So . . . today is voting day for our friends to the south. Maybe it's because I didn't really follow the politics of a foreign country when I was a kid, but it sure seems to me that midterm elections get a lot more attention than they used to. Of course, this particular midterm election is being viewed as a referendum on both Obama's first two years and the Tea Party movement, so people on both sides feel as though they have a lot to say. But part of the problem is that even though there is a lot of talking going on, no one is saying very much. I contribute my piece of speech after the jump.
When I teach my students how to make management decisions, one tool I suggest to them is to use a weighted-average model. Even though this decision-making model is still flawed, it can shed light on where you stand with regard to a particular issue. When we are faced with complex problems involving many variables, we have two main choices: fight or flight. We can run from the complexity and reduce the choice criteria to one or two factors, or we can puzzle through the problem.
To use a weighted average model, you need two inputs: criteria and alternatives. So let's say we deciding on a TV. Our criteria could be price, screen size, type of TV (plasma, LCD or LED), sound quality, etc. Then we would have those brands or products in our consideration set. We would assign a weight to each criterion (e.g. from one to ten) and then rate each brand on each criterion. Multiply the rating by the weighting and boom! you get a weighted average score. This way the importance of each element is taken into consideration.
Just in case you thought that I had cut and pasted that in from a different post, this is still about politics. One of the things that irks me greatly about politics is the reductionism. Both politicians and those discussing politics tend to glom onto one issue as being the most important. We observed this in the 2004 presidential election - Kerry claimed the economy as his turf, and Bush kept talking about security. Because people believed that security was more important than the economy, Bush won.
So when we go to vote, we tend to justify our choices by saying that we agree with the candidate on an issue, but to vote for someone because of one issue is the same as weighting that criterion as ten and all of the rest as zero. We wouldn't do that when buying a TV, so why do it when we are buying a leader?
Part of the problem is that each of us is unique, and it's hard to find a politician that we agree with on all issues. Why should we agree on all issues? So instead, we pretend that it's all about the environment, or abortion, or civil rights, and ignore the fact that all of these factors (and more) are important. It's easy to say that our rights our meaningless if the economy is no good, but the economy doesn't matter if our borders aren't protected, and our sovereignty is worthless if the air isn't breathable. This can go on forever; try as you might, there is no one overriding issue that trumps all.
The unfortunate side effect of all of this is that it makes the parties and candidates spend more time and money trying to sell the idea that "their" issue is the most imprortant, rather than having a reasoned discussion of the issues. If a rational thinker capable of understanding complexity ran for president, he or she would never win because that's not what voters want. They want the Tea Party to scare them into thinking that it's all about taxes and gay marriage, and the Democrats try to coax them into thinking that it's all about the environment and gay marriage. And we end up with a system in which it is no longer a stretch to think that Sarah Palin could eventually be president, because she can simplify (hell, she has to simplify).
The only way that this will change is by withholding your votes from the reductionists and giving them to the candidate with a full slate of ideas who, even if you don't fully agree with him or her, you tend to be on the same page. Complixify instead.
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