What Institutions Should Look Like

(initially April 2022; revised August 2023) I’m planning for this to be a running list of prescriptions about what sort of democratic institutions are optimal, hopefully adding citations as I go through the literature, and hopefully keeping a record of where I’ve changed my mind and why. 1. Legislative supremacy. Growing up in the American education …

Toronto Transit in the Future (Redux)

I made a better version of this map from last year of Toronto transit projects under construction. Because I find that black-based maps are too intense, I attempted an alternate colour scheme with a white background, using a font similar to the TTC station sign font for a bit of character. I'm not completely satisfied …

Depicting Three-Way Elections

https://kojisposts.shinyapps.io/three-way-elections/ App code here: https://github.com/bobidou23/elections/blob/master/three-way-elections/app.R Made a thing. Was intended to be about pre-election polling, but couldn't get it done before the election (for reasons I don't regret — I was quite invested this election, and it was better to spend every moment leading up to it knocking on doors). It's reached the minimum acceptable …

Toronto Transit in the Future

I posted an updated version of this in April 2023. Spurred by discussion online about the Eglinton East LRT plans, and how that shapes what the Toronto transit network will look like in 2035, I made a map that includes all the various projects in the near GTA. Unlike the Montreal future map, this one …

A different way of depicting Canadian elections

So Canadian election results are difficult to depict because of how unevenly the population is distributed across the territory. Maps mean that larger ridings are overemphasized, while pure cartograms make the geography unrecognizable. Courtesy of Wikipedia. Here I try something in between. It might be the best of both worlds, it might be the worst …

Are Multi-Party Systems Really “Unstable”?

Github code here (dataset here) Are multi-party proportional systems really less "stable" than single-party majority systems? This chart includes: 1) Government formation periods after elections and 2) Coalition crises where the government loses its majority, sometimes leading to an early election. In other words, this tries to measure the additional days without government clarity caused …

Extrapolating to 100 Million Canadians

Canada is presently undergoing the extraordinary process of adding 1% of its population every year through immigration. I wondered what this might lead to over the coming century, so I took the Census figures since 1991, took the average 5-year growth rate since then, and extrapolated it forward. The Prairies seem to have really taken …

What Japan ought to do in the coming decades

The thing about Japanese party competition is that only a handful of binary questions are coded as ideological - questions like nuclear power, Article 9, and military funding separate the Left from everyone else, while questions of social equality and wartime revisionism separate the nationalist Right (a subset of the LDP) from everyone else. I’m …

some folklore/evermore graphics

Ah, the albums that turned me off of capital letters. An updated visualization of key signatures in Taylor's albums (2018 version here). I've moved from giving minor keys their own half of the circle, to giving them different-coloured segments within the bars, mostly because some songs are difficult to classify either way. The last row …

“MMT” stumbles upon one point that’s valid (in very specific circumstances)

The problem with "MMT" is that their proponents appear as an "intellectual dark web" of economics, whose primarily purpose is to attack proper economists rather than honestly fleshing out any sort of consistent economic model on their own. And their contrarianism-first worldview ends up often producing ideas that are plainly wrong. You will come across …