What are the conditions for democracy? Is one-man-one-vote one of them? Is representative democracy democratic? En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
The analogy to the stockholder's meeting would be accurate if voting weights were determined by GDP. Or by GDP pro capita.
(That aside, the parallels between the modern Western, spin-mediated version of democracy and the stockholder's meeting are eerily accurate at times.)
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
First, is the IMF not democratic since votes are proportional to budgetary contributions?
What of Penrose's square-root rule and the power index? Why is "slower than linear with population" a bad thing? En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
Yes, the IMF is not democratic. (The fact that votes are weighted according to budget contributions is probably the least of the democratic problems, but that's the IMF for you...)
What of Penrose's square-root rule and the power index? Why is "slower than linear with population" a bad thing?
I didn't mean to say that they were a bad thing. There are as many sound cases for having slower than linearly increasing voting weights as there are sound cases against it.
