I find this article poorly argued, and committing serious errors and fallacies at multiple levels.
The worst single problem is that it’s based on a simplistic model of the political system which is too distant from reality to be useful. This is basically the same objection that I had to the recent “Politics as Charity” post: the assumption that government policy is determined by elected politicians in a way that can be actively and predictably influenced by voters is outright false in the great majority of cases. Sticking to this unrealistic model cannot lead to an accurate understanding of the modern political systems, let alone to any useful practical guidelines for interacting with them.
Moreover, nearly all concrete claims, examples, and hypotheticals in the article are written in a very imprecise and inaccurate way that sounds superficially sensible and plausible, but cannot stand to any real scrutiny. Just a few examples:
“Whether a budget is good or bad depends on how well its author can distinguish between efficient and inefficient spending...” This ignores the crucial problem of incentives. The ability of the “author” (note the vagueness—who exactly is meant by this?) to figure out what’s efficient is irrelevant if his incentives favor inefficiencies.
“Whether a regulation is good or bad depends on how well its author [presumably a politician? - V.] can predict the effects and engineer the small details for optimal effect, and not on whether it is more or less strict overall.” This completely ignores the actual way regulations work: politicians crank out extremely vague legislation, which is shaped into concrete policy by bureaucratic agencies, and to some extent the courts, which however normally have to defer to the bureaucrats’ interpretation of the law. An accurate analysis of the likely practical outcomes of this process would be completely over the politicians’ heads, even if we ignore the law of unintended consequences.
“In the United States and other countries, we elect our leaders.” Only a subset of them, and arguably the least important one, for any definition of “leader” based on the person’s actual influence in the system of government.
“[N]early every description of a political candidate will also mention their political party, and this is the one fact we most need to avoid...” Why? It is simply untrue that party affiliation gives no useful information about a politician’s relevant characteristics, even if only statistically. If you’re afraid that you might have so strong partisan biases that this information will give you more prejudice than knowledge, you have no realistic chance to process any other information correctly either.
And so on. Almost the entire article could be criticized like this piece by piece.
the assumption that government policy is determined by elected politicians in a way that can be actively and predictably influenced by voters is outright false in the great majority of cases.
I think OP intends just the opposite: Voters shouldn’t try to influence policy. The OP is making the case for representative democracy as opposed to democracy, which is that voters should just elect smart, capable, virtuous people rather than concerning themselves with issues.
There is however still the underlying assumption that representative democracy is possible under the present political system. This view is, in my opinion, very far from reality considering the realistic position of elected politicians within it.
Aren’t all four of your disputes also applicable to any discussion about choosing candidates for office? The only large political organizations I’ve seen which advocate changing incentives for politicians and bureacrats instead of voting for the “right candidate” are single-issue pressure groups like the NRA or AARP. As successful as they are, the strategy doesn’t seem to generalize, despite the efforts of groups like DownsizeDC.
I find this article poorly argued, and committing serious errors and fallacies at multiple levels.
The worst single problem is that it’s based on a simplistic model of the political system which is too distant from reality to be useful. This is basically the same objection that I had to the recent “Politics as Charity” post: the assumption that government policy is determined by elected politicians in a way that can be actively and predictably influenced by voters is outright false in the great majority of cases. Sticking to this unrealistic model cannot lead to an accurate understanding of the modern political systems, let alone to any useful practical guidelines for interacting with them.
Moreover, nearly all concrete claims, examples, and hypotheticals in the article are written in a very imprecise and inaccurate way that sounds superficially sensible and plausible, but cannot stand to any real scrutiny. Just a few examples:
“Whether a budget is good or bad depends on how well its author can distinguish between efficient and inefficient spending...” This ignores the crucial problem of incentives. The ability of the “author” (note the vagueness—who exactly is meant by this?) to figure out what’s efficient is irrelevant if his incentives favor inefficiencies.
“Whether a regulation is good or bad depends on how well its author [presumably a politician? - V.] can predict the effects and engineer the small details for optimal effect, and not on whether it is more or less strict overall.” This completely ignores the actual way regulations work: politicians crank out extremely vague legislation, which is shaped into concrete policy by bureaucratic agencies, and to some extent the courts, which however normally have to defer to the bureaucrats’ interpretation of the law. An accurate analysis of the likely practical outcomes of this process would be completely over the politicians’ heads, even if we ignore the law of unintended consequences.
“In the United States and other countries, we elect our leaders.” Only a subset of them, and arguably the least important one, for any definition of “leader” based on the person’s actual influence in the system of government.
“[N]early every description of a political candidate will also mention their political party, and this is the one fact we most need to avoid...” Why? It is simply untrue that party affiliation gives no useful information about a politician’s relevant characteristics, even if only statistically. If you’re afraid that you might have so strong partisan biases that this information will give you more prejudice than knowledge, you have no realistic chance to process any other information correctly either.
And so on. Almost the entire article could be criticized like this piece by piece.
I think OP intends just the opposite: Voters shouldn’t try to influence policy. The OP is making the case for representative democracy as opposed to democracy, which is that voters should just elect smart, capable, virtuous people rather than concerning themselves with issues.
There is however still the underlying assumption that representative democracy is possible under the present political system. This view is, in my opinion, very far from reality considering the realistic position of elected politicians within it.
Aren’t all four of your disputes also applicable to any discussion about choosing candidates for office? The only large political organizations I’ve seen which advocate changing incentives for politicians and bureacrats instead of voting for the “right candidate” are single-issue pressure groups like the NRA or AARP. As successful as they are, the strategy doesn’t seem to generalize, despite the efforts of groups like DownsizeDC.