You greatly overestimate the quality of the will of the people. Just because you don't like certain outcomes because they are stupid doesn't mean that those outcomes aren't what people wanted. Democratic institutions are a much more accurate way of reflecting the will of the people than most other attempts to measure that, for many reasons including the existence of people who don't respond to surveys but vote.
Democratic institutions can be subverted with first past the post voting systems and the illusion of choice amongst the most vocal and well funded parties
Your options for getting rid of it are Congressional ratification with an overwhelming majority (LOL), a Constitutional convention (a horror too frightening to contemplate, given the people who would be involved), or guns. Which do you prefer?
I'm not suggesting getting rid of it, stop with the hysterics. I'm saying it's not a necessary feature of a democracy, as you suggested in your original post.
It is a highly idiosyncratic design decision in one democracy. It is not at all functionally necessary to America's system, and it's certainly not necessary to any other, as proven by its conspicuous absence from said democratic systems.
Five stupid people outvoting four dumb people is a natural outcome in every democratic system. One person outvoting two based on geographic location is not a natural outcome in every democratic system.
It's not that hard to understand if you take off your ideology blinkers for a moment and read the words in front of you.
> the electoral college is not a necessary feature of a democracy.
You offered two traits of "democracy"
1. 5 low IQ voters outvote 4 high IQ votes
2. 1 voter in geography X can outvote 2 voters in geography Y
Trait 1 is a necessary feature of a democracy.
Trait 2 is not a necessary feature of a democracy.
You placing the two together in a list to describe "Democracy" is a category error.
Trait 2 is an idiosyncratic design feature of exactly one democracy, and it is not necessary to either this democracy in particular or to democracies in general.
> Democratic institutions are a much more accurate way of reflecting the will of the people
You're right but that's not what we have in the US. We have a Constitutional Republic. Elected representatives write the laws. People are not voting directly on laws and issues (on a federal level). I'm not saying we should change it but for the parent comment to say that "The People decided this" is not an accurate statement.
> Study: Congress literally doesn’t care what you think
> Their study took data from nearly 2000 public opinion surveys and compared it to the policies that ended up becoming law. In other words, they compared what the public wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all.
Another interpretation: when you sum a bunch of opinions you end up with a result that doesn’t look particularly like any of the inputs, and certainly not a large portion of them.
I think you're over-representing just how well opinion surveys can represent the actual will of the people.
To put this in a less politicized analogy, everyone will tell you they want to be rich, but how many people are willing to make sacrifices to become rich? It turns out many rich people today are rich because they didn't have to make very many sacrifices, while most everyone, including minimum wage employees, can become a millionaire. Mathematically it's not all that complex.
People will tell you what they want with some internalized model that isn't representative of the realistic trade-offs that would have to be made. So in effect what people say isn't based in the reality of what they actually want.
This is the wrong take. The system reflects the will of the people who the system deems important. The average person wants higher wages, shorter hours and cheaper cost of living w/r/t rent, food, fuel and health. Congress is reflecting none of those desires right now because they serves the needs of the oligarchic selectorate that has been funding unrestricted class warfare against regular people for the last 20 years.
> average person wants higher wages, shorter hours and cheaper cost of living w/r/t rent, food, fuel and health. Congress is reflecting none of those desires
The average voter does not uniformly express these preferences.
Duh? Like, by definition, an average doesn't reflect uniform expression. The people who don't want those things are a minority, but they are getting their way, because the system reflects the desires of the elites, not the desires of the average.
> people who don't want that are a minority, but they are getting their way
They’re the majority. Almost every voter puts pocketbook issues near the top of their list, but not so far up that they’re willing to be civically active about it unless it’s a crisis. Herego, we spend most of our non-crisis time on non-pocketbook issues.
No, they aren't the majority. The elites that the system actually serves have successfully ignited a culture war that splits the average people on which issues are driving the economic problems. The overwhelming majority of Americans want higher wages and cheaper cost of living, they just can't agree on how to get there (by design).
Not conspiracy - culture wars. Conspiracy is a part of that, but racial equality, immigration and abortion have all been wielded to great effect. It's certainly easier to create disruption than consensus, but the money is clearly backing disruption.
> racial equality, immigration and abortion have all been wielded to great effect
There is plenty of evidence happiness is, in part, relative. I’m not convinced there aren’t voters who would rather be a little poorer than better off but not as much as that other group.
> easier to create disruption than consensus, but the money is clearly backing disruption
I’m moderately wealthy. Split time between New York and Wyoming. It’s certainly wild that a bunch of voters in rural Pennsylvania feel strongly about lowering my taxes so long as it pisses off some liberals. If I had more resources and were more self centred, I could see myself encouraging that.
Almost every voter puts pocketbook issues near the top of their list, but not so far up that they’re willing to be civically active about it unless it’s a crisis.
We're not in a crisis now, but people voted in the last national election as if we were, because Fox News told them that we were.
This is my problem with the “elites in control” hypothesis. It seems to rely on voters’ power existing, but being circumvented because said voters are too stupid to handle it.
> This is my problem with the “elites in control” hypothesis. It seems to rely on voters’ power existing, but being circumvented because said voters are too stupid to handle it.
You are correct (except that it need only be a subset of voters).
Now that you've done a good job of elaborating on the hypothesis, what exactly is your problem with it?
It doesn't work. Its testable predictions preclude a good amount of extant politics, including practically all populism. Elites the world over are losing in democracies because they presupposed, from afar, that they knew what their constituents wanted. Voters' interests are complex, and they can't be so easily bought.
> Its testable predictions preclude a good amount of extant politics, including practically all populism.
How so?
> Elites the world over are losing in democracies because they presupposed, from afar, that they knew what their constituents wanted
Elites the world over are winning in democracies (take the US for example), which could feed into the hypothesis. Indeed, nonzero voters of these elites were easily bought.
> Here’s another possible interpretation: our information environment makes people extremely vulnerable to actual bullshit in massive volume
That is also true. People get angry and then misdirect it. But the anger is real, and it filters up through the political system when the valves aren't clogged. They aren't, not anywhere in the West. Voters across the West have essentially begun a wholesale replacement of their stable of elites. That is not what happens in an oligarchic system.
> That is not what happens in an oligarchic system.
The person USAns just voted in is literally an oligarch, as is his co-president, and he has indicated that he will populate his cabinet and advisory board with still more oligarchs. His "inauguration" slush fund has already received hundreds of millions of dollars from other oligarchs to secure their place in the new oligarchy*
> person USAns just voted in is literally an oligarch, as is his co-president, and he has indicated that he will populate his cabinet with still more oligarchs
America is tending towards an oligarchic system. (This is a history of weak democracies, historically, and a reason we were founded as a republic and not pure democracy.) That doesn't prove it currently is one. Trump's election is largely about replacing the technocratic and cultural elite with a commercial one.
> America is tending towards an oligarchic system. (This is a history of weak democracies, historically, and a reason we were founded as a republic and not pure democracy.) That doesn't prove it currently is one
Maybe that doesn't. But this study does:
> Princeton University study: Public opinion has “near-zero” impact on U.S. law.
> One thing that does have an influence? Money. While the opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners in America have a “statistically non-significant impact,” economic elites, business interests, and people who can afford lobbyists still carry major influence
The study is from 2004. I'd say things have gotten a lot more "oligarchic" in the last 20 years, and seems like it might get even worse in the next few years
Honestly I don't think there's a rivalry among equals in play. I think the previous "elites" slacked off on the job. What's happening now looks less like a transfer of power than a vacuum being filled.
Regardless, it is the height of absurdity to argue that the "elites" aren't in charge now. A New York billionaire teamed up with the world's wealthiest man and the country's most influential cable news network to buy the Presidency, and the rest are now lining up to pay tribute.
The other "elites," to the extent there are any, are short on ambition, short on cash, and short on media reach.
> the previous "elites" slacked off on the job. What's happening now looks less like a transfer of power than a vacuum being filled
True. But this is how all depositions go. When that process is blocked is when the process stops being peaceful.
> it is the height of absurdity to argue that the "elites" aren't in charge now
Some elites are always going to be in charge. That's almost tautology. The point is there is no the elites who were in charge and are now.
> other "elites," to the extent there are any, are short on ambition, short on cash, and short on media reach
And/or. Plenty have some of those but not all, or at too stupid to know how to wield it. Point remains: we have an amorphous elite with contrasting interests who are constantly fighting because power is fractured among them.
Some elites are always going to be in charge. That's almost tautology.
Sure, but pro-Trump voters will tell you that they were striking a blow against the "elites." Apparently rule by elites is OK, though, as long as they believe the elites in question are on their side. It's only those other elites that are the problem.
Which goes back to my earlier point: why spend money buying votes the old-fashioned way, when a personality cult can actually be profitable?
"Health care should be strictly preventative and diagnostic" runs into the problem that not everyone agrees what that means. For a while most Europeans thought that leeching yourself was preventative medicine, or Japanese people thought removing the outer layer of your skin by rubbing it hard with towels was, etc. Nowadays some people have forgotten that vaccines work and don't want to pay for other people to get them.
Health care in the US is definitely stupid and bad and can easily be made better than it is, but all the easy sounding obvious right answers that would fix everything about some aspect of life usually don't pan out in practice.
It might not be enough for you, but maybe you're not the target audience. His blog is quite popular so clearly it's enough for a lot of folks.
What is "good" communication depends on the social context of the communication, the audience, etc. A novel probably shouldn't be written in the same style as a project status update document. IMO one of the downsides of people in our modern education system being drilled on the "one true way" of communicating for a small handful of contexts (position paper essays, tactical business memos) is that they begin to think that is the only way to communicate ever in any context to any audience and forget that different people have different tastes and in a lot of contexts catering to your audience's taste is what matters.
Making Elsevier reconsider its practices is a self-defeating goal. Pay-per-access research publishing should be driven out of business. The majority of institutions funding the actual research being done are publicly funded or receive large public tax breaks, so the resulting research should be publicly accessible, and the peer review process should be managed and funded within a similar network of institutions, not by an oligarchy of rent-seeking private entities.
Too much bureaucracy is often at fault, but seems very unlikely in this particular case. Are all the other countries mentioned in the article less bureaucratized or regulated? There seems to be a strong correlation between countries that have good public transit and invest heavily in public transit and countries that are perceived as having too much regulatory red tape (EU, East Asia). If that's the case, how could this possibly be the problem here?
According to the chart in the article the EU seems to be building at about the same pace as Russia, so I'm not sure it is a great example for the success of bureaucracy. And is East Asia particularly bureaucratic? The idea that I get is that building a train line over there isn't going to be held up for years in environmental review and lawsuits, but I could be wrong.
"A base of 2 is useful because there are several small positive integers whose base-two logarithms are also integers." What? No! Base 2 is natural in exactly the same way that base e is natural, except for discrete domains instead of continuous domains. There is a unique family of functions for which the rate of change of the function is equal to the current value of the function everywhere. On discrete domains it's some scaled translation of 2^x, and on continuous domains it's some scaled translation of e^x. "Some scaled translation" here is accounting for the fact that the function is only uniquely exactly 2^x or e^x if we also add the constraint that f(0)=1.
The stock market represents a tiny and shrinking sliver of the overall economy. https://businessreview.studentorg.berkeley.edu/why-your-favo.... In many cases there is no distributed class of shareholders, just a concentrated set of owners, so both this and the argument it was responding to about wiping out shareholders are irrelevant.
For companies that are publicly traded, if you were to wipe out the shareholders, that would disproportionately hurt financial institutions that pick and choose stocks and concentrate their holdings and exert influence on the corporate policy over passive investments from the average Joe's retirement fund. To the extent that it's "just a tax", it's a tax that's progressively higher on the people more likely to be at fault.
The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) is an agency in the California executive branch that "manages pension and health benefits for more than 1.5 million California public employees, retirees, and their families". . . . CalPERS manages the largest public pension fund in the United States, with more than $469 billion in assets under management as of June 30, 2021.
The reason that pay transparency laws (which probably don't apply to this position, but exist in other states) require salary ranges and not a specific number is precisely to account for the fact that different applicants with different levels of qualification may merit different compensation in the same role based on the impact they can have. So "depends on the qualifications of the individual applicant" is kind of besides the point; a wide range can account for that.
"I'm not the King of Hiring" is fair though, if you're in a jurisdiction where there is no transparency law and you're not setting policy for your company, you may well be required not to provide this information publicly and that's just how it is.
This was a really remarkable way to undermine your argument.
It's possible to make a strong philosophical argument that government regulation of salary transparency is unnecessary or harmful. This is not that.
The fact that there exist some types of private information for which we recognize a right to maintain privacy does not at all imply it is morally wrong for the government to recognize a public right for some other type of information (salary ranges). In the US there exist both the Freedom of Information Act and the Fourth Amendment guarding against warrantless search. It's obviously clear that the government recognizes the right to demand public transparency for some types of information and the right to protect privacy for other information. You've made no attempt whatsoever to explain why this type of information should fall in one category or the other, just gestured to the existence of one of the categories and implied that this proves that the information in question belongs there.
