I think an important thing with the "how much money would have to be offered for you to take it instead of choosing the election" is that it's phrased as if either your candidate gets selected and you get no money, or you get money and it's normal election, when really it should be you get money and your candidate loses, since we're talking about the expected value of your vote being decisive
@@marcevanstein Interestingly enough I had this thought experiment last night. My threshold is probably above 100B. At least, in the current political climate. My thought experiment was more general, in terms of how much money I'd have to be offered to violate some principle of mine (eg. I worked for a defense contractor for a while, so it could be phrased as "how much money to leak top secret documents to a forign power") and came up with a value in excess of 10T. Mostly due to the fact that at some point more money doesn't make me happier or functionally do anything (eg. I'm not sure how I could ever manage to spend a billion dollars even if I tried) and the costs of violating that principle (eg. going to federal prison) are just too severe to live with. Things usually get phrased as "no one is incorruptable, its just a matter of their price." Well, I'd argue that there's a price at which that amount of money either destabilizes the economy (and is thus worthless) or is functionally unspendable (because nothing costs enough and is thus worthless). Certainly there are people who'd still say yes (see also: Daniel Dancer), but for me, there's no value in money I cannot spend.
8:20 - Oh man, that graph is amazing. I'm so glad someone put that together. I tried making my own similar chart a number of years ago to point out the bonkers hypocracy of the GOP cutting non-defense discretionary spending in order to reduce the deficit gap (my chart had the difference in spending and income as a slice, rather than the interest, but on the whole, it was aproximately the same: that slice is so large compared to any given discretionary slice other than defense as to be meaningless to cut by 10, 20, or even 80%).
I think that this is an interesting way to frame thinking about your vote. Obviously, it's a little like comparing apples to oranges, but using conventional market calculations I think helps put into frame how important an individual vote is, and why it's worth your time to do so.
Thanks for including both my comments in your video, I was afraid I was one of the "annoying" ones lol. But then again, all good (skeptical) mathematicians should be a little pedantic. I am actually working a paper right now about numerical methods for studying elections right now, so your video was very well timed for me. While I'm here, another interesting idea to consider is not just the expected value of the election, but the standard deviation as well. If the value (utility) of the democrats winning is A, and the value of the republicans winning is B, we can treat the election as a Bernoulli Random Variable X which takes A with probability p and B with probability (1-p). Then the standard deviation turns out to be STD = sqrt(p(1-p))(A-B). Taking yout rough estimate from the last video A-B = $100B and p=0.5, we get STD = $50B as expected. The interesting part is you assume you have some small chance of swinging the election dp (which changes the probability to p=0.5+dp) then you can expand dSTD=[STD(0.5+dp)-STD(0.5)] as a taylor series around 1/2 and notice that the resulting function is second-order in dp, which means that it very quickly vanishes for small dp. In fact, you can prove dSTD ~= (A-B) dp^2. So again using you rough estimate from the last video that dp = 10^-7, we get dSTD = $0.0001 :( This basically means that as long as the race is close, the variance of the election is going to stay at nearly $50B or roughly half the utility delta between the parties-so we will all still be biting our nails on election night watching that hundred-billion dollar coin flip whether we like it or not. On a side note, I've been a fan of your acct for a while because I'm a math/computer science/physics undergrad but also interesting in making music. Keep up the good work!
@@TheFirstOnion_ Trump, very begrudgingly (I don't like this man), because I don't like the price controls in Kamala's platform, and I lean slightly right socially, but Gallego (D) over Lake (R) for congress because I think he'd be a way better representative and I like his platform more than Kamala's
@@whatisavehicle If you don't know about it, look in to the Heritage Foundation's "Project 2025". While Trump has distanced himself from it publicly (in a very suspicious manner: "I don't know anything about it, AND I disagree with most of it"), the majority of his advisors and probable cabinet seem to think it is great. Just food for thought. I think most average people would find the stuff in there to be pretty bad. And I am not sure how well known it is. But if it sways your vote has more to do with how high of a probability you place on that affecting his actual agenda. I personally place that probability fairly high.
You said state and local politics has "less impact" but often they get to do more. So technically the work with less money but can do substancially more without being swamped down by our political system that's designed to be sluggish (especially when parties are divided like this). State governments are increasingly being the only part of the government capable of real steps (it feels).
Recommending Thinking Fast And Slow is one thing, but I feel like recommending it as being written by a Nobel price winner, when it is about neurology while the author won the Nobel price in economics, is misleading.
to quote directly from wikipedia 'In 2002, Kahneman received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, despite being a research psychologist, for his work in prospect theory. Kahneman stated he has never taken a single economics course - that everything that he knows of the subject he and Tversky learned from their collaborators Richard Thaler and Jack Knetsch' He won it in economics for his work in psycology
@@marcevanstein Oh, I didn't expect that. Maybe it's just my perspective as someone living under a repressive government. If I was American, I would probably agree that my vote matters. I just don't think putting a price tag on a vote would encourage someone who wouldn't want to vote (if that was the point of the video) to vote.
@@poemes so basically you would take the $100b and lobby for an educated electorate long term? interesting idea, but I still wouldn't take it. lets assume that part of the deal with the $100b is that you cant use it to change the outcome of the current election. that's a deal-breaker. resulting from my political preferences, I believe this election will have permanent ramifications on the entire country that won't be fixable (cough cough if we have a dictator) would rather not have to mention my politics given the nature of the video, but it's hard to explain my reasoning without that. hope you understand
it kind of is. value is subjective, so it's worth whatever anyone will buy or sell it for. if people could sell their vote, that would be interesting, though.
it kind of is. value is subjective, so it's worth whatever anyone will buy or sell it for. if people could sell their vote, that would be interesting, though.
I would probably take the 100 billion dollars over deciding the election, primarily because I don't live in the USA and don't believe that people should be allowed to decide the fate of an election, but also because I could donate that money to charity, and do a metric fuck ton of good.
Well you're just the deciding vote, you only got there through everyone else's votes. If someone decided to not vote, you wouldn't be deciding the election.
Well that's kind of the thing, isn't it. If you've already been given a billion dollars, the value you could get out of an extra $100 billion dollars is probably charitable, since you certainly don't need it for yourself. But come to think of it, then maybe you should compare it to the full trillion dollars of variance in government spending, since there's no point in having an altruism discount Factor. ( since all the studies relating to determining that altruism discount Factor are for small sums of money with people who aren't rich). To the me, the difference in how that trillion dollars would be spent, and the lasting effects on how the economy is structured, outweigh what I could do with $100 billion dollars of charitable contribution. But I'm genuinely curious how other people think!
$1 trillion is enough money to end worldwide extreme poverty for at least four years. Alternatively, we could build system to prevent future pandemics, and have enough money left over to double R&D for clean energy, 4x nuclear security efforts, and dramatically increase funding for AI safety. $1.22 trillion would be required to get clean water and sanitation for everyone. Another plan would allow us to end hunger and malnutrition, suppress malaria, HIV, and TB, suppress or even eradicate most neglected tropical diseases, and cut factory farming in half (which would also help with preventing disease).
Yes, I accidentally scheduled it to post a version that was missing some extras. So I wasn't sure what else to do with reuploaded and switch that version to unlisted. Hope it's not too annoying!
Defaulting on the debt work work perfectly fine, but then you could literally just have the fed buy every single dollar of newly issued debt and it would be less bad because it wouldn't bankrupt every single bank in the country. Both assuming that the US intends to never borrow a single dollar again.
So your plan to avoid total catastrophe would be to have the fed print money to buy back the debt, thereby causing an large increase in the money supply and inflation, while simultaneously drastically cutting government spending (or increasing taxes) in order to balance the budget, thereby creating an enormous negative shock to the economy, the combination of which is stagflation. This does not sound "perfectly fine".
@@marcevanstein the effect would be a drop in interest rates for banks, corporations, and governments that are holding us bonds instead of cash. No money is created other than interest payments on old debt in the scenario of no deficits. In a scenario of deficits made up by printing money it would be disastrous. Any inflation that would happen would be from cash being more liquid than bonds, but that should be within the scope of what normal monetary policy tools can handle. About 700 billion dollars need to be raised outside of the spending on interest, or as a share of gdp the difference between the 2012 and 2014 budgets, I don't think anyone here remembers how the economy ended because of that.
I think an important thing with the "how much money would have to be offered for you to take it instead of choosing the election" is that it's phrased as if either your candidate gets selected and you get no money, or you get money and it's normal election, when really it should be you get money and your candidate loses, since we're talking about the expected value of your vote being decisive
Yes, that's an important point. I meant to say that
@@marcevanstein Interestingly enough I had this thought experiment last night. My threshold is probably above 100B. At least, in the current political climate.
My thought experiment was more general, in terms of how much money I'd have to be offered to violate some principle of mine (eg. I worked for a defense contractor for a while, so it could be phrased as "how much money to leak top secret documents to a forign power") and came up with a value in excess of 10T. Mostly due to the fact that at some point more money doesn't make me happier or functionally do anything (eg. I'm not sure how I could ever manage to spend a billion dollars even if I tried) and the costs of violating that principle (eg. going to federal prison) are just too severe to live with.
Things usually get phrased as "no one is incorruptable, its just a matter of their price." Well, I'd argue that there's a price at which that amount of money either destabilizes the economy (and is thus worthless) or is functionally unspendable (because nothing costs enough and is thus worthless). Certainly there are people who'd still say yes (see also: Daniel Dancer), but for me, there's no value in money I cannot spend.
Undecided voters and swing state influenceable voters are not the same thing.
8:20 - Oh man, that graph is amazing. I'm so glad someone put that together. I tried making my own similar chart a number of years ago to point out the bonkers hypocracy of the GOP cutting non-defense discretionary spending in order to reduce the deficit gap (my chart had the difference in spending and income as a slice, rather than the interest, but on the whole, it was aproximately the same: that slice is so large compared to any given discretionary slice other than defense as to be meaningless to cut by 10, 20, or even 80%).
I think that this is an interesting way to frame thinking about your vote. Obviously, it's a little like comparing apples to oranges, but using conventional market calculations I think helps put into frame how important an individual vote is, and why it's worth your time to do so.
Thanks for including both my comments in your video, I was afraid I was one of the "annoying" ones lol. But then again, all good (skeptical) mathematicians should be a little pedantic. I am actually working a paper right now about numerical methods for studying elections right now, so your video was very well timed for me.
While I'm here, another interesting idea to consider is not just the expected value of the election, but the standard deviation as well. If the value (utility) of the democrats winning is A, and the value of the republicans winning is B, we can treat the election as a Bernoulli Random Variable X which takes A with probability p and B with probability (1-p). Then the standard deviation turns out to be STD = sqrt(p(1-p))(A-B). Taking yout rough estimate from the last video A-B = $100B and p=0.5, we get STD = $50B as expected. The interesting part is you assume you have some small chance of swinging the election dp (which changes the probability to p=0.5+dp) then you can expand dSTD=[STD(0.5+dp)-STD(0.5)] as a taylor series around 1/2 and notice that the resulting function is second-order in dp, which means that it very quickly vanishes for small dp. In fact, you can prove dSTD ~= (A-B) dp^2. So again using you rough estimate from the last video that dp = 10^-7, we get dSTD = $0.0001 :( This basically means that as long as the race is close, the variance of the election is going to stay at nearly $50B or roughly half the utility delta between the parties-so we will all still be biting our nails on election night watching that hundred-billion dollar coin flip whether we like it or not.
On a side note, I've been a fan of your acct for a while because I'm a math/computer science/physics undergrad but also interesting in making music. Keep up the good work!
As a centrist swing state voter, my vote is very, very valuable
who are you voting for?
@@TheFirstOnion_ Trump, very begrudgingly (I don't like this man), because I don't like the price controls in Kamala's platform, and I lean slightly right socially, but Gallego (D) over Lake (R) for congress because I think he'd be a way better representative and I like his platform more than Kamala's
@@whatisavehicle fair enough
@@whatisavehicle If you don't know about it, look in to the Heritage Foundation's "Project 2025". While Trump has distanced himself from it publicly (in a very suspicious manner: "I don't know anything about it, AND I disagree with most of it"), the majority of his advisors and probable cabinet seem to think it is great.
Just food for thought. I think most average people would find the stuff in there to be pretty bad. And I am not sure how well known it is. But if it sways your vote has more to do with how high of a probability you place on that affecting his actual agenda. I personally place that probability fairly high.
@@TheFirstOnion_ yeah true it's fair, price controls are clearly worse for the economy than wanting to deport 20 million immigrants
I laughed way too hard at "plugging that into Wolfram" XD
You said state and local politics has "less impact" but often they get to do more. So technically the work with less money but can do substancially more without being swamped down by our political system that's designed to be sluggish (especially when parties are divided like this). State governments are increasingly being the only part of the government capable of real steps (it feels).
Don't some states have more influence on the election results per voter than others?
Dramatically, but few are competitive too
Recommending Thinking Fast And Slow is one thing, but I feel like recommending it as being written by a Nobel price winner, when it is about neurology while the author won the Nobel price in economics, is misleading.
to quote directly from wikipedia 'In 2002, Kahneman received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, despite being a research psychologist, for his work in prospect theory. Kahneman stated he has never taken a single economics course - that everything that he knows of the subject he and Tversky learned from their collaborators Richard Thaler and Jack Knetsch'
He won it in economics for his work in psycology
Imma be one of those "annoying ones"
You do you :-) (I didn't actually find your comment annoying)
@@marcevanstein Oh, I didn't expect that. Maybe it's just my perspective as someone living under a repressive government. If I was American, I would probably agree that my vote matters. I just don't think putting a price tag on a vote would encourage someone who wouldn't want to vote (if that was the point of the video) to vote.
0:24 ay i saw that one
This comment had a prompt to translate it to English XD
it changed it to "I saw that one", just removing "Ay" and capitalizing I
Damnit, Marc ! Math kills
5:02 doesn’t sound too democratic i must say :)
what's your answer?
@@MilesIsReal id make it so everyone is educated properly and votes for the party they think is best.
@@poemes so basically you would take the $100b and lobby for an educated electorate long term? interesting idea, but I still wouldn't take it.
lets assume that part of the deal with the $100b is that you cant use it to change the outcome of the current election. that's a deal-breaker. resulting from my political preferences, I believe this election will have permanent ramifications on the entire country that won't be fixable (cough cough if we have a dictator)
would rather not have to mention my politics given the nature of the video, but it's hard to explain my reasoning without that. hope you understand
They should limit advertising in elections so that all the party's have a equal chance to get their point across
I think this entire concept is just kind of nonsense
it kind of is. value is subjective, so it's worth whatever anyone will buy or sell it for. if people could sell their vote, that would be interesting, though.
it kind of is. value is subjective, so it's worth whatever anyone will buy or sell it for. if people could sell their vote, that would be interesting, though.
Law Inforcement 6:30
.18!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thanks for the follow up!
amogus
I would probably take the 100 billion dollars over deciding the election, primarily because I don't live in the USA and don't believe that people should be allowed to decide the fate of an election, but also because I could donate that money to charity, and do a metric fuck ton of good.
Well you're just the deciding vote, you only got there through everyone else's votes. If someone decided to not vote, you wouldn't be deciding the election.
Well that's kind of the thing, isn't it. If you've already been given a billion dollars, the value you could get out of an extra $100 billion dollars is probably charitable, since you certainly don't need it for yourself. But come to think of it, then maybe you should compare it to the full trillion dollars of variance in government spending, since there's no point in having an altruism discount Factor. ( since all the studies relating to determining that altruism discount Factor are for small sums of money with people who aren't rich).
To the me, the difference in how that trillion dollars would be spent, and the lasting effects on how the economy is structured, outweigh what I could do with $100 billion dollars of charitable contribution. But I'm genuinely curious how other people think!
Tbh I think you'd better do an imperial shitton of good.
$1 trillion is enough money to end worldwide extreme poverty for at least four years. Alternatively, we could build system to prevent future pandemics, and have enough money left over to double R&D for clean energy, 4x nuclear security efforts, and dramatically increase funding for AI safety. $1.22 trillion would be required to get clean water and sanitation for everyone. Another plan would allow us to end hunger and malnutrition, suppress malaria, HIV, and TB, suppress or even eradicate most neglected tropical diseases, and cut factory farming in half (which would also help with preventing disease).
Nice,
Reupload
Yes, I accidentally scheduled it to post a version that was missing some extras. So I wasn't sure what else to do with reuploaded and switch that version to unlisted. Hope it's not too annoying!
Defaulting on the debt work work perfectly fine, but then you could literally just have the fed buy every single dollar of newly issued debt and it would be less bad because it wouldn't bankrupt every single bank in the country.
Both assuming that the US intends to never borrow a single dollar again.
So your plan to avoid total catastrophe would be to have the fed print money to buy back the debt, thereby causing an large increase in the money supply and inflation, while simultaneously drastically cutting government spending (or increasing taxes) in order to balance the budget, thereby creating an enormous negative shock to the economy, the combination of which is stagflation.
This does not sound "perfectly fine".
@@marcevanstein the effect would be a drop in interest rates for banks, corporations, and governments that are holding us bonds instead of cash.
No money is created other than interest payments on old debt in the scenario of no deficits. In a scenario of deficits made up by printing money it would be disastrous. Any inflation that would happen would be from cash being more liquid than bonds, but that should be within the scope of what normal monetary policy tools can handle.
About 700 billion dollars need to be raised outside of the spending on interest, or as a share of gdp the difference between the 2012 and 2014 budgets, I don't think anyone here remembers how the economy ended because of that.
God he's a Democrat 😂
Great video as always 😊