[lbo-talk] Fwd: Noam goes with Barry ?

[christian bayes]

Or, one could perceive real differences between candidates but realize,
quite sensibly, that the likelihood that one's vote is decisive is quite
close to zero. Your individual vote being decisive is conditional on 1.
your state being tied, and 2. your state's electoral votes being decisive.
For people whose votes count the _most_, that means the probability that
their vote really matters is about 1/10 million.

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/probdecisive2.pdf

Would you get off the couch for that?

-christian

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 2:38 PM, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:


>
> On Mar 12, 2012, at 1:31 PM, Jordan Hayes wrote:
>
>  Eric Beck:
>>
>>> Nonvoters are not all that different from voters ...
>>>>
>>> But that's not the point. The point is that they didn't vote.
>>>
>> That doesn't sound like "a point" to me; what's the implication you're
>> getting at?
>> The usual one, which Carl seems to try to make explicit, is that the
>> reason the US gets the outcomes we get is because only a small percentage
>> of people are required to win an election.  Doug refutes that, which sounds
>> like a point to me.  What's yours?
>>
>
> The point is not that the "poor and powerless," the non-voters, are a
> [more than potentially] radical-thinking constituency.  The point, the only
> point originally raised, is that a majority of the American electorate sees
> so little difference between the duopolistic candidates offered to them
> that they perceive no reason to make the minimal effort involved in voting
> and therefore abstain.
>
>
> Shane Mage
>
> "Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64
>
>
>
>
>
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