an ideal epistocracy would know that on some issues, democracies make better decisions. On those issues, it would consult with and defer to democratic opinion. Similarly, an ideal democracy would know that on some issues, epistocracies make better decisions. On those issues, it would consult with and defer to epistocratic opinion. Accordingly, under ideal conditions, epistocracy and democracy perform equally well.
That is Jason Brennan, paraphrasing theKling indifference theorem. Both Brennan and I were responding to Helene Landemore, who claims that democratic voting should lead to better outcomes than elite decision-making. In my comment, I said that “The whole issue boils down to who is more over-confident. If the people are over-confident, then you may want decisions made by the elite. If the elite are over-confident, then you may want decisions made by the people.” I go on to raise the Hayekian point that the elite are likely to be over-confident and hence markets are to be preferred.
I found Brennan’s most devastating criticism to be this:
If one can show that citizens are systematically mistaken, this is bad news for all three a priori defenses of democracy. If citizens are systematically mistaken, then by definition their errors are not randomly distributed, and so the so-called miracle of aggregation does not occur….According to the Jury Theorem, if citizens’ mean competence is less than 0.5, the probability that democracy will get the wrong answer approaches 1…citizens so not have cognitive diversity–they instead share the same incorrect model of the world–and so the Hong-Page Theorem does not apply.
In the real world, we do not observe direct democracy. Some people think that if we did, we would like the results.
I doubt that direct democracy is feasible. For example, we know that poll results depend on how questions are worded. So who will decide how questions are worded in a direct democracy? If it is a small group of experts, then that sort of defeats the point of direct democracy. So before people vote on a question, they have to vote on the wording of the question. And before they can do that, they have to vote on the wording of the question of how to word the question. etc.
If you can think you can solve the question-wording problem, then go on to deal with the “who decides which questions get voted on” problem.
The best defense of our democracy is that we have had it in place for almost 250 years. In other words, the best defense is a Humean defense; there’s nothing categorically superior about democracy, but preserving democracy _as it works in America_ is order-preserving. The tradition of democracy here preserves order in a number of unobservable ways. Take, for example, the fact that basically no one thinks there is a credible possibility of a military coup in this country. This may have something to do with the fact that the members of our military are inculcated with a set of values by which the military is subordinate to the civilian, democratically elected government.
So hypothetically, democracy in this country may be our best bet in part because replacing it would shatter the narrative that members of the military are invested in which causes them to see civilian government as a legitimate authority over them.
Is there another place to read your comment on Helene Landemore and your Indifference theorem? For whatever reason, that site seems most unwilling to display the full document, or allow me to register and sign in.
http://i.imgur.com/KABLtH6.jpg
There is a big difference between a poll and a vote. A poll asks people something with no prior warning, and without consequence.
Why can’t anyone propose a vote on anything any time they want? If a measure received a certain minimum percentage of votes within a jurisdiction, there could be a campaign period of a specified length where the vote would remain open, then the vote would close and be counted. If the measure fails to receive the minimum within a specified time, the vote fails and is closed.
This reminds me of McKelvey’s chaos theorem: in a multidimensional policy space, with weak assumptions about preferences and sincere majority rule voting, you can get to literally ANY outcome you want by manipulating the agenda in a series of majority rule votes.
Similarly, it is said (and easily believed) that the best form of government is a benevolent monarchy. We are only left with the minor problems of choosing the monarch and how to recover from poor or mistaken choices.
I liked the Landemore comment on the exclusive-from-within nature of true oligarchy, in contrast to its current misapplication as a pejorative one hurls at powerful ideological opponents. This is analagous to Peter Thiel’s recent misidentification of Google as a monopolist, notwithholding the amusing fact that within every diehard capitalist is an aspiring monopolist. The ability to satisfy those served is not to be feared so much as the ability to craft rules which prevent competition in the arena of service.
Finally, the KID, while insightful, doesn’t seem quite sensible without the premise that “everyone has the same interest and the same general understanding of the problem”. Taken to its literal extreme, where the population is composed of experts and the expert panel is simply a sample of the population, the result seems tautological and lacking insight. Don’t we have to assume that the experts have a better understanding of the problem and different interests, some noble and others venal?
I gather the point is that we can’t gain much by fiddling with the relative structure of the two approaches so long as they are both undertaken in some mixture. That choosing only one or the other forfeits a great deal, compounding over time. I also wonder if KID can accomodate real world mutual distrust between the two groups.
Whoops, KID refers to Kling Indifference Theorem. I erred in my initialism.
The Political Dictionary
wisdom of crowds n. The fabled effect where the combined judgment of many people is better than any one individual. The successful experiments asked crowds to estimate the number of jelly beans in a jar, or the butchered weight of an ox. The averaged estimates came closer to the exact answer than any one guess.
Unfortunately, we routinely see the awful result of applying crowd-wisdom to electing politicians. Possibly, this is because the crowd is smarter than any jelly bean or ox, and the beans and ox are incapable of making promises.
George Carlin expressed this well: “Just think how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of them are even stupider!”
The virtue of democracy is that a majority of people can remain skeptical of government. They can rotate their leaders so that no bunch can gain absolute power over them.
In an alarming development, people have become less skeptical of government, and the growing spoils of government have encouraged politicians to reconcile their differences in favor of just dividing up what they can collect in favors and taxes. Prosperity has fostered a totalitarian political peace.
Democracy is nothing more than a guarantee that a little more than half the people won’t rise in revolt.
Historically good results from democracies arose because they coincided with an age of freedom. Since govts usually fail, the less they have to do, the better they seem.
Regards,
Bill Drissel