Oh. The Greens have got a think tank.

When people talk about "providing a voice to future generations" the first thing I think of is the anti-choice lobby. Obviously this report from a Green think tank isn't that, but it's still more than a little bizarre.

And yes, I know, one doesn't have think tanks for the purpose of coming up with workable or sensible ideas, but I was hoping for better from the Green Party, as the closest we have in England to an electable left wing party, than to be encouraging this sort of thing.

If it had been some think tank for Labour or the Conservatives I'd probably just have laughed and ignored it: it's more disappointing when associated with a party I might want to vote for someday.

The basic idea is that there would be a panel of people forming a "third chamber" of the legislature, who...

[...] would have a power of veto over legislation that were likely to have substantial negative effects for society in the future, the right to review major administrative decisions which substantially affected future people and the power to initiate legislation to preserve the basic needs and interests of future people.

Right. Now, okay, there is a very definite conflict between the incentive to mainly act and plan for short-term successes that elective democracies have, and the need to make longer-term plans to have a sustainable society. Certainly, this is going to be a problem with pretty much any political system in which the faction "in charge" can change over a shorter timescale than that needed for long-term planning. (Of course, a political system in which the faction in charge can't change over short timescales has its own severe problems)

The proposed solution claims to address a weakness that despite democratic reforms, no present democracy considers the needs of future voters. So, this panel would guess what their needs might be and force legislation to be made accordingly.

Decision 1: road maintenance budgets should be cut. People in the future will all have flying cars.

How do we know that something will be a problem in the future? In general, we don't. A big hint is "is it a problem today". But if it's a problem today, then a system of government that did an adequate job of representing all currently-existing people would deal with it anyway.

Even assuming the panel have perfect access to and interpretation of all current human knowledge, their decisions are going to be based on "best guesses" about the future. Those guesses are going to be wrong at least as often than not.

And since the purpose of all legislation is its effect in the future (generations or years or days), why would the panel be significantly more likely to get "impact on the future" right than the existing legislative bodies?

The panel - and the report recognises this, though not for the reason I give - could not be elected. If it were, then we'd elect the Commons to make decisions, then we'd elect the Lords to disagree with those decisions, then we'd elect the "Guardians of the Future" (No, really, that's what they're called) to veto anything that gets past them.

So, instead, they'd be selected at random in a manner similar to jury service. It's a tempting idea - I've seen it suggested for House of Lords reform before - but it just wouldn't work. The suggestion is that anyone on the electoral register who doesn't tick the "I don't want to be a Guardian of the Future" box would be eligible for random selection. Once selected, they could opt-out at that stage, but if they didn't there would be a year of training followed by a multi-year term of office.

So, who's going to opt out (either on the register or when selected)?

1. People who are ineligible to register.
2. People who do not register.
3. People who have health conditions incompatible with an intensive multi-year commitment.
4. People who have caring commitments likewise incompatible (the report talks about subsidised or free caring services, but not everyone will want to take up that offer)
5. People who do not wish to be in an extremely public role likely to come under considerably more public scrutiny than the average MP gets.
6. People who don't really care about legislative politics.
7. People with low self-confidence in their own abilities.

And so on, and so on, and so on. See also s.e. smith's Civic Engagement: Only For the Wealthy! which inspired a lot of this section.

Notice that a major common factor of all of those groups is that they are also strongly under-represented in our current political system for much the same reasons, and that they are correlated with various lacks of privilege.

Not needing to campaign and sign up to a political party might help, but not much.

The number of Guardians would be relatively small (7 to 144 is the range suggested, with 12ish being preferred) - which means that to get a representative group would be very tricky. But then, that's not a particular aim. From Appendix B, which sets out selection:

For such demographically-based pre-sortitional selection would detract from the sense, already indicated above, in which this grandest of juries must represent the voiceless, a task for us all which is in important respects equally hard, one might venture, for any of us.

Well, yes, in the "predict the future" sense. And no, in the "interests of future people who are not like me" sense. Given that representing the "interests of people not like me" is - due to privilege - one of the major failings of our current political system, a lack of concern for the same failing in a body of significant political power is disturbing.

(Now, a footnote points out that if you select by certain demographics you can bias away from demographics not selected by - I've mentioned that problem before and it's especially serious for small groups)

There's a footnote referenced in the context of the length of the commitment which is also worrying.

⁴⁷ Given the vastly longer duration of the role, it would be necessary to provide the Guardians with some kind of salary. Probably this should simply be the salary they were getting in their regular job, plus generous (but not corruptly so!) expenses. Alternatively, all the Guardians could get the average national wage (as, arguably, MPs should, too). [...]

Emphasis mine. Spot the really obvious problem with that bit that significantly biases ability to be a "Guardian"... The alternative is not great either, but at least the bias it inserts is somewhat counter to current privilege.

So, okay, we have our randomly selected sample of people who will be protecting the future from the present. So, how will they decide what to do? This perfect access to the world's information won't make itself.

The Guardians would be supported both in their training and in their day to day roles as Guardians by a high- level and diverse support staff of administrators, facilitators and experts, including of course legal experts. It would be very important to stop this support staff serving the Guardians from becoming too powerful (as perhaps the civil service is too powerful in relation to government ministers, in Britain). Primarily, those serving the Guardians closely should consist literally of assistants, secretaries and administrative managers and facilitators, plus a cohort of top academic etc. advisors employed on retainers. The Guardians would have strong rights - including if necessary subpoena style rights, to call any and all further actors and experts that they wished to hear from, to help them in their deliberations.

Okay. With a very small number of Guardians, the chances of any of them being themselves an expert in a specifically-named field is small. If the selection was representative, most of them will have average mathematical and scientific knowledge. A year's training will not give them the knowledge to really tell which of two conflicting experts has the best theory. Is X safe or will it cause serious problems in 200 years? Who knows - the experts disagree, the Guardians don't have the expertise to assess the claims, and beware of experts anyway.

So ultimately they will pick the most persuasive expert. Who is probably themselves wrong.

The existing House of Commons is already perfectly capable of picking the wrong expert advice; it seems unlikely that some randomly-selected people would be significantly better. (And they need to be significantly better, not merely equal, or they're not actually helping)

That's if the Guardians can agree at all. They're randomly selected in part to avoid party political considerations. But it also means that they will have a broad spread of political views. So, how will they make decisions? By consensus.

They would be given training for example in consensus decision making, in a group with a common purpose.

Consensus decision making is really quite difficult between people with completely different core assumptions. So in practice most things would come down to a vote between different political factions. The factions might not be there already - political party membership is so rare that perhaps one of the Guardians might have it - but they'd form pretty rapidly.

See also: Tyranny of Structurelessness - even though this wouldn't be unstructured, it still applies: at least with the selection method for MPs there are so many big egos that they cancel out, whereas with a random selection a couple of charismatic big egoed people can end up very dominant.

In practice then we have a third chamber that will tend to always fall on the same side of political debates about whether a policy is a good idea or not. What side that is is selected randomly, but that doesn't really help. It also gives the "centrist" Guardians the most power as the "swing" voters - in a mini-representation of a marginal Parliamentary constituency, or a slightly enlarged version of the current US Supreme Court.

Perhaps their belief in a common objective would help. Perhaps not. There's a suggestion for their "oath of office":

"I promise to do my utmost to represent and uphold the basic needs of future people in the present. I will work to ensure that the future people of the United Kingdom are cared for by us all, and that nothing that we in the U.K. do hurts them or prevents them from being. I vow therefore to execute faithfully and to the very best of my abilities the office of Guardian for Future Generations."

Emphasis mine, again. Are you thinking "oath of allegiance to extremist anti-choice group?" I'm sure it's accidental, given the Green's general policies, but still! Especially given that the explicit point of this group is to prevent Parliament passing legislation that benefits currently-existing people at the perceived expense of potential future people, how do you stop the anti-choicers being all over that with "Look, it says right in your job description you have to ban abortion. You took an oath of office to that effect." (The draft wording is creepily anti-choice, but the group's purpose probably precludes anything without that flaw¹. At least it by doing so avoids the eugenicism that previous "protect the future" movements have had, though it does still allow for invading other countries to take their land for future UK generations)

Let's back up a bit to the start of my criticism. I said "How do we know that something will be a problem in the future? [...] A big hint is 'is it a problem today'."

The major problem with our existing system of government, in my opinion, is that it does not give a voice and sufficient consideration to the concerns of large groups of people, especially those who are far from being the default human. If we can't get a system of democracy that listens to real existing people and considers them to have equal humanity and worth - and that extends to "Well, this would be great for the UK, but really mess up the lives of a bunch of foreigners who aren't part of UK democracy." of course - do we really have any business trying to represent some hypothetical future people.

Conversely, if we actually took seriously the representation of people in all their interests - including, especially, those who won't become MPs themselves - would we need specific care about future generations? What thing could we possibly do that would not significantly harm a group of people in the short-term but would harm a group of people in the long-term?

Nuclear waste has been suggested as meeting that, but I don't think it does: we know nuclear waste is dangerous now, and either we store it properly in which case future generations are going to be fine - and will have better storage and reprocessing technology to make up for our inadequacies - or we don't store it properly and some current people in the short-term will get hurt (and we don't, and they are).

You don't need an appeal to the needs of future people to do this - an appeal to the needs of certain current people would be enough. If we can't care about those current people now, we have no business privileging the needs of our hypothetical future people above both them and their hypothetical future people.

I get the motivation - embedding good environmental decisions in government decision making is going to be necessary for us to survive. But all of the environmental problems facing us today are already having massive negative effects on currently existing people. If that's not enough for us to do something, what does it say about us if future existing people is? And we have structures that care about some currently existing people already - they just don't care about all of them. But that's not a problem with the democratic structures as much as with the people inhabiting them - and their privilege. Adding more people with the same sorts of privilege won't help matters.

Footnote

¹ Yes, I'm fully aware that this hypothetical anti-choicer's argument contains several major logical flaws. But it sounds superficially convincing if you loudly ignore those flaws.

Statistical dehumanisation

[trigger warning]

Dorset, Leeds, and now Nottinghamshire. Yet again, applying a century-old statistical population measure to individuals gives an utterly meaningless result.

I've already said what I want to say about the science behind this, so I'll just link to that and summarise below. I still have more to say about the attitudes, though.

[Director of Public Health Chris Kenny] said: "Obesity is on the rise in this country and what this weight management programme is designed to do is to raise the issue with parents.

"I wouldn't want this one particular case to undermine the whole programme."

Nor, I suppose, would he want the fact that the "science" he's using is not actually supported by the evidence to undermine his programme.

Or the fact that it's counter-productive and bullying of children who really should be considered too young¹ to be given My First Body Issues sets.

The problem isn't really the horribly flawed science. That's bad - and there's a serious group-think problem within the "obesity research" field that stops this getting much time.

The problem is the attitude to people that current "public health" schemes seem to regularly get sucked into.

"Public health" is not an easy job. Done well, it can save lives, improve health, and free up valuable funds that are no longer needed to deal with preventable diseases. However, it's something that only really works at a population level.

The infamous bacon cancer study found that the risk of a particular group of cancers increased from 5% to 6% through increased consumption of processed meats. Now, as was pointed out at the time, this means that for 99% of people, whether or not they eat bacon will make basically no difference to their risk of cancer. For many of those people, bacon is a tasty food, and giving it up or cutting back will make them unhappy.

From an individual perspective it's highly unlikely to be a good deal - permanently give up bacon now, to marginally decrease your chances of getting cancer thirty years later? Most of the people who would take that deal probably didn't like bacon that much in the first place, and so probably didn't eat enough for cutting it out to make a difference.

From a public health perspective the calcuation is completely different. If everyone stopped eating bacon, rates of this group of cancers would drop about 20%, saving millions of pounds a year, and saving thousands of lives. Who wouldn't want that?²

The conflict comes between the individual view and the population-statistics view of public health policy. It's very easy to forget that those statistics are made of individuals, all of which - even if they're identical on the measured statistics - have their own very different lives.

Population statistics is the "easy" way to do "public health". It's also - because it reduces people to a few broad numbers - inherently dehumanising. With that, it becomes easy to see why they won't be dissuaded from this course: they're saving [abstract] lives, so if a few [real] lives are harmed as a result, it's still worth it.

Because the underlying attitude is itself dehumanising, some bad science that reduces health to a couple of convenient numbers is very attractive. Rather than looking at individual health, fixing the numbers becomes the goal - and if your numbers are "wrong", that makes you a problem. For people who are already dehumanised regularly on an individual level, the effects combine very strongly

The "hard" way to do public health does also happen, and there are professionals working very hard towards it - providing green spaces, looking at food availability, considering safety issues, and so on - rather than blaming individuals for making the "wrong" choices. An approach that humanises rather than dehumanises is not only more compassionate, it's also more effective.

Not surprisingly, those public health professionals don't make the news for things like this.

Also not surprisingly, the government is quite happy to, for instance, cut funding to local councils and so force them to close leisure centres (something that is certainly bad for public health), but continues paying for schemes like this to shame people with non-approved bodies.

Footnote

¹ No, there isn't an appropriate age. The product failed safety tests.

² Given the current high unemployment, anyone whose job depends on people eating bacon, for a start.

Recycling austerity

The local council has announced that from April it will be charging £24 to replace lost or damaged recycling bins or bags, except where they were damaged by the collection staff.

These things do get lost fairly often - ours have gone missing twice this year already - we put them out for collection in the morning; come back in the afternoon and they're gone - and no-one else on the street seems to have more than they should, either, so where they went is a mystery.

Which is most likely when someone's recycling bin goes missing?

1. Pay £24 for a replacement (expensive, especially if it keeps happening)
2. Drive waste to the local tip instead (inconvenient, and not an option for many)
3. Use disposable rubbish bags to put waste out instead (wasteful, and dangerous for recycling glass)
4. Throw everything in the non-recycling bin instead (easy, but defeats the point)
5. Steal someone else's bin (criminal)

Most people are honest enough not to go for option 5. But they probably won't pick option 1 either, given the choice. Still, I suppose the council saves money whichever option is chosen, and they need to do a lot of that right now, given the central funding cuts they've been given.

But it's yet another case where budget cuts are going to end up costing more in the long run as waste that could be recycled goes into landfill instead.