January 2017, Year IX, n. 1
Jason Brennan
Hobbit, hooligans and vulcans. A fictional democracy
Telos: ‘Goodbye Democracy - Welcome Epistocracy’. Does this sentence summarise your proposed solution to a different form of government?
Jason Brennan: Democracy spreads out power widely. But this causes a problem. Since individual votes make no difference, each individual voter can afford to remain ignorant or to indulge irrational and biased political beliefs.
It’s not that voters are stupid. Rather, the incentives are bad. As an analogy, imagine that a university professor had a large class of 2,000 students. Suppose he tells them, “Three months from now, we will have a final exam. You won’t receive your own grade; rather, I will average everyone’s scores together, and you will each receive the same grade ...more
Editorial
Is the word populist an insult or a compliment? It depends on what you mean by populism. If you think that a populist movement gives a voice to the marginalised and the weak, well then populism is a good thing. If instead by populism you mean a group of misinformed individuals pushing governments to implement counterproductive policies, then perhaps it isn't a compliment at all ...more
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