Idiocracy in Action
Ideally, politics is about coming up with a set of understood compromises on issues trading off redistribution and efficiency. As most people have instincts on the long run effects of their favored policies but no definitive proof, people tend to be get very frustrated and emotional discussing these issues because we don't like arguing about things we believe but can't prove. I believe a smaller scale and scope of government would increase welfare, but alas my proof does not fit in a blog post (sort of like Fermat's last theorem).
National politics is about convincing the demographic that votes for American Idol to agree with you. When I used to teach at Northwestern University I occasionally asked what students thought about popular topics like 'free trade' or 'market efficiency'. Their opinions were so poorly articulated and founded, I stopped doing that. It did not help to have people riff on subjects they really didn't understand, the errors were so numerous and fundamental it simply was a waste of time. I realized then that gaining their support would either rely on authority--believe me because I have these credentials--or slick salesmanship. Both methods are not good at converging upon truth. In the end I tried to explain some fundamental ideas showing why, given certain assumptions, one could think something was optimal, so the best case scenario was not definitive anyway.
In this environment it's sad that the great unwashed directly elect a person with the power to make decisions over whether we should spend another $800B, or choose judges for their biases (given smart lawyers, is not hard to do for almost any bias). This is not a wise way to make policy. Unfortunately, alternatives aren't obvious, and certainly not popular. For example, something akin to a literacy test would enhance our voting competence, but would statistically discriminate against certain groups, and I'm doubtful it would be more enlightened anyway. The old belief of J.S. Mill that if we merely educated everyone we would agree and choose wise policies is clearly wrong.
It's a paradox that pure democracy leads to more concentrated power, something known by Plato and the US founding fathers. As collectives get larger--the USA, Roman Republic, Galactic Senate--power gets more concentrated in the President or Emperor. I think this is because when a state is small, an aristocracy/oligarchy is concentrated enough to work, but it doesn't scale. At a certain point the aristocracy is fragmented but the titular head retains his power, which is then amplified by his new relative strength, making the legislative branch a veto at best, a patronage machine at worst. The House and Senate remain more powerful than the President, but they seem to lose stature every decade.
But most importantly for this day, voting in big elections does not matter at all. Consider you live in Florida, which decides the presidential election. You cast the deciding vote, your candidate winning by 1 vote. In such a case, the stakes are so high that very good lawyers would be called in, and the better or more powerful lawyers would find the definition of what constitutes a legitimate vote such that your decisive vote would be irrelevant. That is, lawyers can use one of several metrics of voting, some of which will show their candidate winning, some losing, for any close election (just like polls generate different results depending on demographics). That's what happened in Minnesota, where the Republican was winning the senate race by 700 hundred votes, but the much stronger Democratic party in this state had a much more vigorous counsel helping them 'recount' the votes, and eventually they counted more for their Democrat. In the improbable case your vote matters, it will be the lawyers and not an individual vote that makes the difference. So no vote matters. QED.
National politics is about convincing the demographic that votes for American Idol to agree with you. When I used to teach at Northwestern University I occasionally asked what students thought about popular topics like 'free trade' or 'market efficiency'. Their opinions were so poorly articulated and founded, I stopped doing that. It did not help to have people riff on subjects they really didn't understand, the errors were so numerous and fundamental it simply was a waste of time. I realized then that gaining their support would either rely on authority--believe me because I have these credentials--or slick salesmanship. Both methods are not good at converging upon truth. In the end I tried to explain some fundamental ideas showing why, given certain assumptions, one could think something was optimal, so the best case scenario was not definitive anyway.
In this environment it's sad that the great unwashed directly elect a person with the power to make decisions over whether we should spend another $800B, or choose judges for their biases (given smart lawyers, is not hard to do for almost any bias). This is not a wise way to make policy. Unfortunately, alternatives aren't obvious, and certainly not popular. For example, something akin to a literacy test would enhance our voting competence, but would statistically discriminate against certain groups, and I'm doubtful it would be more enlightened anyway. The old belief of J.S. Mill that if we merely educated everyone we would agree and choose wise policies is clearly wrong.
It's a paradox that pure democracy leads to more concentrated power, something known by Plato and the US founding fathers. As collectives get larger--the USA, Roman Republic, Galactic Senate--power gets more concentrated in the President or Emperor. I think this is because when a state is small, an aristocracy/oligarchy is concentrated enough to work, but it doesn't scale. At a certain point the aristocracy is fragmented but the titular head retains his power, which is then amplified by his new relative strength, making the legislative branch a veto at best, a patronage machine at worst. The House and Senate remain more powerful than the President, but they seem to lose stature every decade.
But most importantly for this day, voting in big elections does not matter at all. Consider you live in Florida, which decides the presidential election. You cast the deciding vote, your candidate winning by 1 vote. In such a case, the stakes are so high that very good lawyers would be called in, and the better or more powerful lawyers would find the definition of what constitutes a legitimate vote such that your decisive vote would be irrelevant. That is, lawyers can use one of several metrics of voting, some of which will show their candidate winning, some losing, for any close election (just like polls generate different results depending on demographics). That's what happened in Minnesota, where the Republican was winning the senate race by 700 hundred votes, but the much stronger Democratic party in this state had a much more vigorous counsel helping them 'recount' the votes, and eventually they counted more for their Democrat. In the improbable case your vote matters, it will be the lawyers and not an individual vote that makes the difference. So no vote matters. QED.
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