Why the electoral college is a great idea

With the election looming, we see the quadrennial complaining about the electoral college. "The electoral college effectively disenfranchises most Americans" complains the New York Times  "Shafted by the electoral college" complains the usually excellent Steve Chapman at the Chicago Tribune.

Here's why I think the electoral college -- with (crucially) winner-take-all selection in the states, which is under attack -- is a great idea. (Even though I live in Illinois.) Look at the map. (Source here, I found it just by google searching, so no endorsement.)

With the electoral college, Governor Romney and President Obama have to get 51% majorities in enough states to get 270 votes, to win the white house.

Suppose we had a popular vote instead. Now, instead of fighting for 51% of Ohio, President Obama could instead try to raise his 60% of New York and Illinois to 70%, even if it meant 45% of Ohio. Or he could try to raise his 80% of New York city and Chicago to 90%, (made up number).  He doesn't need to persuade people, really, he just needs to  encourage more New Yorkers and Chicagoans to turn out.

Instead of fighting for 51% of Ohio, Governor Romney could raise his 60% of the south to 70%, or raise his 75% of Utah to 85%, or just work to get all those people out to the polls.

The Times bemoaned low turnout in non-battleground states. If you think there is a lot of money, obnoxious ads, and people bothering you now, just imagine if bringing out another voter in Utah could  counter one more voter in New York.

But here's the real issue. If you think politics are polarized now, just imagine what they will be with a straight popular vote.

What policies will the next Democrat advocate, if he can win by deepening his margin in New York City rather than try for 51% in  Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Nevada? What policies will the next Republican  choose if the path to victory can come from bigger victories in Salt Lake city and the rest of the Red states rather than have to  try for 51% of Ohio, Virginia, Florida, and Nevada?  What kinds of candidates will parties select if these are the paths to victory?

You don't like letting the Bush tax cuts expire, raising the top rate from 35 to 40%? That's nothing. A policy to win New York, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco and LA, while letting the rest of the country rot, would show you what real "class warfare" looks like!  Wealth tax. 90% income tax. Forget the muddled insurance "reform" of Obamacare -- single-payer "free" health care for all!

On the Republican side, the delicate dance over "social policy" would likely disappear -- appeal to the base for primaries, but  but move quickly to the middle before the election and then don't do anything. If the Republicans can win by going for 90% marjorities in rural areas and red states, what will happen to abortion, immigration, and civil liberties? And taxes that hit, oh, New York, Chicago, and Detroit are a good bet.

This isn't about beliefs. Our parties are coalitions. It's simple math of what policies assemble a winning coalition.

And "polarization" is only the beginning. Look again at that map. The blue states are all together and the red states are all together. We have polarization with strong geographic concentration -- a poisonous combination.

 Remember the "United States of Canada vs. Jesusland" map from 2004 (at left, from Wikipedia) Maybe they weren't kidding.

There were rumblings about secession in Texas over Obamacare. What would they have thought about the real "single-payer" system that so many on the left wanted? How would those people feel about a 70% income tax?

Do you think I'm being extreme? Look at Europe. England/Scotland, French/Flemish Belgium, Catalonia and Basque Spain all want to pull apart. The cold war is over. When you have polarization and geographic concentration, why stick together? It already happened once in the US.

A system in which each candidate has to get a small majority in a large number of states is a good system to keep a polarized democracy together. A straight popular vote, in which one could win by getting huge majorities in some areas and lose by huge majorities in other areas, is a disaster waiting to happen. We do this in sports, for similar good reasons: the world series winner is not just the total number of runs in the regular season.

It looks possible that Gov. Romney will lose the electoral college and win the popular vote. One may forgive liberals bemoaning the electoral college when George W. Bush won. But I hope that people who express reverence for the constitution and the wisdom of the founding fathers will do so again even if they lose. It's a good system. If they lose, Republicans need to find a new coalition that delivers small, widespread majorities. We are not immune from the tides of history pulling other countries apart.

(PS, I know the idea is not original, but don't have the authoritative source. It's probably in the Federalist Papers somewhere. Feel free to comment.)

Update: Already there are some great comments.

As many point out, imagine a national recount in a close election. A popular vote means not only that every vote counts, it means that every vote can be recounted, contested, and challenged. Or, more ominously, imagine the chance for shenanigans when every vote across the country counts the same.

This is true, but not a deep problem. If we used the same level of security and technology for voting that we require for, say, boarding an airplane or taking $40 out of an ATM, we could have a secure and accurate popular vote. If that were the only concern, then the electoral college and state by state winner take all would have been very important for 18th to 20th century voting technology, but no longer really needed if we can ever bring voting technolgy up to about the 1990s.

The most important point in the post is my fear that a popular vote would lead to more polarized candidates and parties, and that the polarization would pit region against region. Colin, below, takes me to task on the median voter theorem, which says that under some conditions the outcome of a popular vote is the preference of the median voter.

Good point. But every theorem has assumptions. The median voter theorem assumes that political outcomes can be placed on a one-dimensional line, and that preferences are "single peaked," people liking the outcome closest to their preference. Ask any libertarian where they stand on the left-right continuum and you get a long lecture. Our parties are coalitions of very strange bedfellows, not points on the median voter line.

My worries are about outcomes where there are many dimensions to what we care about -- foreign policy, economic policy, environment, social questions. Most of all, my worry is geographic concentration -- red states vs blue states, and candidates who win by getting 90% majorities in one or the other.  My worry is that the cost of getting a deeper majority in your own state is less than the cost of getting a slim majority in a battleground state. Costs are absent in the median voter theorem.

So the median voter theorem doesn't really answer the question.  But I'm not an expert in voting theorems, so I'm interested to hear from those who are what theorems do apply to this situation.

The point of an election is not really about selecting a winner and a loser, or a set of policies. It's about building a consensus, that the losers  agree to live together under the winner, and try again next time. A geographically broad set of 51% wins with a popular loss is more important to that goal than a 51% popular vote win based on overwhelming majorities in narrow areas, and overwhelming losses in the rest of the country.


We had a civil war. Yes, under the electoral college. It wasn't good enough. A popular vote would have been worse.

Debate with Goolsbee

Last Tuesday, Glen Weyl asked me to debate economic policy issues in the current election with Austan Goolsbee, in the famous "rational choice" workshop. Here's my 10-minute opening statement. Austan did a great job in a tough audience.

Economic Policy and the Election: 

Growth is our number one economic challenge. Here’s how recoveries are supposed to look. We get a period of very strong growth rates, until the economy recovers to “trend,” or potential.”

Here we are. Not only have we failed to bounce back, growth is slowing down. We seem headed for a permanent loss of about 8% and sclerotic 1-2% growth.

I’m not the only one who thinks we should have bounced back. This nice graph comes from the administration’s 2010 budget, to document the same point that we should bounce back. (Note the great depression. It was not 10 years of steady stagnation. It had a strong recovery, then a double dip in 1937.)

And here, I’ve plotted the Administration’s successive forecasts in blue. They thought we should have bounced back, and you can see the tragedy of their slowly diminished expectations. So much for “recessions after financial crises are inevitably [and hence predictably] long.”

Growth drives everything. Before this recession, 63% of population was working. That ratio plunged to 58%, and is stuck there. New “jobs” just match the new people. About 5% of the working-age population – 12 million people – are out of work, apparently, permanently.

Only growth will bring back 12 million jobs. 10 more green energy boondoggles, 100 more job training programs or 100,000 teachers won’t do it. In the short run, capital and technology are pretty fixed, so you hire more people when you produce more output. Or, as Casey Mulligan argues in his great new book, you produce more output when the government stops putting sand in the gears of hiring people.

Our second huge problem is debt. The Federal government takes in about $2 trillion a year, spends $3 trillion and is $16 trillion in debt. This simply cannot last.

To get out, we need growth. The graph shows the surplus/deficit along with detrended GDP. Our government takes in about 18% of GDP year in and year out, no matter what tax rates are. Tax revenue rises when income rises. If income does not rise, we become Greece.

Growth, growth, growth. It’s not a secret. Growth ultimately comes from productivity. New ideas, products, technologies, businesses, and processes. The dismal 1970s coincided with a sharp productivity decline. Following the Reagan recovery, perhaps sparked by deregulation and tax reform, economic growth, trended up for two decades, which, as you see in the previous graph, is what paid off the Reagan deficits.

But we seem ominously set to repeat the 70s.

I’m sure we all have good ideas about what to do. But we’re here to think about what our two presidential candidates are proposing.

Every sensible observer agrees that we need to reform our chaotic tax system. And how: lower marginal rates, but eliminate the forest of deductions, credits, expenditures and subsidies to keep revenue at least neutral.  This is what Mr. Romney is proposing.

No, marginal tax rates are probably not the central thing driving our sluggish growth, and yes, the economy has grown reasonably despite higher rates in the past. But we know the direction of the effect! Margins matter. This is econ 101.

By contrast, the administration has one idea: a monomaniacal focus on raising taxes on “the rich.”

We don’t need to argue about “fairness,” who “made it,” how progressive our tax and benefits system is already. Let’s just ask if it will work.

Even if there is no avoidance or disincentive, this can raise maybe $50 billion, out of $1.2 trillion deficits. No, it will not fund “investments” or bring down deficits, as the President claims. That’s arithmetic, not economics, and it’s off by two orders of magnitude.

And, by what economics is the central key to escaping sclerotic growth that we should sharply raise marginal tax rates on investment and business formation? When, ever, has a society experiencing sclerotic growth restored robust prosperity by a tax-based redistribution? The last time we tried it was 1937. Roosevelt raised taxes on “the rich” to 70% and sent his attorney general off on a “war on capital.” He got a “capital strike” and his big recession became the great depression. President Obama will follow his hero’s footsteps.

The utter chaos of our tax and spending is more important than the rates. The government has not passed a budget in years. Spain and Greece pass budgets! What serious country decides its taxes every year, in late-night sessions in the middle of January, with thousands of special deals up for grabs?

For the first time ever, this administration doesn’t even pretend that it will balance the budget! Despite all the rosy scenario they can muster, they are proposing trillion dollar deficits forever. Forget the games of “scoring” various plans – does anyone really believe that the actual outcome of a Romney administration is going to be higher deficits than under a second Obama term?

Entitlements are the long-run budget catastrophe. Like it or not, at least Ryan and Romney are advocating a serious entitlement reform. The administration promises, not one penny cut from your Medicare and Social security. But we don’t have that money – this promise must be broken. The only question is how.

Rather than get the long-run right, the administration has indulged in a patchwork of short-run meddling. Stimulus. Cash for clunkers, which destroyed the market for used cars that low-income people depend on. Temporary tax breaks, with the constant threat of higher future taxes. 100 mortgage writedown programs that don’t work. Bankrupt solar panel factories, yet Al Gore walks away with $100 million bucks.

I would not mind if any of this worked. It demonstrably did not.

Source: John Taylor

Dodd Frank and Obamacare are the administration’s singular achievements. With the house in Republican hands, it’s clear there will be no big legislative initiatives in a second Obama term.

Thus, the main story of the second Obama term will be Dodd-Frank and Obamacare “implementation,” writing tens of thousands of pages of rules and creating the hundreds of new agencies those measures mandate, along with expansion of the other regulatory agencies.

I would not mind if these had a chance of working. Health care is a mess. And financial regulation needed to be rethought. But Dodd Frank and Obamacare are disasters. Beyond the well-reported costs.

Obama care and Dodd Frank are not really laws or rules. Instead, they send appointed officials off with huge power and discretion, to run businesses and markets as they see fit. (There are “rules” but they are so massive and so vague, that discretion is their effect.)

A microscopic example: “stress tests.” The Fed staffers in charge are not writing rules – they’re open about it: If they write rules, the banks will work around the rules. So each quarter they dream up something new and challenging to surprise the big banks with. And hundreds of billions of dollars hang on the results. George Stigler is turning over in his grave.

Another: Obamacare is so onerous, that thousands of discretionary waivers are already being handed out. Better not contribute too loudly to Republican causes.

Another: the EPA official caught wanting to “crucify” a few businesses. Here’s a guy dispassionately enforcing clear rules, eh?

Now, telescope. There are tens of thousands of these stories. Regulation is not “more or less” it’s smarter or dumber, more or less prone to evasion, economic stagnation, unintended effects, anti-competitive capture, and crony capitalism.

Our only hope is to replace these with clear, simple, rule-based regulations. Individual, portable, renewable health insurance and a competitive health-care market. Simple effective financial regulation. After four more years of Dodd-Frank and ACA metastasis, the chance to do that will have passed.

None of this was a mistake. The last four years of disastrous economic policy came from a deeply ingrained philosophy: that detailed discretionary control by government bureaucrats is the way to run the macro and micro economy. That growth comes from a one-year special tax break for this or that, a $7000 credit for silicon valley tycoons to buy electric sports cars, and sending the staff of HHS to tell each of us what medicine we need and the Fed to tell each bank who it should lend to.

No. Prosperity comes from property rights, rule of law, simple clear and stable taxation and regulation, which is hard to bend to crony capitalism and protection, and competition.

Not everything in Romney’s plan is perfect. I won’t defend “energy independence” and a fairly mercantilist attitude towards trade. But again, our task tonight is to pick from the menu, not to roll our own. The outlines of what Romney is proposing – and more importantly he, Ryan, the economic advisers I know, and what seems likely to emerge from their administration -- are a lot closer to that philosophy.

(Notes:  This is more political than what I usually write here, so I turned comments off. I don't want to fight about politics or deal with moderating the hate-filled comments I know are coming.

Many graphs and points have shown up in previous blog posts with more detailed explanation, especially "Just how bad is the economy?" "Inevitably slow recoveries?,and  Recoveries after financial crises".

I deliberately kept the graphs simple so the facts would be transparent. Yes, GDP per capita, consumption per capita, etc. might be better measures, labor force should adjust for demographics, I used output per worker to measure productivity, etc.  All can be done better, getting the same basic result, but at the cost of a bit of obscurity.)