People Aren't Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish?
WhiteWeasel
Join Date: 2012-11-25 Member: 173197Members
Join Date: 2012-11-25 Member: 173197Members
Democracy is a great thing, assuming people can vote for the right guy.
Podcast link (the brunt of this idea)
Article link
Now forgive me for this being short, I'm poor at typing so I can't make the rock-solid 5 paragraph essay replies I see everywhere on this forum. I know I should be doing my own arguments instead of using someone elses', but i'm relatively new to this.
Podcast link (the brunt of this idea)
Article link
Now forgive me for this being short, I'm poor at typing so I can't make the rock-solid 5 paragraph essay replies I see everywhere on this forum. I know I should be doing my own arguments instead of using someone elses', but i'm relatively new to this.
Comments
However, if we had a surefire method of always picking the best leaders, then even dictatorships or oligarchies would work well.
Same goes for monarchies, royals for the most part got a lifelong education into how to run things. And lets face it, dictators didnt get "the job" becouse of thier looks. The hard part is the sort the good from the bad, and people dosnt just give up power.
Here's a book for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter
There are many many institutions that are well-run, and they are not democracies.
It might seem that such an occurrence is so unlikely as to never happen. But consider this: medical technology is improving all the time, and more and more people with disabilities/disorders and such who in past centuries would have died young are now living "normal" lives.
Now I'm all for helping people if we're able to, and mean no disrespect of course. But some of these individuals may not be entirely capable of voting for a politician or party that best suits their needs. And as medical technology continues to improve, the number of people with disabilities/disorders in our population also increases.
Two things that could help with this situation are:
1) Simple Test of Basic Competence/Intelligence
Nothing too hard, just a simple test that you're required to pass to gain eligibility to vote. Should be easy enough as to only impede the worst cases.
2) Unbiased Authority to Police Politicians
This is more important. An independent, unbiased group which serves to make sure politicians do not tell lies, half-truths and such. Anyone who seeks to be a political leader should be forced to communicate in a clear, constructive manner. This includes limiting election campaigns or even abolishing them entirely, and having this neutral authority present the candidates and their policies to the populace. Slandering and "digging up dirt" on the opposition should be illegal.
TLDR: Someone needs to force politicians to act their age.
End of rant for now. I'll leave you all with this video of a day in the life of Australian politics...
That article is a bit iffy. It starts by making an unsupported statement that people are too dumb to decide who gets to lead them, then talks about a couple of (unpublished?) studies in which people were shown to be poor judges of their and other's abilities. This is a weak logical bridge to cross, since I believe most people vote based on a candidate's stance on one or more of the hot issues of the day, not on their perception of the candidate's leadership abilities.
Only a fool would argue that democracy is perfect. But it's superior to anything that has a realistic chance of working anytime soon. Fairly run, and backed with a fair constitution (with or without an explicit bill of rights,) it does a good job of keeping the nation more or less under the control of the people. A tyrant, even an ideal one, is not a good, steady-state solution unless they're immortal. Sooner or later they'll need to be replaced. How? Succession? How do you know that the tyrant's offspring will as well suited? Some kind of selection council? Who chooses them? Who holds them accountable? Who knows if they're corrupt?
--Scythe--
Of thunder and of lightning, sole property of Zeus.
Drawn by four fine horses, with brave, triumphant hand
He brandished in the heavens a brightly flaming brand.
In the market place at Elis he strutted through the crowd,
Showing off before the Greeks, vain, arrogant and proud,
And in his pompous progress he rashly laid a claim
To the honor and the glory due solely to God's name:
Mad fool, who did imagine that his mere bronze could fake
The thunder and the lightning that no mere man can make!
The vengeance of the deity was sure, and it came fast:
The thunderbolt that struck him was no puny, mortal blast.
You should have to pass psychometric and knowledge tests in order to vote.
Incompetent people vote in incompetent people.
-Churchill, Winston
Otherwisely said, it is the "less worse" system. But it still sucks (since morons in most countries are elected over and over again; resulting from poor education which won't change).
And I agree with a simple math test (i.e. 4 - (3 - 1) * 2); thought I don't believe we could call that "democracy" anymore, since less morons would vote. Kind-of makes me remember an old youtube video where a woman was calling Obama a communist, and when asked what a communist was by a news guy, she wouldn't answer and returned the question to the asker...
The other problem is what I think a subtle misunderstanding of terms. Democracy is a method of choosing, not a method of representing. We democratically select representatives to go to the government house and democratically select policies for us. There are several layers of indirection and abstraction here which are difficult to define and consequently result in the confusion we see in how our elected officials act.
Obviously, we can't bring every proposition before every citizen to bring a vote on it - how would you define who is or isn't effected by each piece of legislation? Water shortages in Nevada don't have anything to do with Floridians. As other's have said, this is precisely why the country was designed as a federation. The importance of the fall off of government power as scope of government increases is vital to liberty, and it's a point that we seem to have trouble with these days.
IMO big western democracies today (bar states like Island, maybe) are in fact plutocracies. Since people are predictable, he who pours most money into the election campaign wins and places his puppets wherever he likes. The puppeteer can then have custom laws, even a war or two on demand. The big plus for the puppeteer is that few people revolt, because the common man thinks it's his will the government carries out. It's a trick, like pickpockets use when few of them arrange a shocking scene and while the crowd watches, their accomplices go through the pockets.
If you have enough cheap consumer goods to shower the crowd with, you can do whatever you please and get away with it.
There is one recent Czech saying I really like: "If elections could change anything, they would have banned them long time ago."
Actually an old saying, and somewhat true, in that, many countries do ban elections, or criminalise opposition, because, they do in fact change things - sometimes even for the better.
Winston Churchill
Thanks for that video. I had a very tinted view of how China functioned. This TEDtalk seems to provide some counter-point that it very valuable.
Something I've been saying for years - game designers should be making constitutions and political systems. They understand the concepts better than most regarding balance and iterative design. Studying game-systems and game theory is really valuable when evaluating how to organize human beings effectively while retaining the ability to innovate/play.
And we know how that worked out for them in the end.
Which is why being a military-industrial complex is a sound choice, especially this far up the exponential technology curve.
Money gets you power(political or otherwise) and power gets you money. It's a positive feedback cycle that the world is just only now beginning to truly appreciate.
And is also susceptible to:
I don't think democracy is a terrible system, but it's rather difficult to come up with a new system that works really well. Given that humans are not perfect, and societies and their needs change over time, I don't think there ever will be a single "perfect" system that works for everything.
As Abathur from starcraft said, perfection is a goal the always changes. Can chase, but cannot catch.
You know guys, there is actual research into institutions. Have you read a textbook on public choice? You might order that book, read a few pages, think "I ought to get paid for this!" and then you realize what is the problem with democracy. Tada!
The problem with democracy is not that people are not smart enough. The problem is bad incentives. Humans coordinate much better in other institutions, such as companies. The problem in democracy is the moral hazard. The people who make decisions (politicians, voters etc.) are not the people who pay the costs.
Democracy makes a good job of aggregating values but bad job of aggregating beliefs. I don't think in the end a group of citizens, especially of same culture, have very different values. They might all agree that unemployment is bad, but some of the people have wrong beliefs how to fix it. Probably those who have big mouth, big ideological loyalties or didn't do their homework.
The book that I mentioned earlier, "Myth of the Rational Voter", is a good political statement about some problems in democracy. The knowledge how to fix probably most of our problems in democracy exists, it is just not used. It is an information aggregation problem.
When I finished high school, I could do things like Lorentz transformation but didn't understand these important concepts myself either. This "economical illeteracy" really shows. People who are smart enough to understand differential equations make economic mistakes of level of "world is flat".
I have to say though, I think you might be missing a small point about partisanship and whether or not people can be made to do anything in the sense that we mean the expression. What I mean is that you can force people to do anything you want them to for a finite amount of time, but can you really change them for all time?
I think this assumption that you can fundamentally change people without persuasion manifests itself in statements that we all make from time to time, like yours here:
Are you not signaling loyalty to your own interpretation of the world by making this statement? When a libertarian (classical liberal) such as me reads this, we do reject it, but not because we have to stand beside some public choice we made as a matter of feudal honor. We reject it because the methods it suggests are contrary to what we believe will work. Specifically, we believe that there is already a system to ultimately decide fitness of ideas, policies and technologies – natural selection. The key point is that we reject when a government can forcibly dictate only one or one set of such methods; this we believe is an attempt to circumvent nature and will ultimately fail catastrophically.
The subtle point I referred to earlier is that partisanship is unavoidable and in fact it is necessary. A big part of the strife in the world is a popular idea that somehow it’s morally wrong to hold different core beliefs. That is simply impossible because people will always disagree and some will disagree very much. The contradiction in the national psyche forms a kind of psychosis.
As I may have badly tried to say before, the problem with democracy in my opinion is rather a misunderstanding of its definition between coalitions. I suppose the most standard definition is that of a true democracy – one citizen, one vote on everything. We often attempt to apply this to the United States or other democracies but that is a big mistake. The United States is not a true democracy. If it were, there would not be two chambers of congress, the executive branch, and a (supposedly) impartial judicial branch.
The method of equal voting rights provided by democracy is a fair and valid way to decide something, and you can even change the form of a vote! What if a vote was a dollar spent instead of a vote cast? Well obviously more money equals more votes, and this seems morally outrageous. I’d suggest though, that what’s more outrageous is how much less outrageous election fraud seems to be. But in the end, deciding is only a part of the problem of governing.
I recommend reading paper: Are disagreements honest?
I think it takes some time to get distance from any ideology, as it becomes a part of one's identity and there's a certain ego investment in it. It took me some time. And it has happend to me many times, and I'm using ideology as any certain pattern of thoughts shared by people without itself having to do anything with politics.
I would recommend reading David Friedman's essay capitalist trucks vs socialist trucks. Don't get me wrong. There're many things I do not like in the government, and I'm not here saying you necessarily need government the way nations do now. I think there are many ways to solve coordination problems, some of them include bigger or smaller institutions.
I recommend reading blog Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok which gathers political viewpoints across spectrum, and shows a different way to look at issues.
Still, I think the idea in libertarianism, which is decentralization of power is really important insight. We should try to keep the power on small enough size, that those units can then compete with each other. There're some things like climate change, antibiotic crisis and whatever we should fix on global scale, but almost none of these need huge federal-level governmental entities. I think libertarians are hard on the money on the subject of how much we (or anyone) can control the political process when we're talking about millions of people.
Also, aristocracy ftw.
My point here was that in capitalism most companies are run in centralized fashion like socialist states (there are exceptions to this rule you wouldn't even know how close), and yet they succeed. Rob was trying to say that centrally-planned things like government fail, but that's a simplification and not true. Governments fail a lot, and that is because coordination is generally very hard, and the more you have people the more problems you have, matter which system you use.
I think the big problem is that ideologies (both left and right) can use human emotions to persuade people to take stupid positions. All you need to do is show a huge smoking Fukushima, and it will buy you more votes than a million articles about energy economics will get you. People here in Finland were stockpiling on iodine after Fukushima.
There're many institutional problems in democracy, but fixing them is as easy as curing cancer. Even if you could persuade a small group of thinkers that such and such problem is the main problem in democracy, how would you fix it? You have to market it to masses somehow..
The way I see, the problems around the world in democracy are fairly uniform and I'm skeptical of any of them surpassing each other by wide margin. You could take that as a doubling back of my own point. Fixing people is to some extent necessary to fixing democracy. The books like Wealth of Nations and say Why Nations Fail compete with each other on these ideas. However smaller changes like popularizing economics could lead people to be able to vote better. Also some strong institutional reforms could possibly have decent effects on policy quality. I don't think we should throw up air hands in air and say nothing can be done.
I just hope we have enough (small) democracies in world, that some of them come up with better ideas and people can move there or learn from them.
The key solution to any major upgrade to democracy should address one issue: what to do when the machine starts producing useful but unpopular policies? Aging demography wants freebies services in name of respecting the elderly, when they should have done more kids etc. Workers with wrong skills can be laid out en masse and won't have anything interesting to do for quite a while. Nobody wants nuclear energy in their backyard (I'm fine with that btw). List just goes on.