Intelligent Donation

I saw an advertisement on TV sometime back talking about animal rights. They showed some pictures of "cute" looking animals and asked for donations which would be used to provide food and shelter for such animals. I do believe that this goal is a good one but I feel that there is a serious need to prioritize donations. I have lived most of my life in India and have seen too many children who suffer from serious malnutrition and live on the streets in Delhi. I can only imagine what the situation would be like in small villages in some African country. Hence, I find it hard to worry about animals not getting food and shelter when I know there are human beings in similar situations.

I believe that there is a more-or-less constant pool of donations in the world. Hence, every donation that goes to some charity like the animal protection example above is a donation that does not go to poor children dying of hunger around the world. Even if one does not completely agree with the "constant donation pool" assumption above one would probably agree that it does become harder to extract donations from a group of people if they have already donated to some other cause earlier. This is enough to argue for some amount of prioritization in donations. Once again, it is not that I am arguing against the fact that animals also deserve proper food and shelter. All I am arguing is for prioritizing the problems we face.

A logically similar situation occurs with another type of donation request. At the risk of sounding heartless, I will still continue. These are advertisements which show a picture of a child who is suffering from some very dangerous disease and requires some extremely costly medical procedure to save his/her life. Again, this is a very good cause for donation in isolation but the same donation amount that is required to save this one child's life could be used to save the lives of hundreds of children dying of hunger in some village in a developing country. Hence, the same issue of prioritization of donations arises here as well.

I am NOT arguing for someone who is willing to donate to any of the two "negative" examples mentioned above to stop donating. I am just arguing that the donor think intelligently about what matters more to him/her and donate the same amount to a charity that the donor believes will maximize the impact of his/her donation. I am just a computer scientist, so forgive me if this entry seems very blunt.

Akashocracy: A novel approach to improve democracy

My data mining midterm is finally over. It went much better than I was expecting... or so I believe. In any case, it is over and I can finally get back to "research".

A long time back, when the reservation debate in India had heated up again after the government had decided to add the 27% reservation for OBCs in the IITs and IIMs, I had seen one guy on TV who was supporting the reservations and he had said something to this effect. The reporter had asked him why he thinks the additional reservations should be put in place and he answered saying that he does not need to think about reasons for it as it was simple democracy and no one could do anything about it. I think he is right about this point in that there is not much that one can do about it. He and the other politicians were merely being smart about it by taking advantage of it. In fact, they had no choice about it since the backward classes form a coalition of size greater than 50% which is reasonably united. The fact that they were oppressed earlier by the upper caste people is not important. If one can unite a bunch of people in some other way (say on the basis of first names starting from A to P) it would be the same situation.

The point is that democracy automatically enforces complete equality between all the citizens. If we remove the (un-amendable parts of the) constitution, the democratic system would just reduce to communism. The hand wavy reason is as follows: I could always create a political party that imposes 100% tax on some randomly chosen 49% of the population and distributes the amount into the remaining 51% who would obviously vote for me. However, this isn’t a Nash equilibrium and someone else could form a coalition of some other 51% and redistribute the profits among them so that everyone in the coalition was benefiting by switching to this strategy and so there isn’t any stable equilibrium. Finally (again using hand waving), since the situation is symmetric the final bargaining solution should also be symmetric and everyone gets an equal piece of the total GDP of the country. The constitution (probably) provides some rights that protect the democratic system from moving towards such a state but it isn’t sufficient.

That got me thinking about an alternative option. Why do we need a central government agency? Why not just have everyone as a separate entity? The reason is that there are many tasks (such as security) that are much cheaper to implement in bulk. That is, it is much cheaper and efficient to have a single police force for a large bunch of people than if everyone had to worry about their protection separately. We could think of the government as a company that provides these bulk services in exchange for taxes. However, when it comes to making some decision (on how to use the taxes), democracy provides an equal vote to all the citizens. Why not weight the vote of a person by the amount of tax paid by the person. In this case, the earlier issue of the system reducing to communism would no longer exist. The second problem with people forming coalitions (which is a less important problem) could be solved by allowing the decisions to be made randomly based on the weighted votes (decide Yes/No with probability 0.6/0.4) instead of just selecting the decision of the majority (Yes since 0.6>0.4). This may however reduce the total GDP of the country since the decisions may not go the way of the larger set of people (who could have made more money with the decision in their favor). In an idealized case, the market would work out this situation optimally by itself and the 60% of the people that want a "Yes" decision would redistribute their profits and pay some compensation to the remaining 40% so that they change their decision as well.

Hence, I propose Akashocracy which uses the above ideas to solve the problems with the previous approach of democracy. Due to difficulty of implementing the proposed approach in real life, no experiments could be performed to measure the improvements. However, I hope the hand wavy reasons described above would be enough to convince the reader of the promise of the proposed approach. In the future, I plan to incorporate MRFs, CRFs and SVMs into the approach to further enhance it.