Dear all, Upon inheriting the Looking Glass from our predecessors, we identified a number of key issues. Firstly, there were simply not enough articles being published, due both to a lack of submissions from the school community and limited responsiveness from the previous Academic Team. Secondly, the Looking Glass had not been advertised or explained effectively enough to the wider school community. As a result, we plan to implement a more consistent and engaging stream of articles on the Looking Glass. As part of this initiative, we are looking to recruit a select group of keen writers from across the lower school who would be willing to produce one high-quality piece of writing, discussion, or media each month for publication on the Looking Glass. We believe this will be hugely beneficial both to the school community, which will gain access to a wider range of opinions and viewpoints, and to prospective writers, who will be able to reference their experience contributing to the Look...
Note: The following article was written by Zain Khwaja L6B (20khwajaz@students.watfordboys.org) If voters were rational, turnout would be closer to 0. This reflects the view of Anthony Downs, an American economist, who argued that rational individuals vote only when the expected personal benefit outweighs the costs of participation, and when their individual ballot could realistically alter the outcome. Downs proposed the “calculus of voting” in 1957, a formula intended to quantify a personal assessment of the utility of voting: R = (P × B) – C Here, R is the reward from voting, P is the probability of being decisive, B is the benefit if one’s preferred candidate wins, and C is the cost of participation. Therefore, in elections with large turnouts, it is almost always irrational to vote from Downs’s point of view. This is because the probability of one’s vote being decisive is basically close to zero. If P ≈ 0 , the formula reduces to –C , meaning voting only really produces a cost...