This is a bit of a rehearsal of the ‘what is a good government – and is it democratic? question. It’s also more of a set of bookmarks than a proper post, but I hope someone finds it useful.
Click pic for credit
I think we would all like to find ourselves in a situation where the public – by voting – get a government that delivers The General Will – and that, by this, we understand that it does it efficiently as well.
If someone could demonstrate that we could have this without votes or public participation, we’d have to face a tough question: Do we actually want a democracy at all?
So, for example, take the notion of The General Will. As an example, lets take something that the public have a settled preference on. For example, lets say (for the sake of argument) that we want everybody to be able to have access to, and the ability participate in, a particular activity – no matter what their social or ethnic status may be. This will not just require rules to prevent discrimination – it will also require society to be organised in such a way as to make it possible for someone to provide such a service.
The example that springs to mind is that of a golf club.
To appease this General Will, it is not enough for a golf club to remove it’s ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Travellers’ sign from the main gate. A good society, surely, decides that golf is, to some extent, a good thing and it does a few things to make it possible for everyone who really wants to (subject perhaps to some rationing and a few trade-offs – i.e. “you can’t have subsidised golf-club membership and subsidised membership of the Polo Club!”)
That country, after all, wants the national pride of having a few top-class golfers – and if only 1% of the population can set foot on a golf course, that won’t happen. So we take steps.
It may do this by a tax and planning regime that makes it affordable to set up a golf club, by opening municipal courses, by subsidising fees out of general taxation or by imposing some rules on the owners forcing them to offer conscessions of some kind or other.
So this society strives for more than just fairness. It is aware that the freedom of the beggar to drink champagne is no freedom at all.
But it is also for this reason that it resists the temptation to meet every public demand. It is bounded by reality. It can only marshall the resources that it has. It has to be efficient in what it does. Wasting resources makes it harder to comply with the many demands that the public have.
If the government takes a ‘hang the cost’ approach to golf, it won’t be able to do other things.
The government have to be a competent administrator that is good at incentivising people to comply with the the public’s desires promptly and cheaply. But the voters have to play ball as well.
We have to be prepared to elect people who are able to do this well instead of those who offer improbable bribes. If I were to stand for office offering a French standard of health service funded from Dubai’s tax regime, and you were to vote for me, you would get the rotten govenment that you deserve.
This brings us to the suitability of voters. How far do we go along with our side of the bargain? Are we fair? Are we rational? Do we sidestep cognitive biases and logical fallacies? Do we put the interests of the nation ahead of our own short term desires? Do we detect dishonesty well? Do we compensate for media dishonesty or disregard the self-serving agendas of pressure groups? Do we select the right blend of idealists and technocrats?
There’s no short answer to those questions (apart from the near-perfect one-word reply – NO!). My own view is that we lose a lot of those imperfections by electing people who then bring the distributed moral wisdom of Parliament to bear. But it’s a recurring theme in my recent reading – so here’s a few links.
Firstly, Peter Levine on efficiency v fairness.
Then there’s The Political Brain and Don’t Think of an Elephant. And we shouldn’t forget The Myth of the Rational Voter either (which I admit to having only skim-read).
As a counterweight, there’s The Wisdom of Crowds (where public ignorance gets smoothed out in the wash).
Can anyone think of any obvious texts or titles that I’ve missed here?
Update – 16th June 2011: Further evidence that our political beleifs aren’t formed rationally (this one says that childhood trauma makes people more left-wing – it recalls the adage that “a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged and a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested”)
