The Value of Voting

During a recent Freakonomics Podcast, which I listened to on 1/26/11, the host stated that you should not feel bad about skipping voting because it does you no good. I wrote the following letter to them:

"Ignoring my visceral response to your comment that it is a waste of time to vote, it doesn't ring true to me. If the premise of the question is whether or not your individual single vote makes any difference, I can understand the answer. Voting is not an individual act, but a collective one. Choosing not to vote as an individual may have little impact, but encouraging individuals not to vote (I should say dissuading people from voting) has a large collective impact. Further, failure to research issues prior to going into the voting booth to cast a vote, I believe already has an adverse collective impact, as seen by the government we get. A self-serving (or special interest serving) group of elected officials with a 98% incumbency re-election rate is a disservice to our country and a danger to any true progress or problem solving.

"To test the validity of the premise that voting makes no difference, please substitute other activities for voting, such as polluting. Those who grew up in the 60's and 70's, like me, probably remember the polluted lakes and streams and the roadsides littered with garbage. Your individual effort of throwing trash out of your car window or picking up trash a single piece of trash alongside the road might be meaningless, but the collective efforts of the nation to change our behavior has made for a cleaner and better world. The same would be true for voting if we took it more seriously and did it more consistently and with more care.

"I realize your intent was to analyze a particular question without any moral bias, but I couldn't help but hope as I heard you tell people that their votes did not make any difference that this would not influence people to give up their right to vote.

"Could you please re-address the original question with the thought in mind of the results of collective actions? Your coverage of the savings account lottery is another example of collective behavior making a difference when individual behavior seems insignificant. Without all the investors, there is no prize in the savings account lottery."

But I have to say, voting today is a lot more like cleaning up stinky garbage. I might argue that it's worthless to vote because it doesn't ever seem to change anything or fix any of our problems, but it's a hell of a lot better than the alternative.

The History of Torture

I honestly do not remember why I put the search term torture in the search bar that day. I was in my public library's catalog, where I get most of the books I read, and something in the news or some minor thing that came to mind made me put the term in. It came up with The History of Torture by Brian Innes at the first hit. There were two other books in the search that I will discuss further on, but first, an overview of the title book.

This book was written in 1998, before the recent Bush era forays into torture by the United States came up.

I personally have had many arguments about torture with people. The gist of the argument always seems to me to be that if we are doing it, it isn't torture, or these people that were rounded up are guilty, or it's not that bad, you could hardly call it torture.

While our efforts against radical fundamentalist terrorist do bring up unique challenges, they do not justify torture in my mind. The problem with declaring a war on terror is that there is no President, Prime Minister, Emperor, or Fuhrer to surrender, thus winning the whole contest. Each hostile enemy individual is his own war effort, in effect his own country. He's certainly not taking orders from any country recognized by the U.N. and would not surrender unless individually captured. For this reason, declaring war seems to me to be inappropriate. This is individual people not acting under any government direction, so it is criminal activity. You never stop fighting crime, but wars are costly, require a lot of people and effort, and you want to be able to end them at some point. A guerrilla war is similar, although in that case, fighting groups may be supplied and may take direction from a government group.

I was trained by the U.S. Army in the Geneva Convention. We were taught that nothing justified mistreatment of a prisoner. It didn't matter if their side mistreated our guys or if an attack was imminent, or if we caught someone in the act of some war crime, you can never abuse a prisoner. Once captured, he is no longer a factor in the armed struggle. At that point, you may interrogate him, but it never seemed to me that there would be much information of any use that they would offer freely or give up under simple questioning. Often, during the Civil War, captured prisoners would reveal much, but only accidentally, after being tricked, and usually because both sides had a common culture and could goad or enrage prisoners into talking. I always believed that torture was wrong, and often worried about how I would stand up to it if I was ever captured in a conflict. I have always assumed that I would be singing like a canary in a very short time. To me, avoiding being a torturer was necessary in order to keep up the edge we had for decades of being the honorable opponent. In a close situation, soldiers will sometimes surrender rather than fight on if they know they will be treated well, so it was always better to foster that way of thinking in the enemy. Plus, we always talked about how much better and how much more moral we were than then. This is what steeled many people of my generation for the decades of the cold war. We deserved to win because we cared about people and were better human beings.

One of the things I learned along the way was that torture never works. Under a painful interrogation, the prisoner will quickly decide that the pain must end and therefore, the people asking the questions should be told what they want to hear. It's the only reason they'll stop asking questions, when they believe they have the answers. I've always known that I would tell someone whatever they wanted to hear if I was being hurt in a terrible way. The information gained from torture is always suspect. You cannot assume that any of it is true.

The History of Torture talked about how the ancients used torture and brought that forward to the Middle Ages. Just as the Romans occasionally tortured a Christian (before The Roman Empire was a christian empire), the Christians didn't take long to adopt as an instrument of state during the middle ages. A depressingly large swath of the middle of the book is about the inquisitions. I did not realize there were more than one, or that they were started over such trivial matters. Does God interfere in day to day events or has he kept his hands off since shortly after creation? This question was responsible for kicking off the inquisition. I'm guessing that many churches today have people that believe both ways in the same congregation. Can you imagine being accused of something as trivial as this and being disfigured under the hands of torture until you gave over the names of others that were thinking or doing as you did?

It kept striking me throughout the middle of the book that elaborate and widespread torture was mostly religiously motivated and taken out by members of the church or their agents. Religion has been responsible for more torture than anything else over the years. How do you believe? Be careful, the wrong answer could give you a trip to the rack.

I thought that by reading the book, I would become numb to the thought of torture, and I must say that this was the case. After hearing dozens of details of pain inflicted on individuals in order to change their beliefs, I found myself unimpressed by the procedures. I never did lose my sense of unfairness at all the poor people that were unjustly accused, who later confessed to belief or acts which they did not hold or did not commit.

The next book I checked out was Barry Eisler's Inside Out. Mr. Eisler was an actual ex-CIA covert agent. He only did it for 3 years, but even so, you get the feeling that you're hearing things you're not supposed to know. He had fictional government agents that used to torture and now were trying to bring down the government by revealing the extent of their torture. Mr. Eisler had a character in his book state something that I believe he believed himself. He said that people don't use torture because they think it works, they use it because they want to hurt people.

The last book I checked out was The Torture Memos by David Cole. It went over the legal justifications for torture during the Bush administration. The book had a description of an interrogation of a terror suspect, and it did not look easy to endure. It amazes me that there was no one prosecuted over the affair.

Also mentioned in The History of Torture is another older book not available through the library, called: A History of Torture by George Riley Scott. I have not yet checked out or purchased this book (they did not have it at the bookstore), and I may not. It seems to me that everything that needs to be said on torture already has.

Guns, Germs, and Steel

I must have originally heard about the Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond on the radio or in a podcast, I can't remember. It was published in 1997 and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998.

This is a book about how humans colonized the planet, with particular emphasis on discoveries and inventions - how we developed.

There are many aspects of the book which I was already familiar with, in the broad strokes. I knew roughly how we came out of Africa and swept across Europe and Asia, and how we domesticated plants and animals and settled into more and more civilized cities with more and more specialized technology and pursuits.

So you might wonder how much more you can learn from 440 pages of heavily footnoted text. The short answer is not a lot of basic broad historical strokes, but a lot of nuance. Some surprises on human migration, like the colonization of Madagascar from southeast Asia were completely unexpected and fun to learn. The isolation of Australia after it's initial colonization and the self-enforced isolation of China were two things that I had never heard about before, and were fascinating.

There were some very interesting broad concepts, like the wide stretch over the same lattitude of Eurasia being the perfect developing ground for the spread of domesticated plants, while the north south axis of the Americas were a hinderance to spreading of advances.


It was interesting to see how scholars and scientists have shed light on the spread of humanity by analyzing language similarities and by tracking genetic studies of populations. While these were not particularly surprising methods, it was fascinating to see how some details they illuminated were unexpected. For example, we think of Africa as this melting pot where humanity emerged and then changed as they spread out, but Africa used to have more diversity, and studies have shown that other groups of humans with other cultures and languages had been subjugated and absorbed in some migration that occurred after humans had already spread out of Africa.

Since reading the book, I have heard the results of some recent studies that touch on the same subjects that Jared Diamond touched on in his book. He stated that he thought that the megafauna extinctions, particularly of Australia, but of North and South America, too, were the result of overhunting by humans. The megafauna were large mammals that existed on those continents up to the time man migrated in, and then were extinct shortly after the appearance of man. Many people are familiar with the woolly mammoth and the saber toothed tiger, but there were all kinds of other large mammals that used to exist that became extinct right around the time man showed up. Recent studies have drawn the opposite conclusion, stating that the extinctions had climatic or other reasons, but could not have been by overhunting given the time frame that they occurred. Scientists currently disagree on this point.

The other theory that I have heard was that the migrations of humans out of Africa did not originate from the area around Kenya, but from North Africa. The Sahara Desert was a jungle not too long ago, and humans inhabited it. There is evidence that suggests that these are the groups that first migrated off the continent into what is now the area around Israel. Each year brings on new discoveries to flesh out our understanding of this time period.

The main question he is addressing in the book is why some bands of humans were able to out-compete others. The main answer is right in his title. They had guns (superior warfare tactics), they had diseases which they were more resistant to, and they had steel (better developed technology).

The interesting thing that came out of my version of the book, which has an afterword added some years after the original book was released, was that many large corporations were looking at the book and seeing if it applied to corporations and companies. What makes one company out-compete another.

While dense with information and difficult to plow through, the book is also rich with interesting details and well worth the time to work through it.