Subject: [MacroNomic] Paper

From: Towsner <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 09:02:09 -0400

Sorry, I set this to the wrong address last week.  It's been
approved by the RP.

	Power, Influence, and Government
	by Professor Henry Towsner

	It goes without saying that government is about power.
Specifically, government is about who controls what goes on in the governed
area.  This paper will use the term "power" to refer to having (within the
structure of a government) a measure control over a particular topic.
However there is another factor inwho controls decisions.  People who are
older, or more experienced, or wiser, are often given more respect than
other people.  For example in MacroNomic, we wisely pay special attention
to the members of the Revolutionary Party, since we know that they have
earned their positions.  As a real life example, the British monarch has
virtually no legal authority, but her opinion is widely respected anyway.
This could be termed "influence."
	The matter is far more complicated than this however.  In the
American government, each person has (roughly) the same power, since
everyone elects people equally (there a some discrepancies due to
disctricing which I will ignore in this paper.)  Does the President have
more power than a regular citizen?  In a sense no, because he is elected by
everyone equally.  In this way he has a great deal of influence, but no
additional power.  However the President's influence is clearly on a
different scale than a member of the Revolutionary Party, since a great
deal more effort is needed to ignore the President's will than is needed to
depart from the suggestions of a Party member.  (This demonstrates how well
MacroNomic has stuck to its democratic principles while still listening to
its wise members.)  So in fact power and influence are the ends of a scale.
At 100% power, a person's power is undeniable.  At 0% power, it is only
advice, which the person has no ability to enforce.  The President lies
close to the power end, since although his decisions are preventable, it is
difficult.  A cabinet member is close to influence, but they still have a
great deal of control over their realm.  By contrast a Presidential advisor
is entirely influence, since all they can do is advise.
	Let us back up for a moment and clarify a few terms.  A person has
some measure of authority over the government that rules them.  In fact
this is, in a sense, the sum of several "roles" they may play within that
government.  Each role has several scales.  There is the power-influence
scale, which we can call "control."  There is the scope of the role, its
range, and also its dilutedness.  The President has three roles.  As a
citizen of a state, he has pure power, a scope the percentage of people's
lives the state controls, a range of the percentage of all people in the
nation affected, and a dilutedness of the population of the state.  His
second role is as a citizen of the nation, in which he still has pure
power, has a larger scope and range, but a larger dilutedness.  His third
role, as President, is much less power, a substantial scope, a huge range,
and no dilutedness.  In terms of numbers, we could multiply the percent on
the contol scale by the scope (which can be broken down into the number of
people and the percent of those people's lives controled) and dividing by
the number of people.
	Next we can calculate the President's authority.  First we need
some simple assumptions.  We can assume that the state controls 25% of a
persons life and the Federal government another 50%.  Let us also say that
the President's controls 1/3 of the Federal government.  At the state
level, the President has authority of slightly over 0.25/Pop. U.S. (100%
power X 25% of people's lives X the population of Arkansas / the population
of the U.S. / the voting population of Arkansas).  Although the number of
people who can vote in Arkansas is not the same as the total population, we
will assume it is.  At the national level the President receives 0.5/Pop.
U.S. for his voting ability.  As President he receives (let us estimate)
80% power X 50%/3 range X 100% of the population of the U.S. / 1.  That's
about 0.13.  Note how much larger it is than the autority of a typical
citizen.  In fact some additional authority could be added since the
President's opinion on legislative matters, while not binding, is
important, and he does have some ability to carry it out.  That would be
something like 10% power, 50% range, everyone, and about 500 dilutedness
(since this power is diluted over the members of Congress.)  That adds
another 0.001.
	A similar analysis could be used on anyone, but I will apply it to
the most relevant place, MacroNomic.  If we estimate 10 players, each
player has, to start with, 100% power of 100% of the same number of lives
that can vote.  That makes 0.1 for each person.  Actually, that isn't quite
0.1.  The typical voter's authority is limited by the veto power of the RP,
as well as a few other factors to be discussed later.  That should be about
75%, so 0.075 authority for the typical player.  A member of the
Revolutionary Party has 100% power over 10% of those lives.  So each RP
member has an additional 0.033 authority.  Finally, the Secretaries.  The
Secretaries have a substantial (perhaps 60%) power over their jurisdiction,
however even the largest (SoT) is perhaps only a few percent range, let us
say 5%.  So no Secretariship is worth more than 0.03.  On top of that, with
varying other, relatively minor, factors (influence from experience, or
just being in the RP, being a professor) a player could get as much as 0.05
additional from Secretaries and miscellaneous.  So the authority range is
MacroNomic is from 0.075 to 0.16 (approximately).
	Let us add one final term.  The Democraticness of a government is
the authority of its most authoratic member minus the authority of its
least authoratic member, perfect democracy being 0.  The Democraticness of
a dictatorship is close to 1, but not quite.  No one has truly 0 authority
because there is always an ability to rebel, go on a murderous rampage, or
something along those lines.  For convenince, we will pretend that everyone
in America can vote, although of course this is far from true.  Note that a
person has the same authority whether or not they choose to vote.  In the
U.S. the democraticness is  roughly 0.13.  MacroNomic has a democraticness
of around 0.085, about 40% more democratic than the U.S..

--
-Henry Towsner

	<[email-masked]>

	Success is the child of audacity.
		-Benjamin Disraeli