New study says that people aren't smart enough for democracy

[Makalakumu]

http://news.yahoo.com/people-arent-smart-enough-democracy-flourish-scientists-185601411.html

"The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.

The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people's ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify thecandidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.

As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them. On top of that, "very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is," Dunning told Life's Little Mysteries."

I've pondered this many times in the past.  How can any voter decide who to vote for based on information for topics that are way above their heads?  The whole idea of providing people with sophisitication enough through public education is debunked by this study.

[empyblessing]

[View:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LelNYqVEOZQ]

[JohnDJasper]

 

 

I've pondered this many times in the past.  How can any voter decide who to vote for based on information for topics that are way above their heads?  The whole idea of providing people with sophisitication enough through public education is debunked by this study.

 

 

Electioneering is designed to tell the lies that will convince the public to vote for a specific candidate. The tactics of party politics, baby kissing, rolling out the wife and kids or wearing faith in a specific deity are all part of that process.  But the main ammunition is telling the public what they want to hear about lowering (or not raising) taxes, cutting or increasing spending on various programmes and rooting out corruption, blah, blah, blah.  It's really just a show as all of the candidates presented for our choice will have been pre-selected by the real rulers so their candidates will always win.  As part of this show, $millions will be spent on selling the candidates through the media and unfortunately, we have been programmed to believe what we see on TV.  Everyone forms a judgement on whom to trust, if anyone, based on skills that they developed over their lifetime and the system ebbs and flows on the quality of these decisions.  It is the system that we have.

As the article doesn't provide a link to the research document nor any information about who funded it, we can only judge it on this limited view of it.  I suspect many will use this to further justify the necessity of a ruling elite for managing the ignorant masses when what it really says is that the current masters have so screwed up society that people are not properly educated AND that every government policy and program is so unnecessarily complicated.

[DoubtingThomas]

The article missed the all-important point that democratically elected officials have no accountability to their electorate and a great deal of unspoken accountability to the political and financial backers who got them on the ballot and made their name recognizable in the frist place. Thusly, no electable candidate will ever represent the population over the necessarily contradictory interests of their donors and political superiors.

The idiots are the people who think their vote can improve the state, not those who simply recognize there are better things to do on a november day.

[nickhk]

Not that new, Post on it from last year.

It's not really that people aren't smart enough, but that they don't have the knowledge and expertise to make an informed choice... which would inevitably be none.

 

[Arius]

The article missed the all-important point that democratically elected officials have no accountability to their electorate and a great deal of unspoken accountability to the political and financial backers who got them on the ballot and made their name recognizable in the frist place. Thusly, no electable candidate will ever represent the population over the necessarily contradictory interests of their donors and political superiors.

"For it has been already shown that nothing the sovereign representative can do to a subject, on what pretence soever, can properly be called injustice or injury; because every subject is author of every act the sovereign doth, so that he never wanteth right to any thing, otherwise than as he himself is the subject of God, and bound thereby to observe the laws of nature."

-Leviathan

 

[Makalakumu]

 

Not that new, Post on it from last year.

It's not really that people aren't smart enough, but that they don't have the knowledge and expertise to make an informed choice... which would inevitably be none.

 

 

 

For those of you who would like to shift this into an economic discussion, I think there is a principle here that is directly related to the underlying principle of this thread. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

Mises argued in "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth" that the pricing systems in socialist economies were necessarily deficient because if a public entity owned all the means of production, no rational prices could be obtained for capital goods as they were merely internal transfers of goods and not "objects of exchange," unlike final goods. Therefore, they were unpriced and hence the system would be necessarily irrational, as the central planners would not know how to allocate the available resources efficiently.^[1] He wrote "...that rational economic activity is impossible in a socialist commonwealth."^[1] Mises developed his critique of socialism more completely in his 1922 book Socialism, an Economic and Sociological Analysis, arguing that the market price system is an expression of praxeology and can not be replicated by any form of bureaucracy.

This strikes me as just another form of Hayek's Knowledge Problem. In any centrally planned system, there is no way for the planners to know all of the relevant information for economic exchange. Thus, centrally planned systems are always inefficient, dare I say stupid, when it comes to the allocation of resources. Couldn't the same be said of large governments and law makers? The average voter is voting on a platform of laws of which they have no understanding. Even the lawmakers don't understand them, they don't even read them! Thus the Law of Unintended Consequences is always present negative for some group. 

Even in a large, well intended democracy, this knowledge problem predicts failure. In a fascist corporate state, where information is doled out by talking heads and the people have been conditioned to lap up the words of authority, it predicts catastrophic failure.

[tasmlab]

Why is it so accepted that we just get to vote for a few PEOPLE?  Four federall offices total.  Where do I go vote to stop the war? Where do I go vote for my tax rate?  Why do I just get some candidates?

Not that I'm advocating for direct democracy.  I think democracy stinks. But what a queer idea that if we vote for a few individuals that we express any power or influence whatsoever!

[VforVoluntary49]

It's even worse than that-Stefan discusses this in "Everyday Anarchy" and elsewhere for sure, but the main fact is that you need to ask yourself "How did this man get on the ballot in the first place?". The answer is that you truly have no choice to begin with in this facade of "democracy", especially at the state and definitely the Federal levels.  The men in front of you have already been bought and paid for 10 times over, and are answerable only to those who give them the money and resources needed to remain an "option". Nor does that man know who votes for him, why they voted for him, what policies of his they agreed with, which they disagreed with but were outweighed by the first, etc.  We are fed the fairy tale that these men are here out of a sense of duty, altruism, justice, etc. but then look at their campaign contributors.  It's all smoke and mirrors, the distraction presented to you while they pick your pocket from behind. And it's self-perpetuating; the only men with the power to change this "system" (outside of outright revolution) are the ones already embedded within the system! Apart from pleasing their owners, their next major concern is consolidating their own power and authority and adding additional obstacles to entry into the power structure. That's one reason why it costs so much more to run for office each year-its the same as any union or protectionist legislation, simply a barrier to entry in the field.