingy")? This factor only really makes it a valid strategy for undecided voters.
You did a linear regression of spending vs year, and then looked at the variation about that trend. But why not do linear regression of that deviation against the political party in office? That would indicate what changes in spending (if any) is predictably linked to a particular party, which I think is a much better numerator for your expected value -- if we assume all candidates follow a 'party line' that includes spending, this is the amount of spending that will change depending on which party takes office. I'm a bit surprised you _didn't_ do this, it really felt like you were building up to it.
I don't know for sure, but I assume this is because the amount of money a ruling party spends or cuts is highly dependent on outside factors. Also, political priorities shift overtime, and depend heavily on the administration rather than the party.
I looked into this idea, but as I said, the budget is so so complicated. Spending orchestrated by one party may continue to happen for many years after that party has left office. The point of this video was really to get a sense of scale, and I feel that the standard error given a decent sense of the wiggle room involved. It's not perfect, but I think perfect here is impossible.
@@marcevanstein That shouldn't factor into your analysis because that spending is not influenced by one's current vote. By that logic, every vote is worth infinity (under the assumption that the US doesn't ever fall), since every administration institutes programs with ongoing budgets.
@@michaelleue7594 A: the programs won't run truly forever. ...I would hope. Otherwise the US budget will continue growing to infinity.
B: Assume that X amount of money is in long-running programs. In one year one party had the power to put those into place. Not the same year for every program, but they all had one year they originated from. In that sense they're exactly the same as the budget decisions that are decided anew from year to year.
Thus: The only factor that actually matters is if a program was bi-partisan (in which case you can argue that it would have passed under either party and isn't on the line).
@@Pystro The point is to be consistent with one's axioms. If we model government spending as exponential, then yeah, it goes to infinity over an indefinite amount of time, regardless of whether or not that would be the actual truth. You can't assign a finite value to a vote based on that logic. So we instead have an axiom in the model that says we don't account for spending after the given term is over. But that axiom still has consequences for the model. You can't just ignore it when it feels wrong. Either fix the axiom or fix the conclusion.
What your video really does is try to find how much voting should be worth to an individual. The flip side is how much is your vote worth to others, and that can be found by campaign spending. It’s supply and demand. I’m genuinely curious how the two numbers compare.
Your argument is that the vote of a voter in a swing state is worth 100 times more than that of a voter in a non swing state (100-ish in NY vs 10k in GA). I would argue that this is a terrible assumption - the GA vote is worth way more than 100x a NY vote. I'll buy the idea of a GA vote being worth 10k, but a NY vote, I wouldn't even pay a penny for that. The non-swing states are not worthless, but their value is already baked into the baseline results. They only gain value if the state becomes swingy, and only to the extent that its swinginess is important.
There's a relevant footnote in one of the papers: ""The t distribution with 4 df is commonly used
as a robust alternative to the normal (Lange, Little, and Taylor 1989); we use it here to allow for the possibility
of unanticipated shocks. Using the t instead of the normal has little effect on the probability of a decisive vote in close
states, but it moderates the results in states farther from the national median, for example, changing the estimated
probability of decisiveness in the District of Columbia from 5e-85 to 2e-12, in Utah from 9e-16 to 2e-10, but changing
the estimate in Ohio only from 3.4e-8 to 3.1e-8""
It seems that they are choosing a t distribution (which falls off less away from the mean) to account for the possibility of something like a large, state-specific unexpected shock. Not sure what that would look like though
That is if you are only allowed to buy one vote. If you can buy any number at that same price, that is quite complicated.
a) if you buy (or suppress) enough votes, every state becomes swingy
B) the way the researchers model polls is using statistical distributions with some explicit distribution. That distribution tries to account for all possibilities, even black swan events, which could drastically change outcomes
@@marcevanstein oregon getting two red delegates is what that would look like probably
Can you rewrite that response with just words plz OP
Merch idea... expand your math for each state individually. (The degree to which a state is pivotal.) Make yard sign PDF templates ... Does not even need to be partisan. Just a sign that describes the state's vote value. I'm in NC... not quite solid, not swing. What's my vote wortth?
Lowkey a good idea, it would definitely cause more people to vote too
I find it hard to believe a New Yorker's vote is still worth that much money. After all, suppose a vote in that state did barely decide the statewide election. For that to happen, the swing states would've had to have already swung the same way as New York but by very high margins, so did that voter *really* influence the national election?
Yeah you're right, a 50/50 new york vote means so many other states have swung crazily to the R
I mean, there could be a localized swing effect due to pressures within a certain state. We actually saw New York shift heavily Republican in 2022, funnily enough, even though nearly every swing state shifted more democratic. While these shifts are probably more dramatic in midterms rather than general elections, I could think of a few scenarios where New York actually votes Republican due to some massive statewide crisis.
This also does not account for the fact that your individual vote swinging the election is also not the ONLY way you have impact. Your singular vote may not sway a campaign, but you are part of a group, a demographic, and politics don't happen ij the individual, but in the public. The public has a value, and so, everyone there has their individual value.
You’ll need more than $1,730.27 to sway my vote
$1731.27?
@@kaisalmon1646 deal
1,730.28?
I'd say yes to 20k in a heartbeat, but 1.7k isn't that much. My number would probably be around 12k.
I'm actually curious, how much money would it take?
Oklahomans when they have a 1 in 20 billion chance: "so you're saying there's a chance"
oklahomo?
@@cl8804Oklahoma
The day will come, when Oklahoma will decide the fate of all.
the answer is: if you're a voter in a non swing state your vote is worth almost nothing, if you're a voter in a swing state your vote is worth a whole lot
This is soo interesting. However i have one big issue with all this. Politics isn’t just about the budget. A lot of it is about nearly unmeasurable but important policy changes. A gun ban might never show up in a budget but it will have impact on each and every person both measurable and unmeasurable. Some of these will show up in more free money-say medicare and policing-but many won’t show up on the budget at all-think higher productivity due to lower child mortality.
He mentioned in the video that this is a calculation of the pure minimum immediate impact. It would be hard to calculate the real impact but it's certainly larger
higher productivity would result in a higher GDP, which is already a normalizing factor prior to the regression
my state has prediction markets putting the odds of one candidate winning at 98% - my vote matters 25x less than it would in a swing state
a few years ago the candidate for the house of representatives ran unopposed, so... basically 0 value
In a state like this, primaries are much more significant. Voting in a primary can bring the candidate of the dominant party closer to what you might like. Sure, it's not gonna solve anything and get a perfect candidate, but it'll definitely prevent people you can't stand from getting into office.
It's worth noting that the prediction market is implicitly including the risk of an increased voter turnout, and by such a value of 98% is stating that there *won't* be an increase. If you want to prove that wrong, there's an easy and free way to do that -- vote regardless of the prediction markets.
I live in Pennsylvania, and in a swing congressional district to boot. I'm not voting (because both sides are 100% evil) but I wish I could sell you my vote lol.
@@bonecanoe86Skill issue
@@bonecanoe86 I know you probably have heard this a million times and all but, as a queer person, please vote for kamala harris. I know the dems suck but they at least don't want me "eradicated from public life."
One of the assumptions you make is that only the direct economic effects are taken into account, that is why you have the "sociopath asterisk", if you take indirect economic effects into account, it might be that your vote also gets a bump from your cohort's extra spending.
Can I write off my 100k charitable donation for my taxes after I cast my vote?
Yes, but that counts as liquidating your vote, which would increase your gross income by 100k. So they would cancel out.
Pausing after the intro because it seems like you've made a classic mistake of assuming that scale doesn't matter, based on how you take the 10:1 ratio.
The problem is that how life changes doesn't scale linearly. $1000 can be life-changing, and i don't think I'd ever pass up on that to give a neighbor $10,000 or even $100,000.
Like yeah, I'd pass up on a bowl of pho to give a neighbor a dentist bill or an airplane flight. But would I give up an entire doctor visit to give someone else a month rent? Would I give up a month's rent so a random stranger could get a car? Those are very different kinds of questions.
Definitely a valid point! In another comment, someone said that they feel like it's more of a square root, which I thought was interesting.
Also, different people have different scales when it comes to money. For one person, $5 could be the difference between eating tonight or not, whereas for another person it could be insignificant.
In the end, everything to do with economics is a grossly oversimplified model of human behavior. Which isn't to say it can't be a useful model, but it's definitely not the ground truth.
I would absolutely take the 10,000 rather than let my neighbor have 100,000. They are awful people with lots of dogs that bark loudly.
Came to say that, giving up 10 bucks so that my neighbour gets 100 is fine, but if you offered me a million dollars or an option for my neighbour to get 10 million I am taking my mill and not thinking twice about it. Square root seems like it could work well though.
@@michalkostyk5583 keep a 1,000 dollars or neighbor gets 1,000,000 dollars?
@@marcevansteinfunnily enough- you get a square root if you assume a constant ratio of utility rather than cash, and you use log utility functions. And log utility is actually pretty standard because it solves a sensible sounding differential equation (also because nice to work with to be fair). So maybe the random square root dude is onto something!
This did not take into account indifference of spending on some of these things. While I can agree that this would be a decent assessment of the value of a vote if "give 1 trillion to random people in the US or not" was at stake, it does not take into account that the voter will not agree with all 1 trillion dollars being spent the way the party spends it - you may only agree with 40% of one partie's positions and 45% of the other party. This would instantly reduce the value of the money for you to 1/20.
It also does not account for the fact that you may not value the distribution 1:1 - e.g. "100$ to social security" vs "100$ to public education" might be a 100:95 value evaluation for you - and almost nothing will ever be a 100:0 evaluation for you.
One other thing that is not accounted for is also the general inefficiency of state-ran facilities. Take charity efficiency indices for example. They never truly run at 100%. I don't know what the fficiency index is for the government, but this will be another reducing factor. (I'm just gonna randomly guess it's around 60%)
Lastly, just personally speaking, if it was 10$ to me or 10$ to a stranger, I'd easily pick the 100$. Maybe at 1$ I'd change my mind.
Overall, all these factors would reduce the value of the vote for me to 0.05 * 0.05 * 0.6 * 0.1 of the value you mentioned, so 0.05 * 0.05 * 0.6 * 0.1 * 1700$ = 25cents for me.
I definitely agree with the criticism that a voter may not 100% agree with the party's fund choices, but I think the efficiency criticism falls a bit flat.
If I make a $100 charitable deduction, I don't consider it as being worth less than $100 if it's not used efficiently, it's still a $100 contribution.
Imo one of the best things we could do would be to directly detail to taxpayers what their money is spent on. It would help keep government spending accountable since people would feel more personally responsibility for what their funds were used on, but also if done well it would also help people feel like their money was actually used for something good (though that does hinge on the money actually being used for something good)
10:44
A good approximation for n! is sqrt(2πn)*(n/e)^n. (Stirling's approximation) Put that in the formula and, for 2n coins, it becomes C(2n,n)/2^2n = (2n)!/(n!)²/2^2n.
If you replace the factorial with its approximation, it becomes (sqrt(4πn)(2n/e)^2n)/(sqrt(2πn)²*(n/e)^2n*(2^n)²). Lets solve some terms. sqrt(4πn)/sqrt(2πn)^² = sqrt(4πn/4π²n²) = sqrt(1/πn) (2n/e)^2n/(n/e)^2n = 2^2n, dividing by the (2^n)² in the bottom, it goes to 1/πn, but since 2n is the original number of coins, it's sqrt(2/π2n).
Thanks!
I think there's a value here that you're not accounting for, namely that your vote still influences the actions of politicians, even the ones you didn't vote for. This is why republicans who win in blue states are relatively moderate, because they are influenced by the threat of all the people who voted against them.
No, they're more moderate because people voted for them in the primary. 💀
Clicking on this video, I thought it was going to be like: “the dems spent x dollars on advertising and swung y votes so your vote is x/y” but it was so much better ❤
7:50 XKCD 2502 strikes again.
That’s awesome lol
$1730 just by voting? LET'S GO, easiest money ever!!!
Wait, I'm not old enough to vote.... I'm not even american...
When measuring the amount of money at stake, I would only look at the change of money that the candidates would make rather than the whole money supply. For example, if the left wing candidate would increase healthcare spending by 5%, while the right wing candidate would decrease spending by 2%, then you should only consider the money within that 7% change rather than the entire amount of money going to healthcare.
Secondly, taxes are a big part of this and that probably should have been mentioned more. Changes in taxes affect individuals significantly and so would make this calculation vary much more from person to person. On top of that, money that isn't taxed affects the economy in ways that are hard to measure, and so how it would affect the numerator would be difficult to quantify.
On the other hand, the majority of voters tend to vote for the same party, and thus in a probability calculation, their votes can be assumed. This means that a lower number of voters would matter for the election. This will make swing state votes have an even stronger effect on elections while making non-swing state votes matter even less. It would be interesting to see how this would affect the national average however.
Finally, there is also a point to be made about local elections amd state elections. The money at stake is way smaller, but the effect of your vote is also way higher, so it would be interesting to see how the value of this differs compared to the national election. Looking at elections in other countries would also be interesting.
But what about cnsidering it from a corperate perspective, what about just changing where money is spent, say instead of buying some fleet vehicles from ford you get them from chevrolet, or even say military contracts.
4 year federal expenditure from 2020-2023 totaled about 25.776 trillion, voter turnout was 158,429,631, 25,776,000,000,000/158,429,631 equals $162,696.83.
That's only 3 years
3B1B: "WHERE'S THE CIRCLE?!"
If voting could change anything, we wouldn't be allowed to do it.
It's not about buying votes, it's about buying enough votes. The value is determined by the competition if we also consider the other party buying votes.
This was once again a fantastic video from this channel!
Really puts things into perspective & hope it will motivate people to join us in phone banking for a better tomorrow.
What I'm getting from this is that Florida was -$18.6 million- dollars away from a tie in 2000.
correction: 268.5 votes (how many people would need to flip) * 0.9169% (government spending variation compared to GDP) * $10.25 trillion (GDP) * 2 (it can go both ways) * 2 (next time you can change your choice) / 30 million (chance that your vote will decide the election in Florida)
= $35,296,920.50
Or, 3.5 million dollars if you scale for greediness.
Just because the budget has a variation of roughly 1% of the GDP, that doesn't mean that the difference between a red president and a blue president will be 1% of the GDP. How much of that 1% variation is due to random noise and how much of that is due to deliberate policy changes? Would it be better to separate the red terms and blue terms and compare them to each other?
Apparently in the last 70 years only 1 of the recessions occurred under a democrat, and businesses/stocks generally perform better. So democrats can have more money to play around with, but then can also get slammed with the bill when republicans run up the tab (as happened with all the trickle down tax cuts which increased the deficit).
2:25 Assumption 4 is not an reasonable assumption, and that is probably driving the value up by orders of magnitude. Legislative branch is a much larger impact on spending and you can only influence the ones from your state so an average 2% of them...
If Elon Must held a vote of 1 person to decide if he is going to spend 1 billion on a new boat, the vote would not be worth 1 billion just because 1 billion is at stake.
this video is awesome! I hope you will have always videos like this
I'd be interested in how much having a somewhat known partisan split in a state effects that value. If you know that the known preference is split 60-40 or 55-45 instead of a coin flip, how much does that change the value of your vote?
My intuitive guess is that even a small partisan slant (even a small one like 52-48) greatly de-values your vote - but like you mention, our intuition on these sorts of statistics and large numbers isn't necessarily very good.
4:44 There's a problem with this logic. While yes, I would agree that I'd rather give 100$ to a random person than take approxiamtely 10$, If it was with higher numbers, like 100,000$ or 1,000,000$, I am absolutely taking the 100 grand, sorry neighbour. The larger the quantity of money, just like the disparity between the 2 quantities (and other factors of course), can change my decision.
Why don't I get paid 1730.27 then
because selling votes is unfortunately illegal i think im pretty sure
I’m taking a statistics class in grad school and it tends to kick everyone’s butts, but it was cool to see some of the things we talk about there used in this video. Also, the swing at the end to music on a mobius strip is crazy.
I have always found the premise to be silly.
Your vote isn't valuable only if it swings the election.
Otherwise all votes are worthless unless the election is decided by one vote, which is clearly not a good approximation.
Your vote should be valued as something like: election value / estimated # votes above 50%
I have a question. Will it not be the case that both candidates want to spend money in ways you disagree with? So if let’s say both candidates spend an equal amount of things you agree with and things you disagree with then the expected value of either of them winning would be the same so your vote would be worth nothing.
I love how the video is all nuanced and telling us the numbers are just best guesses based on imperfect models and the video title states confindently that it's an exact number :)
Finnally a quality video, thankyou yt algorithm :)
If you like this you should check out 3 Blue 1 Brown, Alpha Phoenix, and The Thought Emporium!
Ive never voted, but id go out and vote for a party I align with for 1k and the opposing for 2k
I guess I'm just going to point things out as I see them. 1) If the value of your vote is dispersed to other people, then the value of their votes are dispersed to you as well. Statistically, this all averages out, so it doesn't need to be accounted for. 2) Why limit by category in the budget? What you should do is calculate variance on the basis of which party is in power in any given year (using ANOVA), adjust for average growth, and ignore categories entirely. 3) You aren't interested in the total variance, you're interested in the variance on the basis of who is in political power. The first number is likely to be enormous compared to the latter, so this is probably an analysis-defining error. 4) You shouldn't multiply by two if you're only accounting for the value of the presidential vote. It should be by four. 5) It isn't reasonable to assume people vote randomly, so you can't build a random variable for the probability of your vote making a difference that way. Most votes (and non-votes) are decided and calcified completely before any random influence can affect them. 6) There's a difference between saying "every" person's vote would be worth a trillion, and "the first" person's vote will be worth a trillion. After the first person's vote is bought, the value of every other vote goes down accordingly.
watching from GA
This should have been in 3blue1brown's Summer of Math 3. It would have placed or won.
11:20 ngl, I've been doing math in university for 3 years now and immediately thought this was an exercise left to the reader ^-^
It is, isn't it?
me, a non-us citizen watching this:
The problem with not counting each sector separately is bigger than it seems. With 2 candidates, one spends money somewhere where the other doesn't, but the other too. You are basically counting only with national debt
When dealing with all of the uncertainties it makes sense to do more rounding, as claiming more accuracy than one significant figure is suspicious
2:03 DAMN I WAS NEARLY DEAD ON!
I thought "Okay, 500 billion is 500,000 million, so you have 500,000 / 17, which is basically 500,000 / 20 so that's 50k / 2 = 25k, and then add some back on because you're not dividing by quite that much so...~$30k?"
So every 3 or 4 voters put together in a swing state decides the fate of one federal employee on average lol
Suppose there is a referendum on a social choice with two options: A and B. Option A would cost every member of society $10,000. Option B would have no effect on anyone. How much is your vote worth? That depends on the probability that your vote will change the outcome of the election. It is impossible to say what the probability is, but it is typically very small. Let’s say there is a one in a million chance that your vote will change the outcome. In that case, the expected utility of voting for B versus A is one penny.
I think the more accurate way to measure the value of a vote is to measure the amount of spending on political advertising in a state and divide it by that state's population (if you believe in an efficient market)
"if you believe in an efficient market" that's quite the religion you've got there. I wonder what bodies are buried under the name of that faith
I wouldn't say divide by population. Better divide by undecided voters. Population also includes people without voting rights (children, criminals, mentally unsound people) and people who don't (want) to vote. You can also exclude decided voters, so about 80% of voters
If my vote is worth that much, why has no one paid me to vote?
that does happen to be a crime
You get the value in roads.
politicians pay for your vote by passing legislation that's favorable to you. why do you think old people get so many government programs lol
On the other hand, the fact that a vote in a swing state is somehow worth 2 orders of magnitude higher than a vote in a non - swing state really illustrates the problem with the electoral college
the federal gov does more than spend, it makes things illegal and legal, which has a gigantic monetary value. and even so, you wouldnt need to surrender your vote provided the winner holds similar values, youd only be paying for the differences. that reduces the value of your vote by a ton.
well... 50 bucks is 50 bucks....
The numerator is way too high. Even if the worse side wins, they are not embezzling 100% of the budget. I'd suggest an estimate that the worse side apends money 5% less efficiently for the public good, making the value of my vote 20x less. Then, if I'm less than 100% confident about which side is the worse side, the value goes down further. A good way to sanity check your numbers is to compare to how much money is actually being spent on votes through campaigning, etc.
4:20 Honestly, I hardly even have a use for the money myself. I'd rather my neighbor have $100 than me have $599.99. If you offer me more than $599.99, I would give in, since that ($600) is pretty helpful.
This would make your vote pretty valuable!
As just another dude with a JSTOR and a Stata subscription, this is the kind of work I dream of
We should all get paid to vote!
why? that seems like a terrible idea
@@moosey7165I agree. Though we absolutely should Make voting completely free and a national holiday. (By free I mean CONPLETELY free, as in if ID's are required then ID's must become free) anything else hinders the poorest communities ability to vote, not to mention how much making the day a holiday will help with working class peoples ability to vote.
the issue is that no one vote can be considered the "deciding vote"
incredible video as always thanks
Also, phonebanking really is not that bad. I have very, very bad social anxiety, but when you get into the swing (ha) of things, it can actually be really fun. Most people you talk to will be nice, and if you phonebank with a group like Progressive Victory, you can talk about the bad calls and get through it together.
SUPERFICIAL AND INCORRECT VIDEO. The real formula is = [ comparative advantage of your preferred candidate vs. other candidates * the probability that your assessment was correct (repeat and integrate for all possible future scenarios weighted by likelyhood) ] * the probability of your single vote making a deference = The worth of your vote. So basically, never vote.
Imagine government spending was fixed year to year and did not depend on party.
Your logic would lead to the conclusion that each vote is worthless.
This implies to me that your method of finding the value is incorrect.
Looking at campaign donations would give you a sort of market estimate of the value of being elected.
Another idea is that a company's value is rooted in the control of free cash flows.
So looking at the controlable budget of the US does make sense as the value of being elected.
To make it more complicated this has to be looked at on a time duration, based on the influence on and value of future cash flows
Yes there are a million different ways this model could be changed to represent more things. It’s far more complicated than this model could represent, he admitted that many times throughout the video. The important part is that no one can predict the future, so we should do what we can to protect it when there is a reasonable chance that the payoff is worth the price. This video does an excellent job proving that your vote is meaningful empirically.
Ok who do I sell it to for the money?
Because I don't see anyone talking about it I have to say the background music throughout this video is amazing! Its totally unnecessary with the topic you're talking about and you don't draw any attention to it in the video so I have to say how cool it is! It feels like the music is speaking as part of the content while not getting in the way of the content. It really helps elevate this video and put it on another level. I hope its not lost on us how neat and how creative it is.
I'm always so happy when people notice this; I make the background music for all of these video essays, and it's almost always some sort of procedural thing that relates to the content. In this case, it was based on a single line that flips randomly (coin flips!) between two notes, changing the resulting harmony depending on how it lands, which is a kind of metaphor for the single vote flipping the result of the election.
@@marcevanstein thats super neat! Ill definitely have to check out your other video essays to see more of this!
Probably a good way to determine how much a vote worth is to look at how much politicians pay for it, because after all they basically have to buy votes with campaign money. Divide the amount of money spent on campaigns by the number of voters and I think that would be a pretty good valuation.
See the follow-up video
One of your best videos yet
This was great!
A timely point well made and the standard error on a GDP adjusted regression is an inspired proxy for order of magnitude government policy!
Extremely small flex but I guessed both of the fractions outputs as $20k and $0.02
Yet i still suck at math when it matters. Lmao
I don't know if it's because I'm Brazilian but I was expecting an answer in terms of how much I should sell my vote to a politician for in terms of how much they'll get paid if they win. Instead it's more about justifying cold calling people about things they already know.
12:19 I’m pretty sure that if the margin of votes in [a state that decides who won (that is, the winner depends on how the state voted)] that determined who won is [0.5% of (the population or the population there that voted, I can’t remember)], they do a recount or redo to account for error in counting, but I don’t know. I heard about something vaguely like it in a metaculus question.
i am currently speaking while on my bottom
A lottery ticket…except I win nothing and the “winner” is still going to spend $4 trillion +/- $500 billion regardless, making my prices even worse.
I feel like the actual way to value a vote is to suppose all people in a state agreed to sell their vote for $X and ask what price would X have to be to cause wealthy people/corporations to start buying votes in each state? Each person/corporation would probably have their own number based on how much they care and how much money they could save with the correct president. Not just taking budget variations and dividing by the chance of a single swing vote.
I think the real question is where can I sell my vote?
The cost would really depend on who is buying my vote. If it was just a centrist then 1700 would probably be enough. If it was a far right uncanny creep then the price will be close to infinity.
I’d change my vote for 1k bucks, any takers?
wouldn't a better metric be. Total amount of votes difference times 2 (to account the probability of paying someone who was already voting that way), divided by the amount spent on campaigning. That would be really close to the amount of money someone campaigning would be willing to pay you. Given that if no one would paid the amount you say, you can't valuate it as it, because price not always translate to value nor possible value addition.
The music sounded quite inspired by FFXIV, but it could be that I spent too much time on there.
Something here doesn't add up/will never add up simply because of the distribution of that money/spending and how hard counting what all of that is worth/going. It ends up being, a small minority of people's votes are worth astronomical amounts, possibly billions, while the majority is worth quite literally nothing. I don't have numerical proof of this, but the statement I made matches my observation on both small and large scales where power is not uniformly distributed. I would be curious of other possible explanations of that trend.
One criticism I do have of the actual video was not analyzing the differences between democrat and republican candidates and determining the deviation of the linear regressions of each president to determine a range of difference between voting in a republican vs democrat. I really thought that's what would happen and was a little disappointed that didn't happen.
But otherwise banger video! Was very engaging.
federal budget variance has parts that matter and parts that don't. to really measure the economic value look at campaign spending instead
Yes, it may be over-counting in some ways, but I think for the reasons I explained in the video, it's significantly under-counting as well. The point was to get a sense of scale.
I'm interested in looking into campaign spend too, but I think it may measure something a little different. Value to the voter and value to the campaign may not be the same.
this is actually a really interesting way to think about individual votes. maybe this will help people vote?
I'm not selling my vote for any lower than $1,738. Come to think of it, I refuse to go any higher as well.
14:15 Keep in mind that canvassing is rarely about convincing people to vote one way or another. It's about reminding people to register to vote at all or check their registration to make sure they didn't get purged by Republican fascists right before an election. Instead of thinking of it as adding one or two votes to the pile, think of it as negating hundreds of negative votes that would have otherwise lowered turnout, one of the largest deciding factors in elections, lower turnouts are favorable to the minority party, aka the GOP.
Thank you for keeping this fun math video relatively a-political till the end. But because of the end... thank you for telling me my vote for red in a blue state is worth $100.
could you get the market value of a vote by figuring out how much a lobbyist on average spends to sway a certain number of votes?
so anyone wanna pay me 25k to switch my vote from D to R in PA?
Somebody was offered that money but he still pointed a gun at the orange podium goon.
I feel like the asumtion I have sqrt(the amount to my neigbor)
Interesting :-)
My new yard sign in NC.... "Your vote is worth $10,000."
This is the most unfiltered comments section I've seen on TH-cam in years
If I was the only person who was getting offered $1730 to change my vote, then sure. But if I knew that there was a billionaire shelling out millions of dollars to sway thousands of voters, boy that changes. In a normal election, I would probably need 10k, and for this one I would not move for less than 500k. That's my instinctive feeling, but the numbers actually makes sense if we're betting with the downfall of the entire country. I can't believe people are still joking in the comments that they would love that kind of money just to change their vote. The whole point is that your vote absolutely does matter and is worth a lot.
I'd happily take $1700 in exchange for my vote!