For some time now it's been clear to me that as society grows ever more technical, it's leaving legislators behind.
At the same time, the background of lawmakers has increasingly narrowed.
In Australia, for example, it used to be commonplace for the Parliament to contain people whose first careers were as teachers, farmers, train drivers, engineers, small businessmen and so forth.
Not any more. Today it's an almost wall-to-wall collection of law students who were all groomed by party machines. Go to uni, join political club, graduate and work in minister's office/a union/a politically-connected law firm, get pre-selected at the local branch, elected to Parliament.
At no point has this person a) studied something other than law or b) held down an ordinary job or run a small business. I imagine the pattern is similar elsewhere.
And so our law making bodies are filled with folk whose main skill is forensic disputation. This is problematic when technical debates are held because politicians are often mistrustful of experts outside their circle of loyalty -- because for any expert I can procure, someone else can get an expert to say the opposite.
Having experts inside the circle of trust is golden. The classic example is the banning of CFCs. Margaret Thatcher's undergraduate degree was in chemistry and so she understood the mechanisms. In turn she was able to assure Regan that the phenomenon was real and serious and the rest is history.
I have for some time toyed with the idea of forming a non-partisan organisation whose purpose is helping STEM professionals to get elected. Please contact me by email (check my profile) if you are interested.
It's also worth mentioning that the bigger problem here is that the breakneck pace of technological advancement has left legislators behind just due to age. They did not grow up with the Internet. Hell, they barely grew up with television. But we went from radio to the Internet in 70 years, less than many a human lifetime. That's going to cause some pendulum swinging. Obviously I think we should oppose SOPA with all of our hearts and all of our voices, but let's also not despair that this is how it will always be. Call me an idealist, but 5-10 years from now, when people start getting elected who were young when the Internet changed everything, I think we'll see a swing of the pendulum back away from this madness.
I'm afraid I can't be as optimistic about future legislators as you seem to be. The pace of technological change is only going to get faster. Even someone who is an expert in a field is going to be utterly clueless about the latest technology by the time he gets elected for a second term. "Dropbox? What's that? Is that like Kazaa?"
Besides, these people are not only ignorant, they are willfully ignorant. They could have asked the experts/"nerds" anytime if they wanted to, but they never will, because they're not interested. They are not going to let expert knowledge get in the way of doing what industry lobbyists paid them to do.
It's completely possible that many of them have no nerds in or near their social circle. They've lived and breathed politics for many years, and most geeks don't go anywhere near politics.
I think Jacques' idea of trying to get some technical people elected is a pretty fantastic one. I think it makes sense to have an offline discussion about how that should be done.
I this this a dangerously weak argument against things like SOPA. Congress deals routinely with technical matters far outside the experience of most of its members. Very few members of Congress can pilot a plane, price an option, inspect a copper mine, gauge the damage of X parts per million of some contaminant in the water supply, or, for that matter, provide for and maintain a Navy like the Constitution demands of them.
The argument against SOPA can't be "Congress has no business wading outside its technical competency"; it has to be, "this is a bad proposal, intrinsically, for reasons X, Y, and Z".
That can't be used as an argument against SOPA, but having technically competent congressmen would certainly help to prevent this kind of thing in the future.
Its important to keep in mind that while lobbyists are a major factor in corruption of the political system, one of the reasons they are there is that they politicians rely on them for providing technical expertise.
You make it sound as if they're just there to help make the world a better place. Lobbyists are there to ensure the interests of the organizations they represent are addressed. They do this using their financial influence, and by "providing technical expertise" in the form of drafting the very policy they expect the politicians to support ... easing the burden of said politician actually doing the work they were elected to do in learning what it is they're foisting upon their constituents in the form of laws. If you think even half of the politicians voting for SOPA have a clue how DNS works and aren't just parroting the message from someone that's given them money, I think you're deluding yourself.
"Lobbyists are there to ensure the interests of the organizations they represent are addressed."
Sure. Some of those organizations have interests that make the world a better place. You do know there are lobbyists out there working against SOPA, right?
I agree that financial influence is a problem, but only part of it has anything to do with campaign contributions and backscratching. Plain and simple, interests that have (or causes that attract) more money can afford to hire more people to actually do the lobbying work from research to face-to-face discussion (this is one reason why wealth distribution issues matter bigtime).
And in the meanwhile, fewer and fewer people do lobbying for any reason other than money. Or to put it another way, maybe the other half of the problem is that we're not all trying to be better lobbyists. I remember hearing an interview with Rep Bill Orton a while back (interesting guy -- a Democrat elected to Utah's 3rd district, one of the most conservative Republican districts out there) where he said his biggest surprise after election was how few "ordinary citizens" came to visit.
Aussie here - while we do have our various lobby groups, they certainly do not seem to be as rampant as in the US system. Because the rules around donations are stricter, issues seem to get fought out in the public sphere a bit more. So for example when a proposed mining tax looked like it might cut corporate profits the mining companies funded massive advertisement campaigns on TV, saying how it would cost jobs.
Our system is much more like the British system, where for technical expertise ministers rely on the public servants of the department they manage. Many of the public servants have university degrees relevant to the areas they work in, and years of relevant experience.
While the system isn't without its problems (see the British comedy 'yes minister' for a more detailed explanation :-) at least ministers have somebody 'non partisan' providing them with expertise and recommendations.
In Australia the classic British model of public servants giving disinterested advice has been steadily eroded by a) senior staff being placed on contracts and b) senior public servants behaving like political actors.
Perhaps the House of Representatives should be populated like a jury. Hundreds of regular "Joe Citizens" are randomly selected and then voted on each year. No more career politicians selling out citizens for kickbacks. No more career politicians not doing their job because they are on the campaign trail seeking reelection.
Then revert Senate seats to be appointed, not elected, positions. The Senate and President will (hopefully) squash crazy ideas that may escape the House.
William F. Buckley said, "I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University."
The Canadian Senate is appointed, and as a result it's mostly become a rubberstamping organization. Almost every time the senate approves whatever comes out of parliament to the point where many Canadians don't even know of it's existence.
I don't know how the jury mechanism will prevent people selected abusing their position much when they have it. Or even worse being quickly manipulated, since the house is a law creating body.
> > Then revert Senate seats to be appointed, not elected, positions.
> In the US and Australia it used to be the case that Senators were appointed by States.
That's why I suggested the seats be "reverted" to appointments.
> Then revert Senate seats to be appointed, not elected, positions. The Senate and President will (hopefully) squash crazy ideas that may escape the House.
And they will be appointed based on whose advice, precisely?
Look at it from the POV of the state governor, who is looking down a long list of people who all want to be on the Senate and all have something like a real qualification. It's easily over a hundred names, none of whom you've ever so much as had a beer with. How do you narrow it down to two? Well, there's someone in your mansion's antechamber right now who is more than willing to help you select the right people...
We need our geniuses, innovators, and entrepreneurs running the show, is the general problem. I think if you took every chunk of 1000 people and asked them to select amongst themselves (assume its a small town thing, where they have known each other for years) they will pick the brightest and best amongst them to represent themselves.
The problem today in my mind is not only the money is speech problem we face today, but the more general problem that the more people you have one person represent the less they are representative of their electorate and the more generalized they become, even in the best case, they don't represent the full broad beliefs and ideals of the constituents. You want representation as fine grained as possible, with a pyramid of layers of it stacking up to a national level, rather than a system that is as top down as the national -> state -> local game we have going right now.
This sounds great and increased participation of technically-trained people is sorely needed. There've been some stirrings toward this over here across the (other) pond:
it is worth remembering that inside-track "experts" come with their own set of tradeoffs, especially when they have unchallenged influence - think Mcnamara and Kissinger, Rice and Wolfowitz, and Summers and gang.
At the same time, the background of lawmakers has increasingly narrowed.
In Australia, for example, it used to be commonplace for the Parliament to contain people whose first careers were as teachers, farmers, train drivers, engineers, small businessmen and so forth.
Not any more. Today it's an almost wall-to-wall collection of law students who were all groomed by party machines. Go to uni, join political club, graduate and work in minister's office/a union/a politically-connected law firm, get pre-selected at the local branch, elected to Parliament.
At no point has this person a) studied something other than law or b) held down an ordinary job or run a small business. I imagine the pattern is similar elsewhere.
And so our law making bodies are filled with folk whose main skill is forensic disputation. This is problematic when technical debates are held because politicians are often mistrustful of experts outside their circle of loyalty -- because for any expert I can procure, someone else can get an expert to say the opposite.
Having experts inside the circle of trust is golden. The classic example is the banning of CFCs. Margaret Thatcher's undergraduate degree was in chemistry and so she understood the mechanisms. In turn she was able to assure Regan that the phenomenon was real and serious and the rest is history.
I have for some time toyed with the idea of forming a non-partisan organisation whose purpose is helping STEM professionals to get elected. Please contact me by email (check my profile) if you are interested.