Month: September 2017

Literature

Book Review: The Second Shift

Posted on by Zach

Fittingly enough, The Second Shift is the second book I’ve read by the famed sociologist Professor Arlie Russel Hochschild. It’s a book about the second working shift – the one that starts when people, especially parents, come home from work and find themselves confronted with a mound of chores.

I really liked this book. It’s one of the most interesting things I’ve read this year and I’ve regaled everyone who will listen with facts from it for the past few weeks. Now I’m taking that regaling online. I’m not going to do a full summary of it because I think a lot of its ideas have entered the cultural consciousness; it’s well known that women continue to do the majority of work at home and have less time for leisure than men and this popular comic about mental load summarizes that section of the book better than I ever could.

But even still, there’s lots of interesting anecdotes and figures to share.

(A quick note: This book focused on heterosexual couples because gay couples are much better at sharing the second shift. I’m going to use gendered language for partners that assumes heterosexual relationships throughout this post because this book talked about a problem of heterosexual relationships; specifically, it talked about a problem with how men act in heterosexual relationships.)

“Transitional” men are worse than traditional men

Professor Hochschild identifies three types of men. There are the traditional men, who believe in traditional gender roles and separate spheres for the sexes. These are the men who’d prefer to earn the money while their wives keep the house. Then there are the egalitarian men – the men who believe that men and women are equal and try (with varying amounts of success) to transfer this political principle to their personal relationships.

Then there are the transitional men. These men aren’t against women having careers, per se (like traditional men might be). Transitional man accept that women can be part of the workforce and often welcome the extra paycheque. Unfortunately, transitional men haven’t bought all the way into equality. They also believe that women should be in charge and do most of the work at home.

Transitional men were the worst sharers of chores. Seventy percent of egalitarian men shared the chores entirely. The rest did between 30% and 45% of them, an amount Professor Hochschild labelled “moderate” (none did less than 30% of the chores, labelled as “little”). Of traditional men, 22% shared entirely and 33% did little (with the balance doing a moderate amount). The transitionals? 3% shared, 10% did a moderate amount and a full 87% did little.

This seems to be because transitional men expect women to deal with a lack of time by cutting back at work. The transitional men profiled in the book tended to be emotionally supportive of the women in their lives who were caught between work and home, but most refused to support their partners by actually helping out more.

People talk about women wanting to “have it all”, with a career and motherhood. But if anyone should be accused of wanting to “have it all”, it’s these men. They wanted the extra spending money their wife brought in with her job, but weren’t prepared to support her in the chores at home. To these men, their wife being able to work was contingent on her first completing her “more important” duties in the home.

Working more can be a way to escape chores

Some couples try and have the same amount of leisure time, rather than do the same amount of chores. This allows them to balance things out if one partner works more. It also can set up bad incentives. Some of the men in this book used their long hours (and high salaries) as an excuse not to do chores at home.

When Prof. Hochschild looked at these men more closely, she discovered that they enjoyed their jobs much more than they enjoyed doing chores. It wasn’t that the jobs didn’t leave them drained – they certainly weren’t faking their need to flop down in front of the TV at the end of a day – but despite that, these men wouldn’t have chosen helping out with chores over being drained. They found work fulfilling, while chores were just a boring obligation.

The negative impacts of overtime work seem to pop up in a few studies. There’s no good reason (beyond signalling your dedication to your job) to work more than forty hours a week long-term. You simply can’t get anything more done. It’s better for your relationship (and your health!) to take some of the extra overtime you might do and spend it at home helping with chores.

Not everyone has the freedom to bring this up at work and not everyone enjoys their work. You might be stuck in a job you don’t like, a job that demands a lot of overtime to prove that you’re serious and this overtime might take a toll on you (like studies suggest it does). If you leaving that job isn’t feasible, you don’t like your job, and your partner works fewer hours or enjoys their job more, then it probably is fair for your partner to take on more of the housework. In all other cases, you probably shouldn’t use working longer hours as an excuse to do less of the housework, at least not if equality is important in your partnership.

This also applies to personal projects, even if they might increase your employability, bring in a bit of extra cash, or bring value to your community. If you’re an aspiring author and spend an hour writing each night, this shouldn’t entitle you to any lesser share of the chores. If you’re studying a subject you enjoy, you shouldn’t use night class as an excuse to shirk housework. And volunteering, while laudable, is an activity that you do. It shouldn’t entitle you to a pass on chores.

Family Myths

The most distressing tale (to me) in the whole book was the story of Nancy and Evan Holt. Nancy was an ardent feminist and egalitarian, while Evan was a transitional. Evan was happy that Nancy liked her job, but thought that the home should be primarily her responsibility. Nancy wanted Evan to share the second shift.

They clashed over this mismatch for years. Here’s what happened when Nancy tried to get Evan to share the cooking:

Nancy said the first week of the new plan went as follows. On Monday, she cooked. For Tuesday, Evan planned a meal that required shopping for a few ingredients, but on his way home he forgot to shop for them. He came home, saw nothing he could use in the refrigerator or in the cupboard, and suggested to Nancy that they go out for Chinese food. On Wednesday, Nancy cooked. On Thursday morning, Nancy reminded Evan, “Tonight it’s your turn.” That night Evan fixed hamburgers and french fries and Nancy was quick to praise him. On Friday, Nancy cooked. On Saturday, Evan forgot again.

As this pattern continued, Nancy’s reminders became sharper. The sharper they became, the more actively Evan forgot—perhaps anticipating even sharper reprimands if he resisted more directly. This cycle of passive refusal followed by disappointment and anger gradually tightened, and before long the struggle had spread to the task of doing the laundry.

Evan kept up his passive resistance for years and eventually Nancy cut back her hours at work in order to have more time for the second shift. But this was never framed as a capitulation. Instead, it coincided with the family myth that they were sharing the chores.

How? Well, they’d ‘split the house in half’. Nancy took the upstairs (cooking, cleaning, the majority of childcare) and Evan took the downstairs (fixing the car, dealing with the yard, and maintaining the house). For all that this apparently represented an even split, it wasn’t. Not only did Evan spend less time doing chores than Nancy, the chores he did gave him more freedom. It’s much easier to put off mowing the yard or some bit of home maintenance than it is to put off picking up your kid from daycare or cooking a meal.

The myth of the work being split in half allowed Nancy to feel like she hadn’t capitulated on her feminist principles, even though she had. From a certain point of view, the family myth was a useful fiction – it probably saved Nancy and Evan’s marriage. But it opened my eyes to the very real danger of allowing a convenient myth to become an unquestioned truth. It reminded me to be careful of any convenient myths and to favour data (e.g. directly comparing how much time my partner and I spend doing chores) over stories when deciding if things are fair.

Passive avoidance and making do with less

Another tactic favoured by men like Evan Holt who have little interest in helping with the second shift requires a combination of passive avoidance and making do with less. We saw the first half of this above. It was the strategy Evan used to get out of cooking. By forgetting the ingredients, he got out of the chore.

Passive avoidance allows for lazy partners to avoid chores they don’t want to do without having to have a conversation about why they’re avoiding them or if it is fair for them to. It was much easier for Evan to be berated for forgetting (a common human frailty) than for not wanting to split chores fairly, which Nancy might have taken (correctly?) to imply something about how much Evan cared about her.

On its own, this was a moderately effective way of getting out of work. To be truly effective, it had to be paired with making do with less. In the book, men who wanted their wives to do more of the cleaning claimed that their wife wanted things too clean; if it was just them, they’d clean much less often. Men who wanted to get out of cooking claimed that takeout was good enough for them. Men who were too lazy to help their wives shop for furniture claimed that they were perfectly happy in a bare house. Men who wished to get out of childcare said they were coddling the child too much and that their children should learn to be more independent.

By passively avoiding chores and then loudly claiming that the whole chore was unnecessary, men made their wives feel like asking for their help was an unreasonable imposition.

In The Second Shift, this was a highly gendered interaction. There were no women claiming that their husbands’ standards of cleanliness were too exacting. And while there’s no reason that this has to always be gendered, I suspect that as long as women are raised with more knowledge of chores (and expectations that they will be the ones to do them), this trend will continue.

The thing I find particularly unfortunate about this tactic is that it sets up a race to the bottom. Having the chores go to whomever cares the most sets up a terrible system of competitive insouciance.

While I acknowledge that it certainly is possible for partners to have very real differences in their desired level of cleanliness or in their desired calibre of meal preparation, I think it makes sense to have a strong habit of discounting those, so as to ensure a good incentive structure. As long as each partner has even one thing they care about more than the other, it should be possible for them to cultivate empathy and avoid the insidious temptation to put off chores by making do with less.

Not all chores are created equal

Even when men were splitting the chores evenly, this didn’t always translate to less work for their partners. The illustrative example here was Greg and Carol Alston. Both spent about the same amount of time working on tasks around the house, but this was driven in part by Greg taking on a variety of home improvement tasks.

Had Greg not done those, the family’s daily situation would have been the exact same. That’s not to say that this work at home wasn’t benefiting the family. It was increasing the resale value of their house and making their long-held dream of a move to the mountains and part-time work that much closer to fruition.

The Second Shift opened my eyes to the reality that some chores must get done in a household and it’s these chores on which I now want to judge sharing the second shift. It’s only these disruptive daily chores that can’t be set aside for something more important.

If Greg was exhausted, or sick, he could easily work less on the kitchen cabinets and make it up when he felt better. Carol had no such luck with her chores. Their daughter had to get fed and bathed regardless of how Carol felt.

Greg somewhat redeemed this imbalance by being entirely willing to help out with the daily chores when Carol needed him. If she was sick, he undoubtedly would have stepped in to help. This still left the burden of managing those daily chores and making sure they got done to Carol, but it offered her some buffer.

What chores are daily necessities will probably vary from couple to couple. If you and your partner are habitually neat but bad at cooking, you might decide that it is important that the house is tidied up daily, but you won’t mind if meals come from takeout.

In discussions with your partner about the second shift, it seems especially worthwhile to determine which chores you and your partner consider absolutely mandatory and ensure that in addition to balancing chores in general, you are approximately balanced here. Otherwise, the chores you do might not be lightening the load on your partner at all.

Gratitude

Despite that fact that Greg’s carpentry projects didn’t really reduce the burden on her, Carol was happy that he was doing them. For one, Greg treated her as someone with important opinions. He may have planned the projects, but he actively sought out and valued her input. In addition, by doing this, Greg was helping make one of Carol’s lifelong dreams a reality. Carol was grateful for the work that Greg was doing around the house.

Reading The Second Shift, it struck me how gratitude was the most important factor in how couples felt about how they split the chores. When one partner expected gratitude, but didn’t receive it, they felt a lot of resentment towards the other. Conversely, relationships were strengthened when one of the partners felt grateful for the things the other did by default.

This showed up in surprising places. When Nina Tanagawa started making more money than her husband Peter, he expected her to grateful that he was willing to accept it. On the other hand, when Ann Myerson started earning more than her husband Robert, he was ecstatic. He’s quoted as saying “[w]hen my wife started to earn more than I did, I thought I’d struck gold.” When furniture arrived, he was the one who waited for it, because it just made sense to him that the person making less money should take the time off work. His wife was reciprocally grateful that he wanted her to have a career and didn’t care if she made more than him. The existence of men like Peter made Ann grateful for Robert.

The worst situation was when one partner expected gratitude for something the other took for granted. When Jessica Stein cut back on work after the birth of her children, her husband Seth treated it like the natural order of the world. To Jessica, it stung. It wasn’t how she’d seen her life going. She’d thought that their careers would be treated as equally important. She expected gratitude (and perhaps equal sacrifices from Seth) in response to her sacrifice.

Seth’s “sacrifice” was working long hours for a large salary. But this wasn’t the sacrifice Jessica wanted of him. She wanted him to be present and helpful. Because of this mismatch, Jessica ended up withdrawing from her marriage and children. She spent the weekends in Seattle (she lived in the San Francisco bay area), with her old college friends. Professor Hochschild described the couple as “divorced in spirit”.

It’s all in the culture

So much of what drove gratitude was cultural. Nina felt grateful that her husband “tolerated” her higher salary because when she looked around at the other women she knew, she saw many of them married to men who wouldn’t have “tolerated” their wife making more than them.

Many of the men in Professor Hochschild’s study almost shared the second shift. They did something like 40% of the tasks around the home and with the kids. Interestingly, the wives of these men often felt like they shared (even though the men were likely to say that their wives did more). This became a sort of family myth of its own, that these men entirely shared, instead of almost entirely shared. Professor Hochschild suggests that this myth arose because when compared to other husbands, these men did so much more.

Who won conflicts about the second shift was often determined by the broader patterns of culture as well. If a husband did much more housework than the average (or was more willing to “tolerate” his wife working), then his wife was much less likely to be successful in causing him to contribute more. When compared against the reference class of “society”, many men did quite well, even though they were objectively lazy when compared to their wife.

This is a pattern I’ve observed in many relationship negotiations (both in my own life and in stories told by friends). It’s really hard to get the partner who is more willing to leave the relationship to do something they don’t want to do. In relationships that aren’t abusive or manipulative, people only do the things they freely choose. They obviously won’t freely choose to do anything that they like less than breaking up. But the very fact that breaking up will hurt them less than their partner makes it very hard for their partner to feel like they can push for changes.

In one of the two profiled couples who actually shared the second shift equally (Adrienne and Michael Sherman), their equality was brought about because Adrienne actually left Michael after his refusal to share the second shift and his insistence that his career come first. After two months, Michael called Adrienne and told her that he’d share. He loved her and didn’t feel like he could love anyone else as deeply as he loved her. She came back and they shared the housework and raising the kids. Michael surprised himself by how much he enjoyed it. He became the best father he knew and he took pride in this. But none of this would have been possible if Adrienne hadn’t been willing to leave.

While the division of the second shift is ostensibly an agreement among individuals, I don’t think the overarching problem is best addressed individually. As long as women feel like they’re getting a good deal when men almost do their fair share, many men won’t do any more. Policies – like extended, non-transferable parental leave after the birth of a child – that encourage men to spend time at home sharing the second shift are a necessary component of ending this gendered divide.

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Literature, Science

Book Review: The Singularity is Near

Posted on by Zach

I recently read The Singularity is Near as part of a book club and figured a few other people might benefit from hearing what I got out of it.

First – it was a useful book. I shed a lot of my skepticism of the singularity as I read it. My mindset has shifted from “a lot of this seems impossible” to “some of this seems impossible, but a lot of it is just incredibly hard engineering”. But that’s because I stuck with it – something that probably wouldn’t have happened without the structure of a book club.

I’m not sure Kurzweil is actually the right author for this message. Accelerando (by Charles Stross) covered much of the same material as Singularity, while being incredibly engaging. Kurzweil’s writing is technically fine – he can string a sentence together and he’s clear – but incredibly repetitious. If you read the introduction, the introduction of each chapter, all of Chapter 4 (in my opinion, the only consistently good part of the book proper), and his included responses to critics (the only other interesting part of the whole tome) you’ll get all the worthwhile content, while saving yourself a good ten hours of hearing the same thing over and over and over again. Control-C/Control-V may have been a cheap way for Kurzweil to pad his word count, but it’s expensive to the reader.

I have three other worries about Kurzweil as a futurist. One deals with his understanding of some of the more technical aspects of what he’s talking about, especially physics. Here’s a verbatim quote from Singularity about nuclear weapons:

Alfred Nobel discovered dynamite by probing chemical interactions of molecules. The atomic bomb, which is tens of thousands of times more powerful than dynamite, is based on nuclear interactions involving large atoms, which are much smaller scales of matter than large molecules. The hydrogen bomb, which is thousands of times more powerful than an atomic bomb, is based on interactions involving an even smaller scale: small atoms. Although this insight does not necessarily imply the existence of yet more powerful destructive chain reactions by manipulating subatomic particles, it does make the conjecture [that we can make more powerful weapons using sub-atomics physics] plausible.

This is false on several levels. First, uranium and plutonium (the fissile isotopes used in atomic bombs) are both more massive (in the sense that they contain more matter) than the nitroglycerine in dynamite. Even if fissile isotopes are smaller in one dimension, they are on the same scale as the molecules that make up high explosives. Second, the larger energy output from hydrogen bombs has nothing to do with the relative size of hydrogen vs. uranium. Long time readers will know that the majority of the destructive output of a hydrogen bomb actually comes from fission of the uranium outer shell. Hydrogen bombs (more accurately thermonuclear weapons) derive their immense power from a complicated multi-step process that liberates a lot of energy from the nuclei of atoms.

Kurzweil falling for this plausible (but entirely incorrect) explanation doesn’t speak well of his ability to correctly pick apart the plausible and true from the plausible and false in fields he is unfamiliar with. But it’s this very picking apart that is so critical for someone who wants to undertake such a general survey of science.

My second qualm emerges when Kurzweil talks about AI safety. Or rather, it arises from the lack of any substantive discussion of AI safety in a book about the singularity. As near as I can tell, Kurzweil believes that AI will emerge naturally from attempts to functionally reverse engineer the human brain. Kurzweil believes that because this AI will be essentially human, there will be no problems with value alignment.

This seems very different from the Bostromian paradigm of dangerously misaligned AI: AI with ostensibly benign goals that turn out to be inimical to human life when taken to their logical conclusion. The most common example I’ve heard for this paradigm is an industrial AI tasked with maximizing paper clip production that tiles the entire solar system with paper clips.

Kurzweil is so convinced that the first AI will be based on reverse engineering the brain that he doesn’t adequately grapple with the orthogonality thesis: the observation that intelligence and comprehensible (to humans) goals don’t need to be correlated. I see no reason to believe Kurzweil that the first super-intelligence will be based off a human. I think to believe that it would be based on a human, you’d have to assume that various university research projects will beat Google and Facebook (who aren’t trying to recreate functional human brains in silica) in the race to develop a general AI. I think that is somewhat unrealistic, especially if there are paths to general intelligence that look quite different from our brains.

Finally, I’m unhappy with how Kurzweil’s predictions are sprinkled throughout the book, vague, and don’t include confidence intervals. The only clear prediction I was able to find was Kurzweil’s infamously false assertion that by ~2010, our computers would be split up and worn with our clothing.

It would be much easier to assess Kurzweil’s accuracy as a predictor if he listed all of his predictions together in a single section, applied to them clear target dates (e.g. less vague than: “in the late 2020s”), and gave his credence (as it stands, it is hard to distinguish between things Kurzweil believes are very likely and things he views as only somewhat likely). Currently any attempts to assess Kurzweil’s accuracy are very sensitive to what you choose to view as “a prediction” and how you interpret his timing. More clarity would make this unambiguous.

Outside of Kurzweil’s personal suitability as an author and advocate (and his sagacity), I have one beef with singulatarian thought in general. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the silicon paradigm of computing will soon come to the end of its exponential growth. Switching to something like indium gallium arsenide and moving key processes to more optimized chips will buy a bit more time, but doesn’t represent a fundamental paradigm shift of the sort that gets us around the tunneling problem.

Furthermore, we’ve already began to bump up against the limit on clock speed in silicon; we can’t really run silicon chips at higher clock rates without melting them. This is unfortunate, because speed ups in clock time are much nicer than increased parallelism. Almost all programs benefit from quicker processing, while only certain programs benefit from increased parallelism. This isn’t an insurmountable obstacle when it comes to things like artificial intelligence (the human brain has a very slow clock speed and massive parallelism and it’s obviously good enough to get lots done), but it does mean that some things that Kurzweil were counting on to get quicker and quicker have stalled out (the book was written just as the Dennard Scaling began to break down).

All this means that the exponential growth that is supposed to drive the singularity is about to fizzle out… maybe. Kurzweil is convinced that the slowdown in silicon will necessarily lead to a paradigm shift to something else. But I’m not sure what it will be. He talks a bit about graphene, but when I was doing my degree in nanotechnology engineering, the joke among the professors was that graphene could do anything… except make it out of the lab.

Kurzweil has an almost religious faith that there will be another paradigm shift, keeping his exponential trend going strong. And I want to be really clear that I’m not saying there won’t be. I’m just saying there might not be. There is no law of the universe that says that we have to have convenient paradigm shifts. We could get stuck with linear (or even logarithmic) incremental improvements for years, decades, or even centuries before we resume exponential growth in computing power.

It does seem like ardent belief in the singularity might attract more religiously minded atheists. Kurzweil himself believes that it is our natural destiny to turn the whole universe into computational substrate. Identifying god with the most holy and perfect (in fine medieval tradition; there’s something reminiscent of Anselm in Kurzweil’s arguments), Kurzweil believes that once every atom in the universe sings with computation, we will have created god.

I don’t believe that humanity has any grand destiny, or that the arc of history bends towards anything at all in particular. And I by no means believe that the singularity is assured, technologically or socially. But it is a beautiful vision. Human flourishing, out to the very edges of the cosmos…

Yeah, I want that too. I’m a religiously minded atheist, after all.

In both disposition and beliefs, I’m far closer to Kurzweil than his many detractors. I think “degrowth” is an insane policy that if followed, would create scores of populist demagogues. I think that the Chinese room argument is good only for identifying people who don’t think systemically. I’m also more or less in agreement that government regulations won’t be able to stop a singularity (if one is going to occur because of continuing smooth acceleration in the price performance of information technology; regulation could catch up if a slowdown between paradigm shifts gives it enough time).

I think the singularity very well might happen. And at the end of the day, the only real difference between me and Kurzweil is that “might”.

Also: I repeat myself less.

Politics

Westminster is bestminster

Posted on by Zach

[6-minute read]

I’ve been ranting to random people all week about how much I love the Westminster System of parliamentary government (most notably used in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK) and figured it was about time to write my rant down for broader consumption.

Here’s three reasons why the Westminster System is so much better than the abominable hodgepodge Americans call a government and all the other dysfunctional presidential republics the world over.

1. The head of state and head of government are separate

And more importantly, the head of state is a figurehead.

The president is an odd dual-role, both head of government (and therefore responsible for running the executive branch and implementing the policies of the government) and head of state (the face of the nation at home and abroad; the person who is supposed to serve as a symbol of national unity and moral authority). In Westminster democracies, these roles are split up. The Prime Minister serves as head of government and directs the executive branch, while the Queen (or her representative) serves as head of state [1]. Insofar as the government is personified in anyone, it is personified in a non-partisan person with a circumscribed role.

This is an excellent protection against populism. There is no one person who can gather the mob to them and offer the solutions to all problems, because the office of the head of state is explicitly anti-populist [2]. In Westminster governments, any attempt at crude populism on the part of the prime minister can be countered by messages of national unity from the head of state [3].

It’s also much easier to remove the head of government in the Westminster system. Unlike the president, the prime minister serves only while they have the confidence of parliament and their party. An unpopular prime minister can be easily replaced, as Australia seems happy to demonstrate over and over. A figure like Trump could not be prime minister if their parliamentarians did not like them.

This feature is at risk from open nominating contests and especially rules that don’t allow MPs to pick the interim leader during a leadership race. In this regard, Australia is doing a much better job at exemplifying the virtues of the Westminster system than Canada or the UK (where Corbyn’s vote share is all the more surprising for how much internal strife his election caused) [4].

2. Confidence

To the Commonwealth, one of the most confusing features of American democracy is its (semi-)regular government shut downs, like the one Trump had planned for September [5]. On the other side, Americans are baffled at the seemingly random elections that Commonwealth countries have.

Her Majesty’s Prime Minister governs only so long as they have the confidence of the house. A government is only sworn in after they can prove they have confidence (via a vote of all newly elected and returning MPs). When no party has an absolute majority, things can get tense – or can go right back to the polls. We’ve observed two tense confidence votes this year, one in BC, the other in the UK.

In both these cases, no party had a clear majority of seats in the house (in Canada, we call this a minority government). In both BC and the UK, confidence was secured when a large party enlisted the help of a smaller party to provide “confidence and supply”. In this situation, the small party will vote with the government on budgets and other confidence motions, but is otherwise free to vote however they want.

The first vote of confidence isn’t the only one a government is likely to face. If the opposition thinks the government is doing a poor job, they can launch a vote of no confidence. If the motion is passed by parliament, it is dissolved for an election.

But many bills are actually confidence motions in disguise. Budgets are the “supply” side of “confidence and supply”. Losing a budget vote – sometimes archaically called “failing to secure supply” – results in parliament being dissolved for an election. This is how Ontario’s last election was called. The governing party put forward a budget they were prepared to campaign on and the opposition voted it down.

This feature prevents government shutdowns. If the government can’t agree on a budget, it has to go to the people. If time is of the essence, the Queen or her representative may ask the party that torpedoed the budget to pass a non-partisan continuing funding resolution, good until just after the election to ensure the government continues to function (as happened in Australia in 1975).

By convention, votes on major legislative promises are also motions of confidence. This helps ensure that the priorities laid out during an election campaign don’t get dropped. In a minority government situation, the opposition must decide whether it is worth another election before vetoing any of the government’s key legislative proposals. Because of this, Commonwealth governments can be surprisingly functional even without a legislative majority.

Add all of this together and you get very accountable parties. Try and enact unpopular legislation with anything less than a majority government and you’ll probably find yourself shortly facing voters. On the flip side, obstruct popular legislation and you’ll also find yourself facing voters. Imagine how the last bit of Obama’s term would have been different if the GOP had to fight an election because of the government shutdown.

3. The upper house is totally different

Many Westminster countries have bicameral legislatures, with two chambers making up parliament (New Zealand is the notable exception here). In most Westminster system countries with two chambers, the relationship between the houses is different than that in America.

The two American chambers are essentially co-equal (although the senate gets to approve treaties and budgets must originate in the house). This is not so in the Westminster system. While both chambers have equal powers in many on paper (except that money bills must often originate in the lower chamber), in practice they are very different.

By convention (and occasionally legislation) the upper chamber has its power constrained. The actual restrictions vary from country to country, but in general they forbid rejecting bills for purely partisan reasons or they prevent the upper house from messing with the budget.

The goal of the upper house in the Westminster system is to take a longer view of legislation and protect the nation from short-sighted thinking. This role is more consultative than legislative; it’s not uncommon to see a bill vetoed once, then returned to the upper chamber and assented to (sometimes with token changes, sometimes even with no changes). The upper house isn’t there to ignore the will of the people (as embodied by the lower house), just to remind them to occasionally look longer term.

This sort of system helps prevent legislate gridlock. Since the upper house tends to serve longer terms (in Canada, senators are appointed for life, for example), there is often a different majority in the upper and lower chambers. If the upper chamber was free to veto anything they didn’t like (even if the reasons were purely partisan) then nothing would ever get done.

Taken together, these features of the Westminster system prevent legislative gridlock and produce legitimate outputs of the political process. This obviates populist “I’ll fix everything myself” leaders like Trump, who seem to be an almost inevitable outcome in a perpetually gridlocked and unnavigable system (i.e. the American government).

Insofar as the Westminster system has problems, they are mostly problems of implementation and several Westminster countries have demonstrated that fundamental reform of the system is possible within the system itself. New Zealand abolished the upper house of their parliament when it proved useless. Australia switched to an elected upper house and has come up with a set of constitutional rules that prevent this from causing gridlock (here I’m thinking of the double dissolution election and joint session permitted by Australian law in response to repeated legislative failures).

Among certain people in Canada, electoral and senate reform have become contentious topics. It’s my (unpopular in millennial circles) opinion that Canada has no need of electoral reform. Get a few beers in most proponents of electoral reform and you’ll quickly find that preventing all future Conservative majorities is a much more important goal for them than any abstract concept of “fairness”. I’m not of the opinion that we should change our electoral system just because a party we didn’t like won a majority government once in the last eight elections (or three times in the past ten elections and past fifteen elections).

Senate reform may have already been accomplished, with Prime Minister Trudeau’s move to appoint only non-partisan senators and dissolve the Liberal caucus in the senate. Time will tell if this new system survives his tenure as prime minister.

In one of the articles I linked above, Prof. Joseph Heath compares the utter futility Americans feel about changing their electoral system with the indifference most Canadians feel about changing theirs. In Canada, many proponents of electoral reform specifically wanted to avoid a plebiscite, because they understand that there currently exists no legitimacy crisis sufficient to overcome the status quo bias most people feel. Reform in Canada is certainly possible, but first the system needs to be broken. Right now, the Westminster system is working admirably.

Footnotes

[1] Israel took many cues from Westminster governments. Its president is non-partisan and ceremonial. If Canada was every forced to give up the monarchy, I’d find this sort of presidential system acceptable. ^

[2] It’s hard to tell which is less populist; the oldest representative of one of the few remaining aristocracies, or (like in Israel or the governor-generals of the former colonies), exceptional citizens chosen for their reliability and loyalty to the current political order. ^

[3] See Governor General David Johnston’s criticism of some of Steven Harper’s campaign rhetoric. ^

[4] I’ve of the opinion that Corbyn’s “popularity” is really indicative of PM Teresa May’s unpopularity bolstered by his ability to barely surpass incredibly low expectations. ^

[5] Since rescheduled to December, in light of Hurricane Harvey. ^

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