 I'm going to start with the prologues. I'm not going to jump into my prepared talk. I want to just read this prologue, which I think is phenomenal stuff. This is Adrian Vermeule, and this is Jeremy Bentham, sort of having a conversation over the centuries. Jeremy Bentham wrote in 1791, this paper, Political Tactics. Adrian Vermeule commented on it 2010 for a conference in France. So this is all Adrian's writing. Bentham notices that successive votes by the same body under different transparency regimes, I'm catching my breath, sometimes teach strikingly different outcomes, sometimes reach slightly different outcomes. Here's some modern examples from a range of institutions and groups. Maybe I should read all of them. In the Italian parliament of the 1970s and 1980s, the practice was that bills designated as issues of confidence by the government would be voted upon first by open ballot and then by secret ballot. This is a rare species in the world, right? So you could actually do two types of votes, open and then secret or secret and then open. So his paper, he goes through and tries to find all of them. He's got more examples I want them to show here. This phenomenal stuff. The results frequently differed. I will say always every example that I've seen. In 1986, Petimo Craxi's government won the open vote of confidence by a margin greater than 100, about 600 votes, pretty big margin. Only to be defeated by the secret ballot, Craxi was forced to resign. In Alaska, a judicial council was charged with a merit-based appointment of judges. Until 1967, the council used a secret ballot but switched to an open ballot after an episode where everyone was bragging about how much there for a particular candidate and then when the vote happened, he lost. So I'm going to leave you with those ideas. We're going to come back to these two characters throughout this talk. They're amazing characters. I think they are who we are. They're struggling with some of the same issues that we struggle with. So my talk's called the Ghost Bill in the cardboard box. Ghost Bill because in 1972, a House of Representatives commenting on a particular bill was amazed that no one wants to talk about it. Can't get press about it. Boston Globe has no articles about this bill. The Ghost Bill. So 1972, we're talking about a bill from 1970. And the cardboard box. The story about the 24 words that changed the world. I originally called it something happened in the 70s. Partly because I'm a historical buffoon. I don't know my history very well. I was living in Africa, as she mentioned. And I was disturbed about climate change. I left when I started to see a lot of problems there with respect to climate change. Fruits that were going off at the wrong time, et cetera. So I came back and I was like, all right, I've got to start to understand policy. I started to read everything I could. And you're going to see the graphs I was seeing just in a month of reading. So this is Paul Krugman, his graph. We're talking about this amazing rise in debt that looks a lot like the amazing rise in debt leading up to the first Gilded Age. Stiglitz mentions the 70s. And everyone's talking about this great time between the 30s and the 70s or 50s and the 70s. And he's talking about how policy made everything better and then it disintegrated. And I just want to make it clear that this is economic stuff we're talking about. So today we're talking a lot about economics. Piketty is a rock star this year. He basically launched the graph that everybody uses. Robert Reich uses his graph. And you can see what's happening. This inequality dropping from the first Gilded Age down to a low in 1976, but kind of real low in the early 70s and then shoots up like a rocket ship. This doesn't look like a rocket ship to you, but it's a rocket ship. It's going up fast. He talks about the same thing. He mentions the same thing. We're going to flow through these because we're short on time. The left talks about this. Lawrence Lessig talks about how campaign finance. The thing he focuses about takes off in 74. I think that has to do with an election cycle. So in 74, campaign finance for a congressman was around what, I don't know, $77 million. By 1982, the number was $343 million. By 2010, 1.8 billion exponential rise. Elizabeth Warren talks about the opposite effect. Wages for males are flat. For what? Well, of course, from 1970. I just kept seeing it. And she, too, talks about what Stiglitz is talking about, how bankruptcy laws and everything just started to disintegrate beginning in the 70s. She says very often, before 1970, there were no big banks collapsing. Why? Well, it's interesting. I keep hearing this date. Here's the right. Paul Ryan. Here's Ron Paul. He's talking about increase in regulations. He's talking about increase in expenditures. I'm high on 1970 and make it easy. Executive pay in the 1%. We all know this. The church going into government, lobbying. What's their deal? But in 1970, it turns. Incarcerated Americans looks maybe more like the 80s, but certainly something's happening, right? This is my favorite. This is polarization. This is partisanship. Again, we look back towards the Gilded Age. We look back to the early century. And we see partisans been dropping steadily. And then it doesn't turn like a slow curve, like switching from bell bottoms to straight legs. It turns on a dime. And it shoots up like a rocket ship. I've seen this before. Just so you know, these are some of these are more scholarly. The guy had a Princeton, McCarthy, and Barber. That's their graph, same graph. Basically the same data. Presidential inability to reel in spending. We're familiar with that. It's interesting who it is. Disappearance of unions, 70. They drop like a rocket ship. Unions are important. Separation of powers. We miss them, even though they were bullies. Growth and complexity. I really want you to think about this. How many pages is the US tax code? You all just did your taxes. It's gotten insane. And the wording, in particular, has gotten insane. It's harder and harder to read it. And this also takes off. And we see more data about that. Growth and complexity of bills. The number of pages of bills, the wording of bills, all of that has grown exponentially. In 2000, let's see. Well, at some point in the past, in the 40s, there were about 2,000 pages of legislation for you to read a year. In 2006, there was 7,000. There's more now. The bills are bigger now. 7,000 pages for someone to read a year. If I gave you 7,000 pages of a juicy romance, you might have a hard time reading that every year. It's a lot of work. So we're going to move on. This is a particular example. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. You've probably heard of under another name. 906 pages, Clean Energy and Security Act, 1,197. Lobbying. Every time I was reading about lobbying, every piece. The number of political action committees. 1970, more than 4,000. Since the 1970s, there have been explosive growth in lobbying. In the early 70s, no one had a lobbyist. Now everyone's got a lobbyist lobbying, lobbying, lobbying. 70, 70, 70s, declining confidence. Surprising to think that Nixon and his government had a 40%. And now we're at a 14%. Decline and confidence for democracy and capitalism. Lots of books with very bizarre titles, right? Capitalism won't work. Democracy won't work. A lot of that happening since the 70s. This is just one of those books. So yeah, something might have happened there. This is a summary of this. I've been back and forth with Prada about some of this data. But Max, who's here, has actually helped me analyze it just in the last couple of weeks. I'm more optimistic about how confident this graph is. This graph is terrifying. If you haven't heard of Gillan's work, you need to look up Gillan's work. Basically, what he's saying is, this is the response to the rich people of legislation. And this is the response to average citizens. Whereas often, the response to poor people is negative. So the response to average citizens, you'll notice, is a flat line. So if 90% of the American people are against a bill, the odds of that bill passing is 30%. If 90% of the American people are for a bill, the odds of that bill are passing is 90%. That's indifference. You can get worse than indifference, but indifference is pretty ugly. The response to the elites is more like a referendum. Referendum would be a straight line coming straight up at a 45 degree angle. It's not a referendum, but it's pretty powerful stuff. So this is a big deal. This came out this year. This is what really got me excited about finally bringing some of my ideas to life. So we get all the causes. People are greedy. Bankers bad, governments corrupt, money's evil. But is there a common cause? People are blaming everybody, but is there one sort of thing? Well, I've done a lot of work in science. Whenever I see growth that looks like the Chinese privet, I think that the Chinese privet was probably introduced. So the Chinese privet comes over to wherever it was in the South and all of a sudden takes off like a rocket ship. This is similar, perhaps, to what's going on here. I kept seeing the same strange thing happen in a very specific time. So I'm thinking something got introduced. People have had their ideas about what got introduced, but they never seem to explain things very completely. So could they all be related? And let me give you the idea of the scope I'm dealing with here. I'm talking about every major problem that we're talking about. I'm not talking about the 70s was a utopia, and today is a nightmare. I'm just talking about the dramatic changes from the 70s to now. The EPA, right? We were passing environmental bills. They're getting disintegrated, banking bills. All of that's changing. Citizens united. Can this affect citizens united? The scope that we're talking about is every major problem and every major change since the 70s. Not small stuff. We're going here. Going for here. But we're particularly looking at inequality. I got in for climate change. When I first started seeing these trends, I was living in Africa. I love Africa. I love my wife, who's African. Love my son, who's born in Kenya. The elections in particular fascinated me, and I was getting involved with those. And I noticed that they were strange to think about how big a burden running a free and fair election was. You had to put a ballot booth everywhere. People were like, oh, we don't even think about it. That's actually expensive. So you're going to deliver all these ballot booths. You're going to deliver fair counts. You're going to police these ballot booths and do all that. It was very expensive for Africa, and often they would plead to the Western world for support to do their elections, which really shot me. But then it turns out it's not atypical. Britain talks about it. Elections are expensive. Can't we do it cheaper? Well, of course we can. We just toss it on the phone, just like Washington, Colorado, all these places, just sticking it on the phone. Perfect, right? Well, that's what I was trying to do. And that's when I got schooled by a guy standing over a grill in Africa. And I told him what I was trying to do is look at the cryptography for it, the cryptography of David Chowm's voting schemes. They all seemed to work pretty good. OK, the cryptography is great. The unfortunate part of them is the politics and the government of it isn't great. And that's what I had to learn, because I didn't know it at all. Sadly. And I came to face with something that almost all of us hold dear, what Jeremy Bentham holds dear, what Adrian Vermeule holds dear, the people who talked at the beginning, this idea of transparency. OK, I've done videos on transparency. How can we get more transparency in the government? Big deal for me. Get great response in those videos. And I wasn't alone, as I was saying, right? These guys are for transparency international, Sun Sun Foundation, all these organizations. So the million dollar question. If I'm going to replace voting booths with cell phones, why do we need voting booths? Why do we put them up in the first place? All right? And people are probably already jumping to some ideas. It's really important to understand how powerful this was and how important this decision was. OK, so some people might think of one idea, there's two really huge problems. And I debate myself which one's worse. But I think they're about equal, but I think actually I'll give you a hint later about which one I think is worse. And it's not the one that most people think it is. The first problem is intimidation. The election's about, I don't know, beating in the household. Well, you're going to have the guy and the wife in the house looking over their cell phone and talking about beating in the household. What's going to happen is she is likely to vote her conscience if her husband's sitting right there and is ready to beat her? Well, of course, we know that that's probably not going to happen. Intimidation is any method of frightening or overawing in order to make someone do what someone wants. OK, this problem was so big that back in Philadelphia in 1881, because as very few people know, before 1890, no one voted with secret ballots in the United States. You'd walk into some courtrooms and you'd vote out loud, viva voce. Sometimes you'd use a ballot. There were different ways to vote, but every way that you voted before 1890, people could determine how you voted. And so what would happen? Well, people were getting killed. I was going to read this whole thing, but we're running out of time. But there was massive violence surrounding the dates of elections. So much so that people were saying the reason why women shouldn't vote is because it's too dangerous. That's not my opinion. I think some women are tougher than guys, but that is what people are talking about. This is really bloody and really violent. You couldn't vote for Abe Lincoln down in the South. Everyone was too afraid to even print ballots and carry the ballots around down in the South. That's intimidation, pre-printing of ballot. If you voted for someone, if say you voted for Abe Lincoln, walked into Georgia and said, I want to vote for Abe Lincoln, they'd be like, excuse me, who you vote for? They're going to be out or something would happen. Or more likely what would happen is your house had burned that night. Massive, massive violence surrounding elections. 1872 in England, they did the ballot reform act. This is how people voted back then. You go up in front of the courthouse, everyone's standing around, I'm going to vote for this. Everyone's like, oh, you voted for that, well, that's crazy, oh, that's crazy, right? Then someone would die, someone would get beat up. This is a publicity for Lincoln by Thomas Nash. And it just looks like kind of a regular thing. Here's how you vote for Lincoln, and here's how you vote for his competitor. But notice the intimidation already. Look at this character. Does he look sort of clean, and handsome, and wonderful? No. So if you're going to walk up, you better be looking clean and handsome, because only respectful people are going to vote for Lincoln, right? And then look at all the people looking around. Look at the swarthy folks ready to handle you if you vote the wrong way, OK? The whole idea of election parades disappeared. Why would you have an election parade, right? You have an election parade to incentivize people, to watch people, to intimidate people, to vote. They're gone, OK? So see, the Voting Rights Act, if you saw Salma, it was a big deal. No person shall intimidate, threaten, or coerce any person for voting or attempting to vote. Intimidation's a big deal. Problem two, vote buying. Everyone knows about that one. We all talk about bribery all the time. Tammany Hall took advantage of pre-1890 ability to see how people vote. So what he'd do is he'd hand people a chicken wing outside the election office, if they voted the right way, to have his guy in there going, yeah, he voted, hand him a beer, a swig of beer for a vote. Turnout was great, right? A lot of people who didn't care at all would just show up. So people were like, oh, where's the turnout? Well, vote buying helps turnout. So if you want, if you see your turnout rising, assume that there's probably some vote buying going. George Washington threw these elaborate parties. He claimed in 1855 when he lost he didn't buy enough booze. Then he'd buy booze and walk people all down to the ballot. Then he'd just sort of stand around, watch them all drunk, and note who's voting, right? That's intimidation, folks. That's vote buying. Tammany Hall delivered probably the votes by buying. George Washington didn't want to race by buying, blah, blah. All right, man charged in Texas with buying school board votes with cocaine. Give you a line, you vote for me. It's amazing how easy it is to buy, all right? And think about the situation. Say we're going to vote and work. This is your boss. He's standing over you. He can be like, vote for me. I'll give you that promotion, right? Then he can see that you vote. So this can happen in Washington already, right? You can do this now. 1890 is no longer. You can do it again, OK? And he can sit there and go, yeah, I'll decide. But he's going to see my vote right there. He'll be able to buy. Any time you have the ability to see someone purchase or intimidate, you have vote buying and intimidation recently. Someone from Washington put his vote up on eBay, all right? eBay didn't like that. They took it down, made some news. Pretty exciting stuff going on, all right? The problem with receipts wouldn't have been great during the Florida election if everyone had a receipt. Collect all the receipts. This is exactly how we voted. Of course, receipts allow for both intimidation and vote buying. Honey, when she gets home from the booth, show me how you voted on that abuse bill. Show me the receipt. I need that receipt, right? And then the beating can happen right there in the home. Or the selling and buying happens right out. Tammany Hall doesn't need someone inside the election room. You can just go, give me a receipt, and I'll give you a swig of beer, OK? And this is indeed what was happening. So you don't get receipts. You will never get a receipt. If someone hands you a receipt about how you voted, who you voted for, you're in a different world, right? They don't do that. So think about it yourself. Say you want to bribe someone. How much would you pay for a vote you can't verify? I kind of know what your answer will be if you really do think about this, right? If I go to try and give someone money, and I'm pushing them or I'm intimidating them, but they can't see, I can't see how they vote, they're more likely to vote against me. They're like, that guy's a crook, right? Oh, yeah, I'm going to do exactly what you say. And I'm going to vote against them. So it actually limits even the approach of buying, OK? And this is from a professor I forget where. He's somewhere in the US. No man has ever placed his money corruptly without satisfying himself that the vote was cast according to the agreement or in a phrase which became only too common during the last campaign without proof that the goods were to be delivered, OK? So which one's worse? I actually think it's intimidation, just because we've been doing it forever, OK? People talk all about bribery, but I think intimidation wins. I don't have date on that. So we teach secret ballots in the first grade. My kid's learning it already. He's three. High schoolers do projects on it. Wikipedia nails it, right? Here's intimidation. Here's vote buying. Here's the prevention. Secret ballot in which only the voter knows how individuals have voted as a crucial part of ensuring free and fair elections. Before this, it was common for candidates to intimidate or bribe voters. I wouldn't say common. I would say it happened all the time, right? I would like to see a case where it didn't happen. Aristotle was very concerned about it. Pliny the Younger was very concerned about it. They talked openly about this, and they nailed it, right? And so Aristotle was trying to develop a voting system whereby you could vote in public, but no one would be able to tell your vote. And he came up with great systems, black and white balls and urns where you put your hands in, drop the balls. He had this other system. They worked great, OK? Congress insists on it. Congress passes legislation to try and make sure you have secret ballots. So since the 1890s, we've upgraded. Everywhere we vote, we vote in private. I don't care if you're at the PTA, a bake sale, wherever you vote, you vote in private, except for one place, US Congress. There's someone in this room who actually said to me, it's like, my god, how could we be so blind? Is it possible that the same problems that apply that apply to an individual apply to a legislator? Well, you tell me what you think, OK? So here's GovTrack US. You can see how every congressman ever voted on almost anything. So this is a current bill. I don't know, 226 to 191. You can look up your congressman. I can't read it off the screen. And you can see if they voted yeah or nay. Well, oh, this is great. And you can actually see it. Do we have a, maybe I'll click on this. Can I click on it? Oh, yeah. All right, and just for fun, it's really good to familiarize yourselves with the idea of roll call. I don't know if we have volume. It's going to be your speakers unless we can try. Who knows? But I don't think your volume's on at this point. All right, well, we'll try. If not, I can maldite. I know it by heart. Up. We missed a page. All right, we'll try. Well, let's hope what they're, I can actually tell you mostly what's happening in this thing anyways. So this is a roll call vote. I don't know if we get any more volume. Let's see if I can. All right, so he's like, quiet please. We're going to have the roll call. This is how they did it in Congress. They're actually wrong. The Connecticut guys actually were four. Bill, but who cares? Oh, whoa. Some people are getting upset already, right? They're looking over at each other. You're going to vote in Congress. Your vote's going to be sent by telegraph back to your hometown. It's likely that even in your hometown, your house is going to get burned that night. So think about the amount of guts it took to make some of these votes or non-guts, sending it by telegraph back to where your wife and your kids live, back to where your friends are, who might be very much opposed to you. And there's a great scene at the end of this, but I'm going to, well, this is actually it. You shoot me dead. I don't care. This is what happened. OK, so we'll move on. So they voted openly in 1799. They voted openly. That was 1865, January 31. So how could this be the root of all these problems if they always voted openly? Well, they didn't always vote openly. OK, this is a bill. And when I was starting to talk about it, I thought it was the smallest bill in the world that no one had ever heard of it. Indeed, no one really had ever heard of it. But it wasn't a small bill. 10 years in the making, the Legislative Reorganization Act. Let's understand what legislative means. Those are the people who make your laws, who decide how your money is spent, is going to be reorganized. There are only two of these acts in history, 1946 and 1970. 1946 when they didn't have a lot of balls, so they wanted to put some balls into this one. And they did. So everything that we think about modern Congress has done in this bill, and you've never heard of it. So when you see a television or a camera inside Congress, this is the bill that did it. If you've heard of radio, when you get open voting, and 90% of the bills that are being done, this is what did it. By far, the most significant secrecy provision in the act dealt with the disclosure of House members' votes. House members. Didn't change the Senate, changed the House. In the Committee of the Whole, the House often makes its most important policy decisions. It often makes its most important policy decisions in secret, but for 180 years, its precedents had been forbidden to record to understand how people voted. From 1789 to 1970, you couldn't record them. So under the new rule, each member's name and vote was to be recorded, put on government.org. Legislative Reorganization Act. Most people have never heard of the Committee of the Whole. If you look it up on Wikipedia, you don't learn anything. It's the worst definition in the world. The Committee of the Whole was developed in England to prevent the very thing we really think it should prevent from. It prevented the ability of the king to intimidate someone voting. So the legislators, members of parliament, whatever they were called, would go inside the Committee of the Whole to avoid repercussions with finance stuff or anything to do with the king. And then they would come out. They would announce their decision. But then their decision would just be a number, the vote total. And so they were avoiding the power of money. They were avoiding the superpower in the country, in the Committee of the Whole. That's from England. You can probably read up on that. I'll post my slides. But here's Wikipedia. It gives you this really dry thing. You'll never understand it. So I call this one of the most important bills in history. Other people say that as well. This landmark legislation launched the congressional reforms of the 70s, transforming the institution more than any event or series of events since the overthrow of Speaker Cannon. Speaker Cannon died in 1913. Here's the 24 words. This is straight from the bill. The result of each roll call vote in any meeting or any committee shall be made available by that committee for inspection by the public. Those are powerful words. They've changed history. Here's the people who sponsored it. Tip O'Neill, who we'll talk about later, because he became very famous for abusing the ability to see people's votes. He built Tufts University by a process called log rolling. He didn't have a penny in his pocket. But he built Tufts University by leaning over junior senators and junior congressmen and making sure that they voted the right way. And he was log rolling like crazy. Charles Goopster was kind of a sad sap. He was having troubles with transparency in Congress. So he was the Republican nominee for this. Look up Charles Goopster. There's not a whole lot of wonderful things about him. He wasn't a bad guy, but he just was kind of there. They proposed this without any data, without any studies. There's no data. They were just appealing to popular sentiment or whatever. And I had some of O'Neill's words here. But the secrecy of the committee of the whole has allowed too many members to duck issues to avoid the perils of controversial voters. And he went on and on and on and on. Committees in general, but the committee of the whole was where most of the secret stuff was happening. So almost every major bill landed in the committee of the whole at some point. So they were doing, just to give you an example, the committee of the whole might do 50 votes of the votes for that year inside the committee whole for one bill. So they were all the little amendments, all the little wording would happen. And then they go, boom, this is it. It's done. Ready? So committee of the whole was a powerful thing. I'm not the committee expert of the world. You might know more than me about that. But the other committees had similar issues. The committee of the whole, though, historically was always private, where the others weren't always. Some of them actually volunteered to be open. So when I discovered this, I tried looking this up. I didn't find any information anywhere. Krugman doesn't mention the word secret ballot in any one of his billion blog posts. Stiglitz doesn't talk about it either. This is zero. No one talks about this issue. It's just mind-blowing to me. And to celebrate, they added the electronic voting machine, 1973, when I think we see a lot more dramatic changes, because people were still lazy at the beginning, as you saw, taking the roll count was very slow. People had spit in their platoons. They'd deliberate. They added the electronic one, really sped things up. And in 1973, I think you see a lot more changing. So just to give you an example of how this happens, and it's insidious how this happens, remember that I'm a fan of Barney Frank. I love the guy. But what he's doing here is he's intimidating by calling for a roll call vote to make sure that people he's squeezed against the wall are now going to put their name to a bill. And you're going to see this. He's retired, but it's recent enough. And he's going to do it after the bill's already been approved. OK? Oh, sorry. Come on. 15, 25, the previous question in order. The question is on the vote, and the vote is down. All right. No camera on him. That's secret. It's over. The bill won. Speaker, speaker, wait. The yeas and nays is roll call voting, where you attach names to the votes. So now they'll have 15 minutes to vote. We won't watch that. But they'll get up and put their cards in. Every name will be published on the board. This you can see on almost every bill, and at the end of almost every yeas and nays, you'll see someone go, please come on, roll call. Roll call. We need roll call. Why? Because I want to get the money for this, or I want to push someone around. OK? Our founding fathers are great, but they didn't talk about this. Nothing in the Constitution requires public sessions of Congress, let alone public hearings. If it's committees or public votes, in fact, the Constitution makes no mention of committees at all. OK? Though one of the first things they did in the very first Congress is they developed the Committee of the Whole, because they love this thing. OK? Acceptable in 1789, but not now. How can no one even mention the possibility of election fraud? How can no one argue for a cardboard box? I call it a cardboard box, because you put that thing up. It's the cheapest way to vote privately. You just stick your head in there and you vote. Pre-made kits for $5, get them while they last. Not one congressman mentioned election fraud, though I read through the whole 200 pages of the crap. The bill passed 326 to 19. So no one really thought this was bad. Of course, it's hard to ask congressmen to act for them to be bald about going, I need to be secret. So we can see some issues with trying to get them to embrace this again. Because if you're going to be the only congressman going, I think my vote should be secret. Everyone's going to think you're a criminal. And that's partly what we had to deal with Jeremy Bentham. And that's what we're going to have to deal with Vermeul. And we're going to have to deal with ourselves who are fans of transparency, if this is correct. No one's talked about it since. I asked Barney Frank about the Legislative Reorganization Act, 1970, never heard of it. He was retired. He was around in what, 80? I asked Chris Dodd, I asked John Barrow, I asked Bill Bellerhurst. They never heard of it. They didn't know that voting was changed in 1970. They didn't know that. Hundreds of roll call studies and services, every major university's got them. They're just analyzing roll calls left, right, and center. None of them have gone, shall we compare roll call with secret? Not one study. It doesn't exist. You find one. I'd love to read it. So these people are getting lots of funding to analyze the minutia of everything, but they aren't talking about the forest, which is whether we should be doing this or not. Here's the missing graph, right? Here's what I think is the additional graph should be added to the 70s. I actually found this in a textbook. They didn't mention anything bad about this, or unusual about it, or that something crazy happened. Roll call voting, before 1970, was always under 400. 2008 got up to 1,800 roll calls a year. I actually think that if you had corruption before then, it actually was down here in the 200s, right? Because if you put someone's name on it, there's room for corruption. And people wanted some of those things open. I think there should be nothing. That's what I think. There was this huge excitement over transparency. So before it passed and then after this huge excitement, my favorite article, which is my last slide, but it'll be up there, actually talks about why this dropped. And it had a lot to do with watchdog groups, finally going, wow, all the legislation that gets passed in secret is better. The watchdog groups themselves were giving up. Like, please, yeah, just do it in secret. But out in public, I'll be like, go transparency. That's the Adrian Vermeerly. That's the Bentham problem. We're so much a fan of transparency that even when we go to question this, we still side on transparency despite all the data. Okay? Ba-ba-ba, Kennedy talked about it. I'm gonna run through some data because I'd rather have some questions and stuff. It isn't theoretical. We've got lots of data. Ba-ba-ba-ba, we've already seen that. We have motivation, clearly lots of money. We have the ROI, return on investment. Lobby groups brag about it. If you give me a dollar, I'll get you back 100, right? The return on investment is phenomenal. It's a big deal, especially if a congressman makes $174,000 a year and they can't even afford to run a podon collection in their own town. We have motivation. The massive hours, this is a big deal. How much time do you spend raising money, talking money pandering to these folks, okay? Well, that's a big deal. They spend a lot of hours. So where did that time used to go? Well, it used to go to the people. It had to because those are the people who put you in office. So people are like, why isn't anybody voting? Right? Why isn't anybody interested? Why doesn't anyone care? Well, because where are the congressmen who used to run down? I used to, I was a kid. I remember congressmen coming to my town. I haven't seen that. I can't even email my congressman. They don't respond to me, right? Why would they respond to me? We have statistical analysis. Here's Bartels. He talks about how low income groups like everyone talks about have a negative response from the government. Okay, Bartels is not a questionable character. He's been doing this forever. Middle income, medium response, high income, great response. Thanks, Bartels. We've got people. He's a little younger guy. He's written some of the more provocative stuff on this. He was over at Harvard, the Safra Center. And he came to the same conclusion. I'm not gonna try and read stuff. I can't see with my eyes. But this is a big deal, all right? This particular one's big. When does the corruption happen? It doesn't happen on the big bills. If you are aware of the bill, there's no corruption. But remember, there are thousands of votes every year. So they're gonna, congressmen aren't dumb. They know which ones you're looking at. If you're looking at it, they're gonna vote the way they believe or the way you believe. And they're gonna say to be damned with the money. Because those are the five votes a year out of 5,000 that you care about. So the people care about a statistically insignificant number of bills, and we see that. All right, so all the data's pointing to that. During election year, they're more likely to be less corrupt. And if it's a public bill, they don't move, all right? This is great. This is from our friend Vermeulade, 2006. I won't go into this, but basically he was shocked. He just keeps being shocked. Transparency seems to wreck everything. But at the end, he votes for secrecy, you know. But every data that he brings up. Even the dismissals support the case. Here's the Brookings Institute, right? The Brookings Institute talks about pre and post-transparency in one of the years they put there. 1984 is preach, that's everything was secret before that. 1984 was the beginning of transparency. They are unaware, the Brookings Institute does not know about the 1970 Legislative Reorganization Act, which brought the televisions in that they talk about, which opens up voting. Here's two of the big thinkers in the space. Here's Barbara McCarty's at Princeton, here's Barbara. They stumble on this idea. They think maybe these committee votes are really the problem, and they poo-poo it. They go, it's unlikely that a one-time rule change would change things for this long, change things for the last 30 years. Well, if you change voting, that would change things forever, okay? And they poo-poo it in a number of ways. They say that on the state level, we don't see the same, well, we see the same pattern. The states change at the same time. So Florida was the first to go, but all around the same years, they're changing. Everything that they poo-poo it with in this little thing, as you probably can already tell, is suspect, okay? So Brookings Institute, Barbara, these are the guys who are holding the rock down for the transparency institutions. And if you'll notice, the people writing for the Brookings Institute work for transparency institutions. So that's troublesome. Lobbyist admissions. I've been in touch a lot with David King over this. He's been sending me some juicy tidbits, so he spoke with John Zork, who's this legislator. Zork said, I was there, the lobbyists loved this legislation. They loved it. And that capitalization, by the way, isn't mine, okay? If you need just two votes, and you knew it, you knew who, because you would see during the 50 votes who to target. So you could put your money in a very specific spot. So if you only had a million dollars to spend, you could do a lot of damage with a million dollars. If you don't know who's voting against you, you now spread a million dollars out by 400 congressmen or whatever else you gotta do, and you're not gonna move anything. You're not gonna move one vote. You're gonna be spending a lot of money and people are already voting for you or people are gonna be voting against you. And if you can't see the vote, they're gonna vote against you anyways. All right, endless congressmen admissions. I'm gonna keep moving. The turning points that we talked about. Congressman complaining about it. Here's Packwood, 69 he starts. In 1974, he says, before this legislation, and this is a big deal, the lobbyists used to walk in and they used to beg. Okay? Before they used to beg. After this legislation, they would tell you what to do. They didn't even need to listen to you. Okay? And so he says it really eloquently, but once lobbyists knew your every vote, they used it as ammunition, and they would come after you. We had congressmen fighting it. This is from my favorite article. Every piece in this article supports my idea, but that's from 1987. Rossinkowski would close down the house in ways means commissions and he would pass all the legislation that the watchdogs liked because it was closed. And he, why did he close it? He would say because of the lobbyists. And when he closed it, he got things done. So here's before 1970, I fought like a tiger in you. That's an actual quote. You would just lie to them. I fought like a tiger in there, but we lost, man. We really worked hard. All right, after, they were just, but just let me, please, who cares? Who cares what the congressman says at that point? It's over, okay? Back to Vermeul and Bentham. How am I doing for time? I don't, I want some discussion. So if I'm running late, okay, five minutes. So these guys are great. So Vermeul is struggling with Bentham and his transparency, struggling with his things called doing open and secret voting, which he actually advocates at the end. Bentham is basically saying, let's do open and secret, but let secret win. So if there's a tie, secret will always win. And this is troubling Vermeul because before in all his papers, Bentham says, open voting is the only way to go because everybody loves transparency, right? So Bentham comes to this outrageous weird conclusion. Vermeul is struggling with it, but this is from Bentham's paper about something happened in Russia. On the second occasion, the open vote gave for the independence of the commission 114 against to 148, but the secret vote turned the majority on the other side for independence, 140 against 122. These are things that are happening one day after another. So people are feeling liberated, perhaps, or greedy. We don't know what, but there's a change and the change is big, all right? The fact that no one's researching this is weird, but with the birth of an industry, when I saw this, I almost fell over. All the lobby groups that you know about are born in the next few years of this legislation. And they're born to punks, all right? Cassidy was driving around in his little van. He was poor. Him and his wife didn't have a job. He's like, maybe I'll go to Washington and be a lobbyist. So he sets up shop behind a stove in his kitchen in Washington, D.C. He has no office, right? But he's now doing lobbying when lobbying works. Before that, every single lobbyist wore a cheap suit. Within a month, he's getting a $10,000 check and then he starts getting more and more and more and more. They didn't understand it. How would he know? He didn't know life beforehand. Alec Foundation, all of these guys, 1972, 1975, you see the dates over and over and over and then they own the market, right? So K Street was built by this bill. So the weird thing about this is it's kind of like discovering gravity or oxygen or air. Once you see it, you see it everywhere. This is from the newspaper. Boehner is standing over his members and going, I'm watching how you're voting. If you don't vote the right way, I'm not gonna listen to your bill. That's intimidation. No one calls it intimidation. We call it whipping up the vote. Why do we give it such a euphemism? That's intimidation. That's actually electoral fraud intimidation. No one ever calls it that. This is amazing stuff right here. The intimidation and pressure was intense. This is from the Congress, right? This is Boehner right here. There are a lot of people that wanted to vote no today and at last call, the last twisting of arms. Did they literally twist their arms? The last twisting of arms convinced them not to vote that way. It goes on and on. If you're young, you get beat up even more. One freshman lawmaker was called prior to the voice and told their committee seat was probably gone if you would vote your conscience. Oh my God, they even used the word conscience, right? We didn't even think they knew that word. They know it. They don't want you to have it. All right. Threatening other party members. Hey, we're not gonna threaten Elizabeth Warren. She's too awesome, right? But we're gonna threaten every single other Democrat if you do anything with Elizabeth Warren. Well, it's intimidation and they can follow that up and they do, okay? We have gang style intimidation. Well, that makes a lot of sense. You can't form a gang unless you see how the other members of your gang are voting, right? You can't form a full ranks unless you turn around and they go, oh, well, he voted. We all voted the same way. We all vote for each other's bills and we all hate Obama and we're gonna crush Obama and we'll all move together. You can't do that unless you see how they vote. Well, there you go. That's not the only reason. I think there's a lot of reasons for partisanship. This is great. Here's a guy who wrote the partisan divide. Let's see what he's got to say about this. And even if it is transparent, why doesn't that invite corruption? It doesn't have to have that. But right now you have interest groups that put out lists and target members who don't vote a certain way. The only reason you only had 70 members vote for aid after Hurricane Sandy was because several groups called for growth, heritage action, like Freedom Works said we're rating this vote basically threatened to go after members that voted for that kind of aid. It's worse today than it's ever been. And parties have been a sensory force in American politics for 200 years. That money is gonna go somewhere and if you don't give it to parties in a transparent fashion, it's out on the wind. Remember what he's talking about? Aid to Hurricane Sandy, 70 votes. If you voted for aid for Hurricane Sandy, you were in trouble. And they would see your vote and they would go after you. Imagine if they couldn't see your vote. Well, you might be able to use that conscious thing you have. Vote buying, yes, we've got it. No one really calls it what it is, that's election fraud. That's bribery. We call it other things, quid pro quo. Let's just call it what it is. This is secret ballot curable stuff. Massive vote buying, I don't know how many have heard of Duke Cunningham. Duke Cunningham put out a menu. If you want this type of legislation, that's this much. If you want this type of legislation, that's this much. When he got caught, he did time in jail. He wasn't the only one. Guys were hiding money in their freezers, all of this stuff. People talk about trying to stop money going into their hands. That's impossible. If I invest in a snake farm in Guam, does that help a congressman? You'll never figure that out. But what if we can stop the feedback loop where they get to know if that money worked? Then we see the money go down. Tammany Hall wasn't giving anyone a chicken wing or a swig of beer after 1890. They were giving nobody nothing. There were no election parades. George Washington wouldn't buy booze after that. The secret ballot stops the money. It's a crucial feedback loop that's interrupted. All right, so I've got more, but I'm gonna end there because I think you get it. Oh, this is my graphs. These are important. Here's inequality, which actually the guys at Princeton said correlates almost dramatically with partisanship, and correlates with a lot of other stuff. So inequality correlates very well with partisanship, and it also, no one's ever done this, correlates really well with house roll call votes, which should be the opposite, right? It should be the opposite stuff. This is outrageous. I think we can explain even the peaks and valleys with data that we have, but the correlation that it has with inequality is terrifying. Okay, the secret ballot worked in the previous Gilded Age. Not a lot of data on it, but all the results that I'm seeing are saying that is one of the main reasons why we ended the first Gilded Age, and this is one of the articles that cooperate with that. So I could go on forever. I would like to open up for questions. I'm sure you have some. You think that secret votes would stay secret? It seems like if someone was proud of their vote, they would volunteer the fact that they voted for it. Could always do that. The trouble is people- Certainly the way things are now, if you don't say how you voted, there should be someone coming in with an ad saying, what's the result? Back to hiding. What would it be? So I guess- What you were getting- In fact, many decades, what was that like? What kind of department do people have between the votes? What you were getting was unreliability. You get congressmen telling two different groups they voted different ways. All right, you got what Pakwood said, which is he would tell the other congressmen to tell the lobby group that he voted one way. All right, and that was covered in the thing that I sped through. But Pakwood would say, we fought like a tiger in there for you. We did everything we could. I did all I could. How much are you gonna pay for that if you are smart enough to know that he could be lying? Right, so the money goes down regardless. It's unreliable information. There was this whole thing called spotters, which is hard to find stuff on, but people were planting people in Congress to try and figure out how they were voting beforehand. That was unreliable, so the money was low. So Data Void has this notion of context collapse, which is that in today's media space you can no longer be two-faced, even if it was virtuous two-faced in this, because people are gonna know if you say one thing to one group and the contrary thing to another group. So I wonder if the virtues of the secret ballot existed in a particular media space, and today where everything is photographed and recorded and interviewed. I'm with you. It was a secret little conversation. I'm a terrible actor, but I can do this one really well. You're the lobbies who come into my office. I told every motherfucker out there that I voted no, but Harry, I voted yes. Why don't you come to our organization symposia and publicly say that to our members? Okay, but all I'm saying is that same thing. We underestimate the ability for the press to work in the 70s. The reporters were very aggressive. They were trying to put people on the spot. There were spotters there trying to put their names. You would see lists of how people voted. Trouble is even Goopser, who proposed this bill, was disagreeing with those lists. So he was publicly disagreeing with lists of what either he had said before or whatever. It's just unreliable, right? It's you are going down to someone's word. He could lie just because he doesn't like you. You know that, he knows that, all right? And I'm just saying the ability to lie, the ability to be secret is what changes the game. No question, we're in a different world. 2015's different. I think lying and those games still play fairly well. But the other way to look at it, it's hard to imagine anyone, but a sociopath, being able to be in a fiction through all those interactions. When you should be with constituents who care about it, what's different. You know, I mean, you're going to say one thing and do another. I mean, there's a sort of incentive here for really massive acceptance. I mean, but it's not to say you haven't identified a problem and an interesting solution. I just don't think you actually sort of thought through the entire solution and what the consequence is. I don't think there's any way I could. I agree with you. I think you're absolutely right. I do think that when we take in a leap of faith, we took a leap of faith in 1970. And if we look at the legislation pre-1970, granted, things have changed. But man, we're talking the lowest point of inequality, the lowest point of partisanship in history. This bill changed more than one thing. It allowed for more open committees so you could sit, as once reporter said in 1972, on the congressman's elbow, the lobbyists would sit there, right? During the write-up of the bills. All of that. I mean, it's a maddening amount of transparency. The one link, though, is if you're investing a lot of money and you can't see the vote, well, you've now lost that, the vote is the tie to whether what you invested in worked or not, right? So if you invest in the think tanks, if you invest in whatever, the think tanks are on the take, as the reporter from New York Times recently said, all that. But they're putting money in specifically for results that they can see. If you can't see the results, then you put in less. I'm not saying it's gonna take it to zero. I'm saying it's a change. Go ahead. So, I had a student come to me about a year ago and say, look, I've solved democracy. I have a new platform. The way it's gonna work is we're an elect people and we are gonna have votes online and what policy stance is this should take. Every bill they're gonna vote on, we're gonna have full information on it. And if they don't do what we say, you know, we're gonna throw them out, we're gonna stop giving them money, so on and so forth. And when you look at this at first, it looks like an interesting idea. This looks like how you want democracy to work until you actually read about American democracy and you realize that very much this was designed as a deliberative system. It was designed as a system where you have a representative who can engage in exactly the sort of course trading, back room dealing conversation that we have. And so I'm very sympathetic to this argument as being consistent with what we wanna deliberate of representative democracy to be. We actually want the possibility that our representatives deliberate and that God forbid they change their minds and that they're actually able to do it in compromise. So that all sounds right to me. But in this 45 minute talk, I didn't hear voters mentioned after minute 10. It became a conversation about lobbyists. And what I'm really curious about is if we return to this culture of secrecy, how do you get to the problem that student was trying to solve? That student was really interested in the question of I don't believe in this in the legislators. I don't believe that they're representing me. I don't believe that they're acting on my behalf. If we have the restoration of secrecy that you're talking about, it's very, very difficult to have voters feel like they have any sense for what's going on. How do you campaign? How do you represent your work? How do you actually have a representative election in a situation where you've removed that ability to sort of ask what your representative is doing and really have? I love that question. That's something I think a lot about. And I think it actually is the change of motivations that I presented through data, but I'll make clear. Say I'm writing a bill now. And I really am worried about lobbyists POV or I'm worried about someone else's POV but I don't want the public to understand. I'm gonna write a longer bill and I'm gonna write a really complex bill. If you look at a bill of rights, it's one page, 10 bills. That changed dramatically. That change of your ability to read and follow legislation is gone. Remember that everything became inwardly facing since the 70s. So instead of reaching back to the people which is gone and engaging the people and showing the people their bill and trying to get them to understand your legislation, they turned and did the exact opposite. So you get lobbyists who are from Harvard, MIT, et cetera, to write wording. And they talk about this, right? The people who get caught talk about how crafty they wrote that wording, right? Abramoff talked about hiring some of the best and brightest to write one clause to screw everybody over. If you're writing the bill where the only acceptance you're looking for is the public, well then you have to go and meet the public. You have to go and write for the public. So you're talking a whole different way of writing bills. You're talking a whole different face on your congressman, right? So you've changed the interaction with the voter for the entire time, not just his election, but every time he writes a bill, now you have to read it, right? Wouldn't it be great if he wrote as, I forget who wrote it, but sorry I wrote a long bill. I didn't have time to write a short one. They'd be working to write the shorter ones again. I'll get you one, two, then three. And then... There's a question of what it really is. So the function of a congressman or whatever is both as intelligent and as a representative. And I think this question is kind of getting at the representative nature, the sense to which they cite the views of the people back home versus how much we delegate to them to understand complex bills and things like that. I guess my question is just, I mean, I'm curious, is there data or is it even available? Like what happened in the committee of the polls before? How many bills went to the committee of the whole voting format? There is. And that's why I asked you a question also about committees, not just the committee of the whole. Right. I mean, obviously, anyone who's going to be talking about all of the work happens in the committees. And that's for all of the legislation, tractors, et cetera. So I'm curious kind of like whether there are a lot of committees in the committee. You know, I didn't go through the committees. I did look at the things they were passing. So at that point, they were passing all the major stuff when they were talking about. So Tip O'Neill talks about war-based initiatives, finance-based initiatives, right, the SST supersonic, which was a big deal then, and which many people claim that the open voting changed the legislation on that. We can go back and look at, my guess is it's going to touch, and it have touched, almost every bill beforehand, because you would write your amendments in the committee of the whole. You could switch to committee of whole return very quickly. As you might know, the hardest thing to get data on is secret ballots, right? So you're not going to find how someone voted. You're not going to see, you're going to have to pull for partisanship numbers. The partisanship numbers all end in 1970 for very good reason, right? And then we have this sort of guessing based on. Let's say you go back to the way it was. It seems like a natural response to what would happen would be the Congress going to start putting up on their website. This is how I know it. It's going to be pressured to do so. So we kind of end up with the same thing anyway. And how do we do this, what do we do for this to actually happen here? Well, because part of it is just having a straight story. I mean, it's just, yeah, it goes to that point. It almost doesn't matter how they vote, if what they're claiming, I mean, they're now bound to say how they vote, you know, what they claim they vote. What is their life? What are the connections to that? And how do you know they vote now? But they do the math and math and what they've done. It's always through the day. What can be missed? They could have done that in 1970. They could have done it in 1969. They didn't. But we have time more than we did in 1965. I agree. And I think it would be less likely for them to lie as they would right in a small office with one person. But once again, we're talking 5,000 votes a year. Probably half of them, the only conversations they're having on that are with particular lobbyists. And those are the people that they're going to be upset with, or the people are going to have some sort of personal, and they're going to be getting pushed around by these people. I would say the propensity of lying might actually be fairly high on the particular bills where we're seeing the most corruption. I don't think they're going to move on big ideas. I think they're going to be very public about it. And I think they're going to pretty much follow their heart. It's so hard to say. If we go back to Adrian and Jeremy, they both sided on secrecy, even though every case they show, they sided on transparency, where every case they show mentioned that secrecy changed things dramatically and might have been more honest. And as Bentham kept saying, I think it's the honest vote. And the partisanship factor here is really the key. You get a lot of soft money based on how you vote. You get a lot of internal, I did a whole thing on why partisanship happens. And people link partisanship with inequality and I think for good reason. And it's because you get bullied on how you vote on everything. There's talks of congressmen walking in and seeing how the top five people voted and voting appropriately. I think we're going to see examples like Adrian and Jeremy found where people are saying one thing and doing the other. I think that'll come out quickly. And as soon as you see that, then we know we're dealing with some kind of data. I think at the beginning there might be some energy to try and do it, right? So I think it must be. I don't know. It's just incredible what happens in secret. You don't know why or how. So it seems like your main argument is that while transparency is the way that citizens can hold their election decisions accountable, right? That it's going to be flipped by the fact that there's a whole industry now kind of grown up that is more powerful and paying more attention to a lot of more resources to using transparency to meet their own interests, right? So my question then would be, if transparency is in the way, what are the other metrics or levers of accountability would envision citizens hold in their elected officials accountable in the future? Yeah, I mean, I think it's awesome that I'm old enough to remember when we thought congressmen were pretty awesome. And well, I'm 50. So I remember some of this, and you can go back and you can start talking about how we judge congressmen. We didn't judge them by their votes, because we couldn't, right? Their voting was rare. So if you talk about Kennedy being a senator and he talks very dramatically about how he thought open voting shouldn't happen because you get pushed around by the people. He thought it'd be a tyranny of the majority. The data seems to suggest that it's a tyranny of the minority. It's a tyranny of the rich. And we elected them. They came out and made sure that we knew everything about them, right? They had to impress us through whatever metric you judge anybody, a lover, a boyfriend, candidate, their past record. Maybe they worked in Africa. Maybe they built something you like or been involved in organizations. Yeah. Yeah, they now had to impress you with those other metrics. And I don't think we can determine what those metrics are in advance, because those metrics could be a number of things. And I think they'll change dramatically based on whether we're in the middle of a Vietnam war or a different war or all of this other stuff that's going on. The incentive is to vote in ways that get your money to get reelected, because that's what you're judged on, how you vote. And I mean, on the big issues for the public, the ones that they do pay attention to, you're judged on how you vote on that issue. Correct. With a secret ballot, you're judged on the outcome of the product of the bill, which is kind of what you're getting in. Is that somebody that essentially supports the bill and the outcomes of those bills, if those things are consistent, that's how they're going to actually be judged. And that's what they're actually aimed for. That's the possible outcome, so that they win the votes that way, as opposed to being incentivized and selling all your votes on issues that people don't care about and don't even care about. So I think it's not a silver bullet. It's not going to change anything instantaneously or anything like that. But at the same time, it's where that very first incentive in the decision-making process takes place. It's playing a crucial role. So that's why I agree. I'll respond. I agree. I'm not as middle of the road about this. I do think that Citizens United relies on this bill. There is no Citizens United without this. So people are very concerned just about Citizens United, the ability to pour money in based on how someone votes. Well, what if we take away the ability to verify that? If we talk about climate change, I who've worked with many lobbyists on climate change issues, you go into the office, and unfortunately, they're sitting there going, I hear you. I really do. I mean, I understand the science, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you look at his funders, and he speaks very publicly about how he's against it. And this is a common response from people who work on climate change, that they are in trouble if they voice their opinions on it and dramatically in trouble. So they have to weigh how big an issue it is to the public and what they can do about it. So I am not as pessimistic about it as an idea. I actually think it correlates dramatically well with all the problems, which is just jaw dropping. It's pretty hard to sneeze at the correlation, which should go the other way. But it also has the same results in history, proven its past very well. So it's not researched at all. So I'm literally pleading for this to be a research topic, a question, an article. There is not a single article on this. If it's possible that it causes this, why aren't we talking about it at all? The leap of faith, as you talk about, happened in 1970. It seems one of the things we're dealing with here, differences between direct democracy and representative democracy, in which your student wanted to micromanage, wanted every citizen to vote on every issue, which I think is a really bad idea. I think this would force us to back candidates who we think are wise and have our best interests at heart. Now, the evaluation's a little trickier, right? There's a trust there. But I think as opposed to the system we have now where you know what's gonna happen to that candidate once you vote for them, it sort of doesn't matter who you vote for because they're being bullied, right? But the one thing that bothered me a little bit about your presentation is that there was always this assumption, without proof, and I know you're anxious to study this, that one can imagine instances where this voting in secret might actually work against the public interest. No question. One we'd like to see is some sort of controlled study where one actually can compare the two and see how often it works for us versus against them. I'd like to offer one. I think that the 13th Amendment might have worked. If that was, there was a lot of pressure. Abraham Lincoln put a lot of pressure on individual voters. The movie talks about it, the history talks about it. He was pushing for the last five votes. Now, those are the last five transparent votes. I think it's possible that if it was all secret, all along, it might have passed earlier. But certainly in the last round, given transparency, I might have lost how he not put the pressure. Oh, sorry. Yeah? So I thought I was a little confused. But after Ethan's question, I know that I have not missed it. If I'm not going to be able to vote based on somebody's beliefs and their co-voting, the closeness of what I want to do, then what would be the metric that you suspect that I should judge somebody when I go and vote? Exactly. What is that? I mean, somebody could do as wise as you want it to be. If they're going to raise taxes, I would never vote. What if people do before 1970, I guess it's a question. And the other argument, the word that's, well, a word that's based on something. H.L. Lincoln has the famous line that every complex problem has a solution that is simple compelling and incomplete. And the less unkind way to say that is simple compelling and incomplete. And to me, this strikes me as simple compelling and incomplete. I think there's a lot of things that are going on at the same inflection point that we're talking about that are interacting in some very, very complicated ways. What's hard about this wisdom argument is that you've gone in the US from one representative representing under 40,000 people, which is in fact the one thing that Washington insists on in the Constitution is almost no commentary on it, except he thinks one to 40,000 is wrong. You've had enormous explosion in population. You now have roughly one to 700,000. So it's much, much harder to have that sort of personal relationship of I know who you are. I trust you. You know me. You know my values. You simply move to a different region because we no longer scale the house of representatives in the same way. Second, you have a similar shift that's happened along the same line of the presence of millionaires and billionaires within Congress and the Senate. You've gone from having income of the people who are representing us being within a multiple of the average income to being many, many multiples of the average income. These things are happening at the same time as you have a shift going into the late 70s and the early 80s of people literally trying to make the case that government can do no right. And that's essentially a way of saying, don't bother paying attention to these bozos. They're not actually doing anything. For me, I think you have a really critical insight. I think you're absolutely right that the way in which deliberation is happening within the House and the Senate has changed radically. I think it's really important. I totally agree with you that it should be study of this sort of these different factors and interact them. I think it's really hard to undo and simply move back to a pre-1970 model because I think a lot of these other complicating factors at the same time make it really, really hard to recover that 1960s politics where you do have a representative who feels much closer to the voter interest and where you would have that trust relationship. So I absolutely think you're on the right target. I think you're way overdetermined in terms of making this sort of the solution to it. And I think that's where you're getting the pushback around this question of why would I trust any of these guys? These guys at this point are not from my quite privileged socioeconomic strata. They are 10X of where I am and I'm in pretty damn good shape. These people have no personal relationship with me nor have they for 20 or 30 years through some of these scaling issues. So I love to see this as part of a complement of a larger critique. Well, I also think that it's a lens and I think it's important to even look at your particular critique as a lens. I think it's interesting to think of the freedom that you might have if you were rich enough to afford your own campaign. So all of a sudden you can look more honest and you can look more convincing and you can look more unique. If you're poor and you're relying on investors, well all of a sudden you're not gonna appeal to the voter nearly as much. So as the money raises, keep in mind that the money might be being raised by this particular bill and isolating fewer and fewer intriguing people who just happen to be rich because they're able to speak their mind. So if we control the way people think by controlling the money and intimidating them then we do end up with very interesting billionaires and very boring poor people. Strangely, I look at sports. I'm jaw-dropped at where the Muhammad Ali's have gone as they're now pandering for all the money that they get from Nike, right? And we've noticed that even when Charles Barkley used to be very colorful, we don't have them anymore. No one's being colorful anymore because the money is controlled how they speak. Okay, so we have the same issue. And I don't think that it's changed dramatically. I think there was a lot of money in politics and politicians in particular running back in the day. I mean Woodrow Wilson clearly wasn't poor. The Roosevelt weren't poor. We had a number of fairly wealthy off people but I think it's interesting that they're able to speak their minds better. The issue about the amount of representatives, I agree. I mean, I think that's a disaster but if we multiply that by the fact that they're not at all looking at the people. They're no longer going back to their towns. They're no longer going back to their constituency at all. They don't respond to my emails at all. I think it's a time factor. They're out of time. And so even though they have more ability to reach masses, they don't have the time to even use the mass communication tools that they have to reach out to the people. I think we're running out of time. But yeah, we have one minute. But let's all just like give another round of applause to Jane for the great talk. Thank you so much. Thank you.