Apparently we tend to confuse these two separate things, or assume some sort of correlation.
This might seem all a bit random but bear with me.
What do you think is the percentage of smart people in a given population?
Trying to come up with a definition for smartness or intelligence is not as easy of a task as it sounds. There are thousands of totally different I.Q. tests which are assumed to measure ability at a skillset and call it IQ.
Being well informed about a specific topic, however, is much easier to define and measure.
So what do you think is the percentage of people who are well versed in medical sciences or philosophy in a given population? The US's or Egypt's for example?
My conjecture says that it's not a majority.
This, in itself, is not so bad. But substitute economics or politics for medicine or philosophy and it becomes kind of dangerous.
Smart or not, you have to be well informed about a subject to be able to take sound decisions regarding matters of said subject. It took countless smart people thousands of years to build a foundation of science that got us to where we are today. You simply can not, no matter how smart you (think you) are, rebuild it all from scratch in one lifetime.
I said earlier that one can get away with little knowledge of medicine because one doesn't get to vote if one wants his son's tonsils removed or not. The decision is made in a dictatorial fashion by someone who is (hopefully) an expert on the subject.
But this very same person gets to vote for what his country's policies should be, at least in a true democracy he does.
To make matters worse, individuals rarely get to pick from individual policies on a decision by decision basis (or else nobody will do anything but attend political meetings and vote for whatever today's decision is). Instead, you and I get to pick a "package deal", be it a political party or a presidential candidate. For example American voters can (and recently actually did) pick candidates from the Democratic Party for the senate or the house. The Democratic party generally stands for a higher minimum wage and legalization of abortion.
If you happen to agree on the latter but disagree with the former, tough luck. It's our package of the day.
Or of course start your own party, good luck with that.
Combine all of the above and you might arrive at the same conclusion I did.
1. The majority of people are not well informed (sometimes ill-informed?) about economics and politics.
2. If you're ill/dis/mis-informed about a specific matter, you shouldn't be expected to take a sound a decision regarding said matter.
2. Voters get to pick one out of several candidates, each is a bag of specific stands on a multitude of subjects.
3. A democracy guarantees that the candidate with the most votes win.
Do you see it yet?
Democracy guarantees the domination of what's popular. It even actually creates an incentive system for politicians to stay "in fashion" with what's popular and form their strategies or advertised agendas accordingly.
The result?
What's popular is what will get done. And what's popular shouldn't be expected to magically intersect with what's right. Not until the majority is knowledgeable about economics and politics (in the very least).
We might as well be flipping coins.
P.S.
I'm not anti-democracy. Nor do I have an alternative worthwhile system that I can suggest. I'm just debating the merits and flaws of what is currently, widely accepted as the best system to run a country.
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3 comments:
did you read Dilbert's post about smartness before posting this? You seem highly influenced by him if you did! :D
"Right and wrong" in this context is very reltive. I assume you agree with this.
I almost totally agree with your argument BUT it seems in a true democracy it all cancels out, I mean the smart, the ignorant, the lazy etc. In the end peolple get what the majority want. It is kind of like statistics there are "outliers" but the mean and the median coincide in a big enough sample.
Does this make any sense!!
Mr. Anonymous, your statements are self contradictory.
If you agree with my arguments then you agree that the majority of people are ignorant about politics and economics. Given that, then it follows that to get an average of well informed votes out of that (whatever that means) then you'll have to take a weighted average. Assigning arbitrary weights that are higher when it's a well-informed vote and lower when it's an ignorant vote.
That we don't do.
And if we did that to skew the results then we might as well make sure that people pass some exams before they're allowed to vote.
Which, now that I think about it, doesn't sound like a bad idea.
Nag, I did read dilbert's post, thanks for the reference. But that's not the inspiration for this post, this has been brewing in my head for quite a while and after reading Dilbert's post I was just triggered to write it down instead of keeping it as a work in progress.
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