Garett Jones suggests we try 10% less democracy and see how that works out.
Politicians behave differently near the end of their term, when they play more to voters’ irrational biases, including their anti-market bias, make-work bias, anti-foreign bias, and pessimistic bias.
Jones cites an unusual source — Jennifer Hochschild, Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard — on epistocracy:
Three uncontroversial points sum to a paradox:
- Almost every democratic theorist or democratic political actor sees an informed electorate as essential to good democratic practice….
- In most if not all democratic polities, the proportion of the population granted the suffrage has consistently expanded, and seldom contracted, over the past two centuries….
- Most expansions of the suffrage bring in, on average, people who are less politically informed or less broadly educated than those already eligible to vote….
Putting these three uncontroversial points together leads to the conclusion that as democracies become more democratic, their decision-making processes become of lower quality in terms of cognitive processing of issues and candidate choice.
Jones recommends six-year terms for the House and more autonomous agencies like the Fed.
The problem is that over time, the system becomes more and more gamed as it is more and more understood. There should be an injection of randomness somehow in order to make it somewhat unpredictable.
There should be constitutionally mandated lotteries inserted into the system somewhere, somehow, at some random times. I’m not enough of a wonk to know where, or how, but I can picture maybe a random 6 year term for some office holders, or having jury members (that have not been disqualified) randomly selected as the winners of random elections, or having random laws immediately invalidated.
Democracies self destruct. Fiddling with the machinery is just moving the deck chairs on the Titanic after it hit the berg.
With an incumbency rate greater than 90%, I think House members already have six year terms, if not more.
“Jones recommends six-year terms for the House and more autonomous agencies like the Fed.”
Congratulations, Mr. Jones, you are a leading contender for the 2015 Mencius Moldbug award, for doing an outstanding job of identifying a real problem, and then coming up with an utterly inadequate or unworkable solution!