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    • Showing only topics with the tag "reform". Back to normal view

    30. How to make class action lawsuits more meaningful to the public

      ~society Ask
      Have you ever received notice that you might be eligible for something from a class-action settlement? Ever notice that the effort required to recover is significant, and the recovery perhaps...

      Have you ever received notice that you might be eligible for something from a class-action settlement? Ever notice that the effort required to recover is significant, and the recovery perhaps insultingly miniscule?

      I don't know of any data, but I suspect that's true of nearly every class action lawsuit, even those that win in court battles. Maybe the original plaintiffs get a decent recovery, sometimes there's injunctive relief (which means the court forces the defendant to do or not do something). Every once in a while, individual members of the class get a meaningful outcome (vw's dieselgate comes to mind).

      The public interest justification for the outcomes where the recover for class members is really small, if one is even ever really offered, is that the cost of the action to the defendant serves as an inducement to all defendants to keep their act together. But see, Tyler Durden's explanation of the actuarial function from Fight Club.

      My thought is that instead of any recovery for the individual class members ("fuck 'em, right?"), their portion of the money should go to a public interest fund dedicated to consumer protection. My reason for this is that these small recoveries don't make any useful change for the individual class member consumers. But collectively, might add up to enough to make a meaningful difference to the future activities of producers.

      Of course, all the usual caveats about corruption and accountability come into play. But there's a few reasons it might help, if those can be overcome. First, it might prompt faster, lest costly settlements. The payouts would be lower, and also the transaction costs. This shifts the litigation process from focussing on big recoveries to high volume of suits, bringing in more defendants. It would also enable smaller firms to bring suit, the hope being that smaller firms would take on more marginal cases and get more action.

      Second, it might actually create a feedback loop. If the fund gets large enough, it could lobby and investigate, providing more information more new suits, and identifying the worst actors, and encouraging useful regulation. Imagine if Consumers Union could return to its glory of the 80's and have a big lobbying fund?

      Or, we could just have decent government level consumer protections (hahhahahahahahahah!)

      9 votes

    42. Could "fuzzing" voting, election, and judicial process improve decisionmaking and democratic outcomes?

      ~talk Ask
      Voting is determinative, especially where the constituency is precisely known, as with a legislature, executive council, panel of judges, gerrymandered electoral district, defined organisational...

      Voting is determinative, especially where the constituency is precisely known, as with a legislature, executive council, panel of judges, gerrymandered electoral district, defined organisational membership. If you know, with high precision, who is voting, then you can determine or influence how they vote, or what the outcome will be. Which lends a certain amount of predictability (often considered as good), but also of a tyranny of the majority. This is especially true where long-standing majorities can be assured: legislatures, boards of directors, courts, ethnic or cultural majorities.

      The result is a very high-stakes game in establishing majorities, influencing critical constituencies, packing courts, and gaming parliamentary and organisational procedures. But is this the best method --- both in terms of representational eqquity and of decision and goverrnance quality?

      Hands down the most fascinating article I've read over the past decade is Michael Schulson's "How to choose? When your reasons are worse than useless, sometimes the most rational choice is a random stab in the dark", in Aeon. The essay, drawing heavily on Peter Stone, The Luck of the Draw: The Role of Lotteries in Decision Making (2011), which I've not read, mostly concerns decisions under uncertainty and of the risk of bad decisions. It seems to me that it also applies to periods of extreme political partisanship and division. An unlikely but possible circumstance, I'm sure....

      Under many political systems, control is binary and discrete. A party with a majority in a legislature or judiciary, or control of the executive, has absolute control, barring procedural exceptions. Moreover, what results is a politics of veto power, where the bloc defining a controlling share of votes effectively controls the entire organisation. It may not be able to get its way, but it can determine which of two pluralities can reach a majority. Often in favour of its own considerations, overtly or covertly --- this is an obvious engine of corruption.

      (This is why "political flexibility" often translates to more effective power than a hardline orthodoxy.)

      One inspiration is a suggestion for US Supreme Court reform: greatly expand the court, hear more cases, but randomly assign a subset of judges to each case.[1] A litigant cannot know what specific magistrates will hear a case, and even a highly-packed court could produce minority-majority panels.

      Where voting can be fuzzed, the majority's power is made less absolute, more uncertain, and considerations which presume that such a majority cannot be assured, one hopes, would lead to a more inclusive decisionmaking process. Some specific mechanisms;

      • All members vote, but a subset of votes are considered at random. The larger the subset, the more reliably the true majority wins.
      • A subset of members votes. As in the court example above.
      • An executive role (presidency, leader, chairmanship) is rotated over time.
      • For ranged decisions (quantitative, rather than yes/no), a value is selected randomly based on weighted support.

      Concensus/majority decisionmaking tends to locked and unrepresentitive states. Fuzzing might better unlock these and increase representation.

      Notes

      1. A selection of articles on Supreme Court reforms and expansion, from an earlier G+ post: https://web.archive.org/web/20190117114110/https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/9btDjFcNhg1 Also, notably, court restructuring or resizing has been practiced: "Republicans Oppose Court Packing (Except When They Support It)".
      14 votes