Conspiracies Without Cabals

Todays topic is human organization and the analysis of power. In particular, how we can have actions that look concerted, but which do not necessarily require collaboration between individual actors. That is we have things that may appear to be conspiracies, but without any organizing cabal of plotters.

We analyze situations at a level that is practical and with the tools that produce results. We cannot analyze complex physical phenomena in terms of wave functions because the mathematics are intractable. At the level of atoms and molecules we look at electron shells and bonding strength. At the level of materials we talk about stress and strain...

An analogous situation occurs when talking about human behavior. We have to decide which types of analysis are most productive for describing particular aspects of human society. Sometimes the appropriate level is examining individuals, their motivations and actions. At other times it may be more productive to look at larger scale organizations.

In the animal world, an example is a flock of geese. The flock travels long distances without a leader and without conclaves. At any given instant, the goose who is most certain about the proper direction influences the flock to move in that direction. No single goose knows the route, but at any instant one or another goose has a pretty good idea. The flock finds its way where the individuals might not. For analyzing travel, the flock is the correct unit.

We can view the political system as a means to resolve contention between individuals who have differing notions of man and society. Some people value loyalty and the preservation of known successful structures. Other people value fairness and adaptation to a changing world.

At a level up, we can view the US political system as a competition between two major groups, the political parties. The names and values of the parties change over time, but the structure of the US electoral system seems to ensure that there are only two parties (with the occasional splinter party). For analysis, we can look at the party itself, not the people in the party. That is, look at the machine. The parties have evolved over time, but for the US system, the important qualities seem to be: that there are two major parties, that the populace is partitioned into people who largely support one or the other, and that real consequences - power, money, and favor - flow to the inner circle of the party in power. At this level, the modern targeted marketing favored by both parties make sense. Elections are held. A party only gets power if its representatives get the votes in their district. Separating the electorate into very fine segments and appealing to a single issue that is important to a particular individual will sway votes and get the party into power. For the party, being in power is more important than any particular issue or group. The individual parties have expressed beliefs, the party platform. The platform is not any kind of coherent philosophy or reality tested approach. It is merely a collection of issues the core constituency cares about and that can be used to polarize the population and get votes. The party in power uses the apparatus of government to reward those who keep it in power. The favors generally flow to large contributors, often organizations not individuals. The base currency of reward is access. The result of access is most commonly legislation that favors financial interests (a group level result), but it can be personal (e.g. ambassadorships or other government jobs).

In this analysis the characteristics of the groups (parties, lobbying groups ...) rather than individuals is important. To my mind, this fits the facts pretty well. At an individual level, any participant may be internally persuaded that they are working toward future personal rewards, but sometimes the odds don't seem very good. During the presidential primaries of 2008 Andrew Young, an aid to candidate John Edwards, tried to protect the candidate by claiming to be the father of Edwards' illegitimate child. The notion that this lie would somehow advance Young's future personal prospects seems delusional. It looks more like a subsumption of personal interests to the aims of the campaign (the group).

Analysis of group behavior is difficult because groups are constantly appearing and disappearing and they form and break alliances. For example, there is a firearms industry that sells weapons to individuals. At one level we can examine each company as an organization promoting its own aims and competing with other firearm manufacturers. In the political sphere they have banded together and sponsor the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA is beholden to the manufacturers for much of its funding, but it also has a large number of individual contributors. The demands of the rank and file may move the organization away from the aims of the manufacturers. The NRA also gets direction from the specific individuals who lead the organization. The leaders of the organization have some autonomy, but they must operate within a range that is acceptable to the funding constituency.

The difficulty of analysis is increased by the natural human tendency to anthropomorphize the world around us. Every day on the news there is a story talking about the stock market rising or falling, and the reasons behind the movement. The "reasons" are invariably nonsense based on the feelings of "Investors". "Investors" or "The Market" is everyone who bought and sold stock that day. This is anthropomorphized into a thinking, feeling uber-being. On the news you will hear comments like "Investors were frightened by the newly released jobs figures, causing the market to go down". These comments reflect the personal feelings of news commentator and are not based on any rigorous polling of people making trades. If we did poll, we would undoubtedly find a huge range of reasons for buying and selling (the fund needed cash, rebalancing a portfolio away from stocks ...). Even rigorous polling would give us no sensible reason because most trades are not made by humans. Most trades are made algorithmically by computer programs so complex that no individual can, without extreme effort, determine why any particular trade was made. In the "flash crash" of May 2006 the stock market lost, then regained, 10% of its value in less than hour. After five months of analysis the SEC released a report trying to explain why the market fell on that particular day. The answer had nothing to do with the magical "Investors" or "The Market". The SEC explanation included a lot interaction between algorithmic trades (including high frequency traders). Almost a decade later, the reasons are still debated. If you hear a discussion about the stock market that includes human motivations for movement, it is almost certainly fantasy, often in service to the biases and aims of the organization that pays the commentator. That does not mean the commentator is deliberately lying. They are reflecting the views of those in their circle of "experts". Those experts in turn are employed by an organization with an organizational world view tuned to support the aims of the organization.

Analysis at the group level is not hopeless though. There are common strands that allow us to discover some rules and explain actions. Unfortunately, as in many complex systems, often we can only explain in hindsight. It is only in hindsight that we can see how the various forces actually played out. In hindsight, things that were uncertain when they unfolded appear to be more inevitable. This feeling of inevitability can, in turn, lead to the notion that there was deliberate intent by some small set of individual actors (the cabal). All of us have the intent trying to shape the future, but our individual intent is usually tempered by our position within society, which shapes what we think and believe, and by the organizations through which we act.

Partly because of our stated value of respecting individuals, US society is structured to support organizations rather than individuals . In the political sphere, we do not vote for a party, we vote for an individual in a winner takes all system. To get the resources necessary to win an election, individuals almost always have to join a party. The party has a ready place on the ballot for its candidates, the party has a pool of money and a network of people who can be mobilized to work for the candidate. To get this support, the individual must align him/herself with the aims of the party.

In national office, officials "represent" millions of people. They use "public opinion" to help shape their message (but perhaps not their votes). Public opinion can be gauged by polling, and by analyzing comments and requests from constituents. If you have ever written to a national elected official you can see how your feedback is handled. The "personalized" response from the official is a set of canned paragraphs on topics you mentioned. It is clear from this response, that you letter has been analyzed at the level of "concerned about issue X" or, at the most specific, "supports position Y". Based on that, the paragraphs are chosen. These days, the analysis of your letter and the response may be automatically generated without human intervention. I have asked my elected officials to let me talk to someone about this process, and been ignored. The input to the official is presumably equally coarse, basically a count in a spreadsheet that indicates how many constituent wrote in "support of position Y". That is, the responses are aggregated in a very simplistic way. In such a world, organizations have oversized influence because they can mobilize people to affect the count in the spreadsheet of public opinion.

This makes political life a competition of organizations. Powerful individuals can increase their power by creating "grass roots" organizations capable of generating pressure on elected officials by changing the counts in the spreadsheets. Thirty second ads are used to mobilize additional letters and calls. The smartest powerful people go one step further by controlling media to affect the way issues are framed. But, whenever an organization is created, even the most powerful individuals cannot force the organization to completely reflect personal beliefs. Inevitably, other individuals in the organization influence the direction as well.

When we see the results of this process, we may assume there is a conspiracy of individuals (the Trilateral commission, Davos participants ...). It is demonstrably true that actual public opinion has no effect on the legislative process in the US. But this does not mean there is a conspiracy with secret meetings, it is the result of the wars between competing, powerful, moneyed organizations. These organizations form alliances and work together when it is convenient. As alliances are created, individuals will meet, but I believe an appropriate level of analysis is the organization. Individuals create and manipulate organizations for personal gain. I contend individuals strongly influence organizations, but only occasionally control the outcome of the balance between organizations. Individuals generally ride the larger organization trends for individual advantage.

Election Related Blog Posts

Election season is on us again, so I thought I would collect some blog posts from the last election because I think they are still valid.

This election cycle is even worse than usual because of the amount of untraceable money. As I note in Following Politics Too Closely Makes You Stupid, nothing can be learned from a thirty second ad. Unfortunately, there are so many of them they are impossible to ignore.

If you have a small amount of energy to devote to politics, I recommend keeping a pencil and paper and jotting down the name of organizations sponsoring ads (Citizens for All Things Good). Look for the organization on the internet. If it does not list where the money comes from, that should be a black mark against the candidate. Whoever is sponsoring the ad is spending a lot of money to get the candidate elected (or to defeat the opponent). The sponsors will want something in return, but they don't want you to know who they are.

• Following Politics Too Closely Makes You Stupid


• It is Your Civic Duty - Lie to Political Pollsters


• Machine Politics

A little off topic, but related to many of the current election discussions is
Why Does Government Interfere With Markets?

Following Politics Too Closely Makes You Stupid

I'm reading (and recommend) "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. As with his preceding book, "Fooled by Randomness" it deals in part with human limitations in predicting the future and, in particular, our inability to judge risk.

One of his themes is what others call the pull of narrative. As a species we like a nice story and we also wonder what happens next. It doesn't seem to matter how banal the story is (gossip or business plans) or how outlandish (soap operas or business plans). We are drawn in. Something is being shown or explained. We want to understand how the pieces fit together and to imagine what happens next. One of Taleb's points is that the narratives we see and invent for the world around us are not only false, they also lead us astray and cause us to miss what is actually occurring. A black swan is something that we do not see coming, but seems obvious once it has occurred and we create an appropriate narrative. The current financial meltdowns are a case in point. We will be paying for the debacle for generations. While the seeds were being sown many smart, and sometimes well intentioned, people gave us a story about how the financial instruments at the base of the crisis reduced risk. Now that credit markets are freezing, we have new stories that tell how greedy people acted blindly and exposed everyone to grave risks.

In political discourse the same human foibles apply and are even magnified. Every side is selling a story. The vehicle for the story is mostly TV and radio through ads and news stories. Each installment of the story must be communicated in about thirty seconds. Very occasionally a full minute can be used. Because the audience only observes intermittently, each installment must be repeated many times to make sure everyone keeps up. This is one of the origins of "talking points". Consistent messages are easier to remember. Constant repetition makes it more likely the message will be heard, and more likely the ideas will be accepted at face value (everyone is saying it). This leads to a slow accretion of fragments that fit into a consistent theme or story that the proponent hopes is persuasive.

In an odd way, the fragmentary delivery of political messages makes them more effective. Like the next installment of a soap opera, new talking points fill in a missing piece and lead us to wonder what is next. The abbreviated format force reduction of the message to slogans and codewords that mean more than the actual statement. These not only reinforce the story, they act as cheers to emotionally charge supporters who have accepted the truth of the underlying message. All sides engage in this but, in the United States, conservatives have been much more effective at this style of communication. They just have better slogans. There are keywords like "liberal" and phrases like "tax and spend". They are even better at adjectives. One recent ad talked about an opponent supporting "massive government", which has succeeded the epithet "big government". Each of these keys on a part of a larger narrative. Political narratives have existed for as long as the human race, but the modern form is based on commercial advertising and uses all the tools and techniques of that craft including testing and focus groups.

Political communication has been simplified to mere advertising, but the problems we face are not simple. There is essentially nothing that can be learned about a complex situation in thirty seconds. Regardless of the party or position, every ad you listen too is misleading. The same is true of the news stories. Simplified communication can communicate at most first order forces. Complex situations are often the result of many different forces, some of them quite removed from the obvious.

I take one ad, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pRHliGZl-o, as an example, not because there is anything special about it, but because there isn't anything special. It typifies the level of discourse. It happens to come out of the Republican camp. The ad shows gas prices going up, "the US has more oil resources than Saudi Arabia" but "85% of it is off limits" and the opposing candidate "voted against development of American energy".

The first level of skepticism should be the facts presented. Anyone who works with numbers about the real world knows how difficult it is to get valid numbers and that the numbers are usually based on simplifying assumptions. The statement that the US has more oil resources than Saudi Arabia presumes that we have a good idea about what those reserves are. For both the US and Saudi Arabia, we do not know about the reserves. Some of this is genuine ignorance (we haven't looked), some of it is global politics (the Saudi's have every reason to lie). It also depends on what you mean by "reserve". Does oil shale in Colorado count the same way as a typical Saudi oil field?

Moving past the "facts" we get to the implied world view. Implied is the notion that gasoline and oil are synonymous with energy and that lower gas prices are good public policy. Beyond that is the notion that opening the 85% of reserves that are off limits will reduce the price of Gasoline. None of these are particularly good assumptions for reasons that would take more than thirty seconds to explain.

After hearing a typical political ad or even candidate speech, you are actually more ignorant than you were before. You have been deliberately deceived and your emotions played upon to accept a world view that is questionable and policies that, if you investigated further, you might very well disagree with.

What to do then? Try to get real information. On the whole, books are much more valuable than any kind of daily/weekly/monthly news. But recognize that books can be commissioned as propaganda as easily as many other things. Trust authors who examine the situation dispassionately and who genuinely research all sides. If you are interested in oil, do not start with anything political. Instead, read science articles on exploration and estimation. On most subjects it is best to get a good grounding in the state of the information and its limitations, then move to issues of policy. At least you will recognize the blatant distortions.

Policy has to do with where we are and what we want for ourselves and the world. In terms of policy, it is not enough to have an intent, we must also examine the risks, the likelihood of failure, and strategies that have worked and failed in the past. Because each of us is in a different situation, wants different things, and weighs choices differently, your judgements on policy and tactics will differ from your neighbors.

If you do all this, you will be as well informed as you can. You will also be wrong on basic issues. The way you think the world works will be incorrect. There is no avoiding this. The world is a complicated place. We just do the best we can.

Machine Politics

Political machines are self perpetuating systems generally based on personal loyalty and patronage. In the United States people generally think of political machines in terms of large cities. For example: the Richard Daley machine in Chicago, Tammany Hall in New York. But a political machine can exist at any level of government. At the state level we have had Huey Long in Louisiana and Thomas Catron in New Mexico. At the national level, Tom Delay ran a comprehensive and relatively effective national political machine.

The nature of a machine depends on the power structure of the society in which it is embedded. In societies where political power is influenced by election, the basic mechanics of the machine center on getting votes. In hierarchical societies (feudal, tribal...) machines center on fealty often coerced by violence.

Political machines are not an aberration. They are based on an essential part of being human. As a social animal, we live in groups. We band together for mutual support and protection. We form friendships and animosities. We try to help our friends and expect them to do the same. When someone thwarts our plans, we will undermine him in order to accomplish our aims. Political machines are not unalloyed evil. In order to maintain a power base, a machine may be extremely response to their supporters. In many cases this improves government services. In supporter's areas, the trash is picked up and the roads are good.

Political machines are about power. Its members may espouse, and believe in, a particular ideology, but the heart of a machine is not ideological, it is personal. A machine must have a way to reward supporters and punish enemies. In fact, one of the hallmarks of the machine mentality is an enemies list.

For political machines the source of power is the machinery of government. Government taxation provides a base of money. This money provides direct means to reward in the form of jobs and contracts. Withholding jobs and money provides a means of punishment. Government regulation provides another carrot and another stick. Businesses can be shut down through regulation or over-vigorous enforcement. Conversely, the skids can be greased by removing regulations or declining to enforce them. Taxation itself is a great lever. Taxes can be reduced on friends and increased on enemies. All of this requires that the machine controls the levers of government.

City machines are perhaps the easiest to understand and examine. The Daley organization controlled on the order of 30,000 patronage jobs. There was a strict hierarchy based on electoral politics. The city was divided into wards and precincts. Political appointees were responsible for estimating and delivering the votes in their area. At every level of the machine, there were rewards and punishments. The plus side is government responsiveness. An influential person gets his requests answered. A important precinct might get better city services. On the other hand, precincts where the machine lost might find themselves without city services and city jobs.

Electoral politics are used to ensure control over government, but machines are personal. By cooperating with the machine, you should personally benefit. By defying, you are personally punished. Reward can be through direct payment, perhaps by being given a job that may or may not require work. More profitable is the ability to steer government money. A lucrative government contract can act as payment. If you are the person deciding where the contract should go, that power is worth something. Typical forms of personal payment can be bribes, kickbacks or jobs for friends. Political machines thrive on graft. When personal profit takes precedence over public good, everyone suffers.

In national politics the same basic mechanics exist, but because of the scale the details change. On a national level, campaigns are won with money. Loyalty can be bought with campaign money.

Direct contributions to particular candidates and parties are restricted. Campaigns that address large numbers of individual voters can raise tremendous amounts of money. However, each individual contributor is not that important to the campaign. If you want to gain attention, you can become a "bundler". A bundler gathers together the campaign money from a set of individuals. The bundler may not put up all the money himself but becomes personally powerful by being able to control a large donation. There have, or course, been scandals where bundlers paid the money to the individuals who turned around and contributed it. The bigger the bundle, the more powerful the bundler becomes.

At the national level, lobbyists for industries and particular points of view are very important. Lobbyists must be able to argue persuasively, but another important function is to provide monetary support for those who support them. This support provides access to the political process. Tom Delay took this to a new level. First, he steered contributions to his political action organizations. That made candidates beholden directly to him. He also inserted himself into the lobbying firms themselves. Access required political approval in hiring. This made lobbying itself a patronage job.

At the national level, the personal loyalty and reward structure of machines remains the same, but the amount of money available is much larger.

It is Your Civic Duty - Lie to Political Pollsters

It is your civic duty to lie to political pollsters to make polls as unreliable as possible. It is not enough to refuse to answer the questions, you have to lie.

The rest of this article deals with why, but I want to take a moment on the practical - how to lie. There are several amusing techniques for this. Here are two. The most reliable one is to pretend you are someone else, but completely stereotype their views. Choose your crazy Aunt Myrtle or your grandmother who votes for the "most handsome" candidate. The important thing is that their views do not agree with yours. This technique has the advantage of a coherent, if mildly insane, point of view. That makes it hard for pollsters to simply discard your answers as nonsensical. I suspect that most polling techniques do not allow for throwing out responses. That allows for more extreme techniques. I choose random numbers, the digits of pi for example, and use those to determine my answers. If the next digit is 3 and there are three choices, I answer with the third one. If there are only two answers I choose the first because 3 and 1 are both odd numbers. The other day I owned a company with over 100 employees, but made less than 20 thousand a year and had no health insurance.

At first you may find it hard to give an answer that you absolutely and positively disagree with, but I assure you, you get over it and it becomes fun after a while.


Here is what I want from political candidates and the media that covers elections. I want to know how the candidates think about the world and our place in it, and how they are likely to vote on issues I care about. Political polling makes it less likely that I will get what I want from the media, from political parties, and from the candidates themselves. Each of us should do what we can to remove polling from the political landscape. Lying is the easiest and most effective way I can think of to make the polls disappear.


The Media:

Media coverage of elections is bad and not getting better. From "A First Look at Coverage of the 2008 Presidential Campaign".


Just 12% of stories examined were presented in a way that explained how citizens might be affected by the election, while nearly nine-out-of-ten stories (86%) focused on matters that largely impacted only the parties and the candidates. Those numbers, incidentally, match almost exactly the campaign-centric orientation of coverage found on the eve of the primaries eight years ago.

Here is what we get from the media

• Horserace coverage. Candidate Smith is 3% up in the polls, candidate Jones is gaining in a final stretch surge in the polls. Candidate McMurry wins by a nose. Candidate Rostnikov outdid candidate McMurry in fund-raising in the month of June.



• Political strategy coverage. Polling shows 27% of the electorate is "very concerned" about issue "Horses that have left the barn". The Animal party intends to take advantage of this with a direct mail campaign to people who do not own horses emphasizing their position that barn doors should be self closing.



• Discussion of the polls. After a poll proves unreliable, the media spend a lot of time talking about why. This is particularly corrosive because it uses up time that could be used discussing something of importance. It is also completely vacuous because if the pollsters knew why they were wrong they would have corrected for it before the poll was published. My goal is to stop this discussion by making ALL political polls unreliable.



• Reporting of partisan polls. Many polls are commissioned by people with an axe to grind. Questions are created that invite a particular answer, then it is reported that "By a vast majority, the electorate oppose beating dead horses."

Nonsensical explanations. Poll results are often analyzed as though the polls were answered by a single person and that person had a coherent set of beliefs. This invented person if often called "the electorate". For example, "The electorate seem to feels that taxes are too high." In fact, poll results do not reflect anyone's views. They are an aggregate measure.

Parties and Special Interest Groups

Here is what we get from the parties and special interest groups:

• Attack ads on targeted, hot-button topics. "Candidate Rostnikov voted to allow horses to escape, often to be killed". These ads invariably inflame passion, distort the candidates views, and cheapen the debate. Here is a simple rule. There is nothing meaningful that can be learned about a candidate in 30 seconds.



• Feel good ads. These are essentially selling the candidate with the same techniques as Coca Cola. There are some general techniques: attractive smiling people doing good things, flags waving, children and a better future. Polling and focus groups allow the political machines to tune these ads like a drug formula.



• Pandering. Here is a definition of pandering: "To cater to the lower tastes and desires of others or exploit their weaknesses." Pandering is often subtle, but sometimes not. If someone offers you money "A $1000 tax rebate" or "repeal/suspend a tax", they are pandering. "Lower tastes and desires" are easy to figure out. In politics, money usually does the trick. But, effective pandering requires some excuse so you feel justified in receiving the the largess. That is where polling comes in.



• Very specific targeting of particular people. Based on your answers to political polls, you will categorized. This allows you to be targeted very specifically. If a candidate Hernandez knows that it is very important to you that koala bears remain a symbol of affection and comfort, you may be targeted with a koala bear ad. It will paint the opposing candidate, Walenski, with some plausible evidence, as someone who just doesn't care about koalas. Hernandez is counting on your affection for koalas to motivate you to support him and oppose Walenski. A closer examimination of the candidates voting records may show that Hernandez is likely to vote for a measure that will cost you your job, but he does like those koalas and Walenski seems to hate them.

A few interesting links to follow if you are interested in the topic:

• Polling Politics, Media, and Election Campaigns


• Poll-obsessed media focus on strategy over substance


• Horse race reporting - 92 election