The Algorithmic Thoreau

A man’s house burns down because he didn’t pay 75 dollars. In one sense, there’s nothing to unpack here. You don’t pay for a service, you don’t get a service. But in several other senses, this means a lot more to a lot of people, to the tune of over 15,000 comments and climbing on the Yahoo News article about it, and so the band wagons are filling up, and they’re calling for band trains, band barges, and there is some guy in the street with a broken bottle yelling about pulling the Spruce Goose out of retirement.

As my partner M pointed out, this seems to be a perfect opportunity, in a tense political commentary climate, for everyone who is anti- anything to blame these anti’s for what is generally agreed to be shitty situation. Anti-government, anti-Obama, anti-conservative, anti-Tennessee, anti-gay, anti-firefighter (seriously, that comment feed is like a State Fair One-Off World-Record Largest Ever Salted Nut Roll of American popular opinion). A house burned down, with all their stuff, and pets. SOMEBODY should be to blame.

My own personal anti-, of course, is anti- people who need to blame everyone else for their problems, or hijack an unfortunate situation to claim that no one should blame anyone for their own problems, thereby blaming everyone else for their own everyone else’s problems. I’m anti-15000+ comments on a Yahoo News site. If everyone who commented saved their spit and mailed it to Western Tennessee, there would be floods, not fires.

But what I really want to write about is taxes.

Because that is what this is really about. Everybody wants government services, nobody wants to pay. There’s disagreements over what the proper amount of each of these are, and about what happens between the time they pay and when they get the service. In the end, government is a unilateral business for something know generally as “Public Good”. This nebulous industry is also the company mission statement and managing strategy, and nebulously, it is always up for debate. Meanwhile, houses continue to burn down.

M works in government services. She is the union worker with an expensive government contract that you always hear about, living the high life on your tax dollars. For example, we ordered a pizza by phone last night… at 10pm! Ah, the sweet life. But you know what is sweeter than that? Telling anyone who complains that they could live like us. All they’d have to do is join a union. And live near a pizza place with free delivery.

The reason we felt we deserved pizza, is because not only does she work in government services, she works in emergency services. And not only does she work in emergency services, she works for the part of emergency services that takes phone calls from people about their emergencies, and therefore she is in a unique position to hear the customers’ points of view about their emergency services. Oh, and me? I just deserve pizza because I have the good sense to live with her.

In addition to pizza I don’t deserve, I also get a view into what goes on in this high-rolling, nebulous world of government emergency services. I get a peek at what it is like to allocate only twelve officers to a downtown district full of noise complaints and drunken fights on a Saturday night, when all of a sudden, there is also a shooting. I get to hear about the citizens who call in from the Washington side of the Columbia River to report people having campfires on the Oregon beach, necessitating calling out the police boat. I get to listen to the actual ire in human beings’ voices as they call over and over to complain that children are playing basketball in the park at 9pm. You know, rather than selling drugs or stealing beer or drag racing. Because basketball is a public problem. And I don’t even need to get into the racism, the neglect, the selfishness, the childishness, the violence, and the other horrible things this modern first-world society does to itself all day and night.

What I conclude is this: managing this lovely, peaceful society we have, or at least maintaining this facade for most people, costs money. It needs cars, and radios, and computer systems. Expensive trucks that can pump hundreds of gallons of water that run on diesel fuel. Many well-trained human beings to operate all this equipment, and the organizational structure to improve this training, and figure out what went wrong when they fuck up. Which they will do occasionally, when humanity throws them a curve ball, or someone decides to do something absolutely horrible without warning, or when the responders themselves are humans.

And these are just the emergency services themselves, not to mention the roads needed for the trucks to get where they are going, the electricity to power the computers, and the educational system to try and subdue the horrible violence lurking within humanity. I mean, to train people to put out fires. Actually, both please.

Therefore, “cutting spending” is about as sensible “cutting population”, or at least until the sea levels rise and then some maniacs actually start suggesting that. You can’t just pay less, and expect to get the same service. Or better service. Which is what people apparently claim–that the problem is that everyone else is lazy, and so if you fired all the lazy people with big salaries, then the people who work really hard for low wages will make everything awesome. Because there are lots of million-dollar bonus executives in government. Any of these people are welcome to come and see how we live, fat on a union salary. But they can’t have any of our pizza.

What is needed is to spend the right amount of money in the right places. Everyone seems to have ideas about this as well. That is, everyone except for the Republican Party, that did not suggest ONE, not ONE place they would cut spending in their Pledge to America plan to cut spending. With all the discussion about spending and deficits and taxes recently, it’s been mentioned that there is a gap between the actual distribution of government budgets, versus the public conception of what the state is spending priorities are. As it turns out, the state largely spends money the way people want it spent. People just think that it isn’t.

To fix this problem, there is the suggestion of an itemized receipt for tax payers, to help them understand exactly where their money is going. We could see that our expenditures on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is more than triple the federal highway budget. Or almost five times the federal health research through NIH. Or that five percent of our taxes go towards paying interest on the national debt. This sort of information might cause problems, because it encourages taxpayers to apply their home budget micro-economic knowledge against macro issues. For example, the national debt is actually more of an investment in the US currency and the open-market ability of the Fed to control the economy. Not just a gigantic credit card. But more information is good, right? So first we’ll give people the data, and then start to hand out primers on macro-economics and the FOMC.

But this, combined with a Twitter comment I read suggesting not paying taxes to protest a war, got me thinking. What if after seeing this receipt, taxpayers were allowed to shift where their taxes went? Say, less Pell grants, and more to the war in Afghanistan, if that was their priority. Or less war, and more highways. Of course this would affect their service. The service only gets what the individual public thinks it deserves from their contribution to the tax coffers. It would be easier to go all Henry Thoreau on a war a hemisphere away then it would on, say, your local fire service, because there are fewer people contributing to your local fire bureau than paying national taxes, and you’d see the effect of the latter right away, the former only later. But hey, open it up. Let people pay their share of what they think it important. Let’s think about what would happen, if people could actually control where the money was going.

Other than finally letting individuals control their tax dollars, what this would eventually create is a massive, cybernetic feedback loop. Let’s say you opened up a website with UI controls, so you could adjust your proportional tax payment anytime you wanted, adjustable down to hourly segments of your fiscal year total. (I am assuming you must still pay your full total, you can just allocate the percentages. Otherwise, everyone would obviously opt to pay nothing at all.) And this site updates. So after it first launches, we see (and I am just guessing here) payment for education and arts decrease, and military spending increases. After a few hours of people allocating their own taxes, education and arts are almost at zero. But then what happens as people see these changes? Maybe someone who originally allocated 75% military/25% education, on seeing education spending slide nationally to nothing, decides to allocate 100% education to make up for the difference. How many people do this? Enough to counter the childless militants? What sort of equilibrium is reached? Is an equilibrium reached?

Now imagine, after they open up the API of this system (naturally), third-party algorithms are introduced. Want to help the budget reach 25% for education nationally? Install this add-on, and it will auto-adjust you and everyone else using the add-on in a unified front to make this goal a reality (while protecting your personal data, of course). Or maybe you set it to automatically devote up to 100% of your individual taxes to education, unless highways dip below 5%, and then it re-figures your totals according to your preference. Or, download the Democratic Party algorithm, which will automatically adjust your percentages to match the national tax distribution platform of the party. Download the Support our Troops algorithm, which helps the Veterans and Military budgets maintain a certain consistent ratio to the overall budget depending on how many troops are currently on active duty. Pledge to Support the Dollar, by downloading the FOMC algorithm that will adjust internal infrastructure spending and national debt spending in such a way as to drive the strength of the dollar world-wide. How about an algorithm that scans the news for stories of political scandal, reducing the money allocated to congressional salaries every time there is another ethics violation? Too many fires in your district last month? The Google Map Fire Layer-aware algorithm will automatically up your fire services percentage by an appropriate amount.

Now what would be REALLY REALLY interesting: what sort of equilibrium is achieved, and how far off is it the current balance as it now, without this sci-fi direct democracy scheme? After all the algorithms are factored in, and all the feedback to the results of the algorithms are calculated and re-factored… are we actually any different than where we are now? Is our national desired budget, summed from all the diverse opinion about where we ought to be spending money, really any different from reality? If we let one person tweak the budget, they’d do all sorts of different things. But if everyone’s opinion and rate of pay were weighted together, I’d say it’s a fair bet that we’d end up exactly where we are.

Which brings us back to Thoreau. If Thoreau decides not to pay any taxes towards an unjust war, and convinces 100,000 of his friends and Twitter followers to do likewise, who is to say that if they are allowed to adjust their tax distribution, William Randolph Hearst and all of his Twitter followers won’t decide to up their tax distribution in favor of war to make up the difference? Wouldn’t we then see that those who pay the most taxes control the distribution of the budget by their weight? How would this “voting with your tax” be any different than the world today, in which people with a lot of money, and hoards of people with a little bit of money, filtered through regimes of power and ideology and opinion, are the only influences to the political system?

Is it possible that as bankrupt and backwards as our democracy is, that it actually functions perfectly at doing what it is supposed to do? This function: to obfuscate and abstract our own lack of knowledge and ability, to direct our attention away from our responsibility for our own egos. And is it possible that the government, by echoing the non-sensical desires and demands of a populace that is as fickle as a television programming schedule, is already the representative compass of a society that is ready and willing to sprint directly towards oblivion? This society that would rather wage war across the globe than put out the fires in our neighbors homes, and fix the gas lines underneath our own feet.

I don’t actually know. But somebody should run a mock-up study to see. I’d really like to participate, and see the results.

Comment from Martha - 10/12/2010 at 13:44

wow, so nice to see someone took the time to begin working this out, thanks!