7 ms·

Why are we governed by incompetents?

41 points by deafcalculus 7y ago

cortesoft 7y ago
I think the issue is that they are competent in the skill that matters; getting elected. Voters are not competent at the skill they need - voting for people who will do a good job running the government. I think part of it is because lies work so well in campaigns. People will believe things they want to believe, so if one candidate is telling a convenient lie and another a harsh truth, people will vote for the convenient lie. Of course, when it comes time to actually govern, the reality will come back to bite them, but by then it doesn’t matter. They already won the election.
- Retric 7y ago
  That’s one of the advantages to carrier politicians. It’s harder to sell the exact same lie across different campaigns. Though this can devolve into word games and meaningless platitudes. “I will fight for the American people.”
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    These people just merge into background for a time then make a comeback when everyone has forgotten the lie or a new even more outrageous one moves the set point...
- nicholasjon 7y ago
  Douglas Adams: "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/250456-anyone-who-is-capable-of-getting-themselves-made-president-should https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/250456-anyone-who-is-capabl...
  - eli_gottlieb 7y ago
    Of course, looking back, it's hard to avoid the realization that Zaphod Beeblebrox was some sort of expy for Ronald Reagan.
- WhompingWindows 7y ago
  Lies are a broad category. If you mean overpromising / huge signature campaign promises, let's look at some of DJT's many, many promises. On healthcare and budgetary concerns, you see him pulling back from promises of better/cheaper healthcare, not trying to cut medicare/medicaid. Even on immigration and trade, he's walked a tough line but it's hard to say if he's really kept any of those promises. Do I blame him for that lack of delivery, were those promises lies? Well, he had GOP majority in 3 different branches and it didn't happen. He was a great campaigner for various reasons, however he has not effectively governed and delivered on promises, which his opponents would say is highly predictable. Is it then on his voters, they chose this politician who hasn't delivered? Is it their responsibility for not predicting the lack of progress he has made on even his own signature issues? Another theory is that candidates simply signal their stances/worldview/personality, and big/bold proposers like DJT and Obama are generally much more likely to get votes than incrementalists like HRC. Then, when it comes to real decisions, the bold promise-type politicians are practical and try to compromise to move towards their previous promises.
- kolbe 7y ago
  I disagree that it's the fault of anyone other than the process we've established. It's only a recent belief that democracy is a process for everyone to participate in. I personally think Locke and Rousseau were the two best early political theorists, and they would never have considered democracy a viable system if they knew people as poorly educated as most Americans are were enfranchised. The system collapses upon itself as poorly educated people vote their own pocket books and consistently fall for frauds. That's just inevitable when you build a system that's susceptible to it.
- everdev 7y ago
  I think both sides are competent. Electors at getting elected and voters at voting against what they don't want. We're pretty efficient at voting people out of office when they mess up egregiously. The two parties and winner take all system probably create what we see now where you want to have extreme positions to get elected, but only extreme enough to still win 50% + 1. It's like we're optimizing for agreement among the smallest majority possible. There's no incentive to win 90% of the vote. If your power as an elected official somehow increased in proportion to what % of the vote you got I think we'd see a lot more unique solutions to common problems rather than blaming the other side.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    > There's no incentive to win 90% of the vote. There is also no path to get 90% of the vote across the entire US population. As soon as a politician takes a stance on a polarizing issue, and they're not allowed to not take a stance, they lose half the vote. One could try and blend the tribes by choosing stances evenly-ish across them but it's practically impossible because you need tribal backing to have a successful run and that backing comes with a promise of loyalty. It probably wouldn't really work anyway -- people don't really tally positive stances, they vote for whoever has the fewest bad checks so everyone would end up hating you. Our electorate is, sans cheating, a reflection of ourselves. As long as we are divided about issues that are important to us so too will Capitol Hill. If there were a best solution there would be nothing to argue about unfortunately.
    - AstralStorm 7y ago
      So according to your idea, a politician who would not flag many bad boxes while getting a few common issues nailed down would be a winner? Unfortunately, this is not what we see. We get politics playing to respective power bases and not the actual electorate as an aggregate, and politicians that are a reflection of these power bases and not electorate.
      - Spivak 7y ago
        > not flag many bad boxes while getting a few common issues nailed down would be a winner Easier said than done when you have to take a stance on a bunch of polarizing issues, and any choice you make will be a bad check for half the population. Not messing up the issues people generally agree on is the easy part.
- goatlover 7y ago
  Democracy as a vote-maximizing system, which is an example of unintended consequences with powerful and complicated systems.
jameskilton 7y ago
The natural, final consequences of the Peter Principle? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Peter principle it is not. Politicians are competent, just not in the areas people need them to be competent in. They're competent in maintaining power bases (including outright lies in addition to just being weasels) and other political manoeuvering.
insulanian 7y ago
Because incompetent are stupid enough to "dare", while the smart ones are "too smart to mess with that".
polskibus 7y ago
Because creating ad distribution mechanisms delivers much more reward than governing. I'm being sarcastic but I think most would agree that current market mechanisms do not promise large enough financial rewards for solving the biggest problems for the society to attract the most competent in domains relevant to solving them and do not provide enough resources to do so.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Not even that. The rare competent people are consistently being sabotaged, denied and removed from posts to put people from "our team" in name of power. (Recent example in US was what happened to EPA.)
- awinder 7y ago
  Thinking out loud, but despite politicians going all over market-style structures (i.e., pay-for-performance with teachers, making welfare recipients jump through hoops, etc.) maybe you could flip this table on politicians for beneficial results: 1. Salary grading on some formula of bills proposed & bills voted on & passed could provide incentive for working together / compromising 2. Salary grading based on tenure could provide incentive to make your money in congress, versus using congress to make your money later 3. Maybe we need a mechanism where ideologues who waste time with meaningless votes on "crowd-pleasers" are disinvited from serving future terms
malvosenior 7y ago
We're governed by psychopaths. They may or may not be competent at the outward appearance of their jobs but they will be highly skilled at manipulation. See the Gervais Principle for a description of this in the private sector: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
afinlayson 7y ago
Well some ideas aren't based in reality. Brexit was anti-immigrant policy, and used non immigrant based lies to bring regular people onboard the idea. Aka the lie that 350 Million Pounds would go to NHS instead of EU. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/final-say-brexit-referendum-lies-boris-johnson-leave-campaign-remain-a8466751.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/final-say-bre... That coupled with the idea that every country thinks it's special, no one in America thought that kind of broad faced lie would happen in USA. Welcome to the new reality. I worry that the only way we have smart world leaders again is if they make a huge lie that gets ignored by some world event. Example: George W Bush and 9/11. No one worried about his promises afterwards, because national security was the prime focus.
- hedora 7y ago
  Current rates of ecosystem collapse imply salt water fish will be extinct by 2048, which will have unknown negative repercussions on the atmosphere’s ability to sustain human life, so I’m guessing you’re right: we’ll see global catastrophe before competent leaders.
- vixen99 7y ago
  For those strangely un-persuaded by an anonymous soapbox opinion, Pew Research has published some data relating to Brexit. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/24/brexit-vote-highlighted-uks-discontent-with-eu-but-other-european-countries-are-grumbling-too/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/24/brexit-vote...
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Interesting. Baby boomers don't have the background life experience to see that politics actually matters, so they treat it like a game? Plausible, very plausible. And politics recently (increasingly over the last 20 years, say) has come to resemble sports - people support their team, for no rational reason, but just because they are fans of that team. But that leaves us with politicians (and therefore government as a whole) that is focused on winning, not on governing. And so they fight their trench warfare against each other while the country burns. (Not literally... yet.)
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Additionally the whole process of becoming a prominent politician selects not for the best administrators nor planners nor visionaries. It selects for people who are best connected, most charismatic and most ruthless.
- dr_dshiv 7y ago
  Politics is entertainment -- sports teams. I don't think we can change that. Read the comments section in the WSJ -- always so depressing. I truly believe that philosophy is the answer. Unfortunately, modern philosophy has been stripped of rhetoric. And political philosophy is just sophistry.
- mattrp 7y ago
  I think you’re close in your perspective but I don’t think I would describe it as generational nor using the game analogy. Here’s my suggestion - coming from someone who spent a few years in the grassroots of a party’s infrastructure. First, the expectations of those who back a given party are way beyond reality. However the party elite sell this vision as achievable if only the party has the White House, both houses of Congress and the judiciary. Not only is this unreasonable, it completely unravels the minute all of these conditions aren’t met. Just look at all the executive orders and cornerstone legislation that Trump has been able to undo inside of a single term. Creating positions that requires an untenable, short-lived condition to be successful just doesn’t seem very smart to me. Yet both parties endorse this. At the same time, even when a single party controls everything it’s still not very good at getting what it wants — because there are a number of minority protections built in to the system. I think the first thing voters need to do is adjust our expectations. What can you compromise on? What positions can you live without entirely? What opposing policies might actually make sense over the next twenty or thirty years? I think it’s time we start thinking about how do we create laws that are sustainable when you don’t have all the power concentrated in one party.
deleted 7y ago
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motohagiography 7y ago
At what thing would people who govern be competent at to be considered competent? For any regular readers of the Financial Times, the irony of quoting Simon Kuper in an appeal to competence is surely a bit rich, given his open, haughty, contempt for people who make their livings working at jobs that require physical competence to create value, vs. sustaining cognitive dissonance to achieve political ends. But the question of what would "qualify," someone for governance is a useful one. Arguably, the bar for representing the interests of a constituency is very low, but mere democratic election does not provide enough confidence to legitimize the pervasive powers of social intervention representatives and modern public employees grant themselves. It's not clear what would confer legitimacy on these new technologically enhanced powers, but it's becoming evident that a ballot is decreasingly sufficient.
- chuckgreenman 7y ago
  I really like this comment, because I think it gets to the root of the problem. People on Hacker News would probably be happy with an engineer, systems thinker turned politician. That's probably because all of the smart people that we know and interact with regularly are engineers and systematic thinkers. What ever the Business version of Hacker News would probably want someone with a business or economic background. Ditto for medical professionals, artists, etc. What seems clear is that the only bar for being elected is some amount of charisma. Barring that, just stoke fear in your chosen party's base.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Systems thinking is a thing. Choosing and finding other competent people for executives and advisors is even more important. Unfortunately most people cannot gauge competence in areas they are not themselves competent in, falling back on charisma. It is an extremely hard skill to learn and train. Additionally, having stones enough to ignore personal affinities, and just the right level of distrust. Essentially being the ultimate in HR and headhunting is good enough.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
The point about boomers is valid, but why? Let's simplify it a little more. In my parent's day, and my younger days, almost every politican had had a life first. Lawyer, doctor, surgeon, Special Forces, union official, plenty of WW2 service too, you name it. You may not agree with their policy, but there was usually a huge breadth of life-experience, and often demonstrated knowledge even if you vary on the conclusion. We generally had older politicians as they had experience. There was a remnant of the once popular idea that after a successful life you gave something back in politics - locally or nationally. Now there's an expectation politicians need to be younger, media friendly etc. So now we're overrun by professional politicans who get their degree in PPE and expect to start chasing power the moment they graduate, with little more than family wealth or the increasingly common short PR/media career to look back on. They can draw on short political experience and little else. They increasingly have no idea how the world works. No amount of advisers and civil servants can close that gap.
- jcadam 7y ago
  In the U.S., we need to add about 20 years to the minimum age requirement for representatives, senators, and the president. Those were set back when the constitution was originally written (different world, etc.) and need to be increased. Also, set the minimum voting age to 30. That might help... some.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    1) No, sorry, you will not get better politics with old politicians. We've had those before. 2) That will exclude interests of a major bloc that is increasingly more politically active nowadays and is essentially baiting a revolution. (Because young people do not know how destructive those can be.)
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    What no... How will that actually change much, US politicians are currently quite a bit older than the minimum! > The average age of Members of the House at the beginning of the 115th Congress was 57.8 years; of Senators, 61.8 years, among the oldest in U.S. history Older doesn't mean better by default we've had year and years of governing by the old it's the default because they've had longer to raise their profile and to become independently wealthy enough to fund their campaigns. [0] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44762.pdf https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44762.pdf
netcan 7y ago
I think that the take-away from this affair is that we're not being governed by people, we are being governed by an institution, parliament. That institution is made up of other institutions, referendums, votes, political parties... In any case, the key institution for brexit was referendum. It was a particularly broken example of it too. First, the whole UK referendum thing is broken because they're not legally binding which means they don't end a debate. Second, both major political parties opposed it. This means Brexit was handed to a parliament (and pm) who didn't support it, to implement. Third, it's not something the UK is used to, referendums are a quirky rarity. ... This led to spectacle. 2 party politics also plays a bad role. May was stuck trying to get agreement from populists, extremists from her own party and the DUP.. She could have gone to her opposition instead, but it would have harmed the Tories politically. The recurring pathologies of democracy and nationalism are something we're used to. Obviously the proponents piled on the merits of Brexit and dismissed the opposite. They always do that. Anyway, it's the institutions failing. ..and I'm not sure they're failing, it's just taking forever. The only impossible thing about Brexit was northern Ireland, at least within the "red lines." The peace there was premised on the EU making sovereignty unimportant.
rndmize 7y ago
Variety of thoughts on this - We're governed by incompetents because we elect incompetents. We elect them because voting has become more of an emotional/cultural decision than a logical one. And this is largely because the big problems everyone could agree on have been solved - we're not under threat of attack from other countries; social security and medicare and other social welfare programs have taken care of much of the visible suffering in society; regulation has taken care of others. As a result we're left with issues that are harder to pin down and harder to solve (why are medical costs so high? how do we legislate on privacy?) and issues that have been turned into culture war elements by cranking up the emotional component and discarding the evidence and effects (abortion, Brexit, the wall, etc.) Also, I'm tempted to say that blaming this on boomers is a causation/correlation error - I'd look at the changes in media, starting with the TV debate between Nixon and Kennedy. It feels like since then, policy has mattered less and less, and appeal has mattered more. TV news feels like it has become ever more emotional over time - Fox appeals through fear, MSNBC through anger/frustration, CNN through surprise (breaking news alert!)
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  >We're governed by incompetents because we elect incompetents... Money quote. You're also right about this not really being the Boomers' fault.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  "The fault lies not in our politicians but in ourselves."
- SmirkingRevenge 7y ago
  Its unclear to me if we have more or less competent people in power than in the past... but maybe its become more complex to govern, as society scales up and becomes more complex itself?
  - pintxo 7y ago
    My take on this is that the relation between politics and the public has changed massively over the last 100 years and this seems to shape the sort of politicians we get. Today - as a politician - you need to be a media person, else you will easily look incompetent. This drives out mostly everyone who is not willing or able to handle the pressure of maintaining a public persona.
IOT_Apprentice 7y ago
Because we have an uniformed and often stupid citizenry. It now is apparent that this is not tied to any nation, as this spans the globe. For all knowledge and facts potentially available, most are uninterested and base their voting decisions off perception and their own biases. The competent are driven out when they don't hew to party doctrine or the cult of personality around the party leadership. You also now have a class of grifter idiot, who believes they have the skills to govern and implement policy that caters to the rich donor class that funds them. And those same candidates are voted in by people who say "it's time for a change". A change to what? And we've seen generations of poor vote in and keep in representatives who don't have their interests at heart, yet don't question why things haven't gotten better for them. Never underestimate the ability of everyday people to make catastrophic political decisions and empower corrupt and incompetent politicians. With the coming job apocalypse from machine learning, automation and robotics, ANGRY uninformed voters are going to make even more horrific choices for authoritarian monsters to rule them.
- belorn 7y ago
  Looking at voting statitics here in Sweden, the pattern is very similar to lobbying. A party that cater to one demographic gets votes for doing that, while loosing votes to demographics that the competition caters to. To me this shows the opposite of uninformed. The information about which political party is catering to which demographic is distributed well and effective. It becomes even more clear when two parties uses the others opposite demographic as "the other" for which all problems in society can be attributed to. When you are declared the enemy by one side and the targeted beneficiary by the other it is very easy for votes to align themselves accordingly. I don't blame them for that.
belorn 7y ago
For all the claim of incompetents, I must say I am enjoying this pause where the US has not started new wars. Looking at the list at wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States#21st-century_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...), a new war was started basically every second year. No new war since 2015. Maybe I just have a very low bar for competence.
- rtkwe 7y ago
  We're instead stuck in interminable wars basically fighting the idea of extreme fundamentalist Islam.
  - belorn 7y ago
    Yes, it seems that rather than starting wars and sending military out to fight, the discussing has landed on more abstract aspects. If this period becomes the longest time between new wars since 1978 then I think that is an improvement. 40 years with constant news wars every second or third year is kind of crazy. It only takes that the US last until 2020 without starting a new war for it to reach that "record", and given current political internal fighting between the left and the right it seems this will actually happen. It would be amazing if as a result the military budget would start to shrink as current ongoing wars ends.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - rtkwe 7y ago
      I think longest time without a new war is a pretty garbage metric considering we're just constantly in the same fight for the last 10+ years.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - belorn 7y ago
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
There are a lot of structural reasons why this happens. In the US one of the major ones is that the US government was not constitutionally intended to be large. As a result, for example, there is one elected position in the entire executive branch. We don't elect the Secretaries of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, etc. We don't elect the head of the FCC or the director of the FBI. They're all appointed by the President. Then we use FPTP voting instead of something sane like approval voting, which gives us two parties, which hypercharges the "team sport" dynamics that make everything worse. So not only do you only get to elect one member of the executive branch, you de facto only have a choice between two people. And it's really the same for Congress. There is more than one Congressman but you only get to vote for one and it's still FPTP. We don't have separate committees with separate members who are voted on independently. But fixing this would presumably require amending the constitution. Of course, another way to fix it would be to stop trying to do everything at the federal level to begin with. Because a lot of states and cities do make many of the equivalent offices elected positions.
lordnacho 7y ago
My formative years were spent at one of the universities where a lot of these incompetents went, and I am not surprised. If you want to know what is wrong with UK political culture, here's my take. The student politics at Oxford were a playground for these people. I never came across anyone who said anything sincere when it came to politics: - At JCR election time, you could see the political kids from a mile away. They'd approach me in the way politicians approach their voters: acting as if they knew you, despite never talking to you otherwise. You could just tell these guys were thinking "right, what would this nerd here want me to say?" and then some BS about how they'd help you out in particular. - Backstabbing was part soap, part sport. There's even special Oxford vocab for "working for someone who turns on you". It was just disgusting to get told random rumours about one candidate or another. - Sincerity is weeded out from the population. Some kids start off okay: they make realistic promises and are measured in assessing their chances of being able to press through changes. Before long, they are replaced by that guy who knows how to manipulate the crowd with rhetoric. - Their belief in their own ability is inexplicably high. Particularly people who study PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) think their opinions matter more than everyone else's. In fact someone started a motion that only PPEists should be allowed on the council. Part of the problem here is they don't seem to understand what their education actually is. And so they make the comparison to doctors, who actually ARE specially qualified to practice medicine. - Politics is treated like a game. You saw this with Brexit, Boris Johnson wrote a column supporting remain just before reversing. (https://news.sky.com/story/boris-johnsons-secret-remain-article-revealed-10619546 https://news.sky.com/story/boris-johnsons-secret-remain-arti...) Is this because the facts changed? No, of course not. He thought it would be fun to challenge his old pal David Cameron. You saw it with the Gove knifing incident, that's something that happens all the time at uni. These guys treat politics like a board game, an entertainment in which you are supposed to shock people with your moves. - Virtue signalling. Since you never know what thay're actually doing, there's a lot of posturing. They want you to think they are this or that archetype. When I was there there was a huge amount of talk about opposing the Iraq War. I opposed it too, but there's no reason a student organisation needs to have an opinion of the war. We don't all have to go on a college demo in London, people can figure out how to do that themselves. - Skin in the wrong game. Once you're a senior politician, your life is far removed from ordinary people. Your incentives are to stay elected, rather than to do what's right. Years later I actually went to visit an MP in Parliament. I had an issue to bring up about kids in deprived neighbourhoods. Anyway, the guy I knew had taken a different course in life. He'd actually worked in industry for a long time before going into politics. But he was a back bencher. The people who joined as kids have sewn up all the nice jobs in government. They know each other, and they keep things within the club.
olooney 7y ago
A timeless question. "Who shall mend the ship of state?" - Socrates, by way of Plato, paraphrased by Bertrand Russell > Plato's Socrates compares the population at large to a strong but nearsighted shipowner whose knowledge of seafaring is lacking. The quarreling sailors are demagogues and politicians, and the ship's navigator, a stargazer, is the philosopher. The sailors flatter themselves with claims to knowledge of sailing, though they know nothing of navigation, and are constantly vying with one another for the approval of the shipowner so to captain the ship, going so far as to stupefy the shipowner with drugs and wine. Meanwhile, they dismiss the navigator as a useless stargazer, though he is the only one with adequate knowledge to direct the ship's course. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_State Plato was not a huge fan of democracy, perhaps because Socrates had been put to death by the Athenian democracy. He defined five regimes[2] of which Democracy is the second most degenerate and says that Oligarchy (rule by the rich), Timocracy (rule by land owners), and Aristocracy (rule by a privileged class) are all better than Democracy, which from his point of view is essentially rule by the mob. [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_five_regimes Yet Plato's Republic, his own design for a Utopia, is essentially an totalitarian state[3] explicitly based on a lie[4]. North Korea is much closer to Plato's Republic than any country in Europe. It doesn't say much for philosophers as potential rulers that they first declare themselves to be the only suitable rulers, and then immediately propose an unworkable Orwellian nightmare of a society. [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_political_philosophy [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie#Plato's_Republic Ever since, the question, "by what means may wise rulers be selected?" has remained open, with no alternative method reliably producing better results than democracy, which itself has failures. Notably, democracy turns out to be worthless if the government controls all information or can manipulate election results. For this set of problems, fair voting systems, rule of law, and freedom of speech seem to be necessary ingredients for the long term success of democracy. However there is another failure mode, for which no solution is known: democracies are susceptible to demagogues. Demagogues have popped up on a regular basis to trouble everyone from ancient Athens[5] and 20th century America[6], always peddling much the same brand of inflammatory and largely baseless rhetoric. [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleon [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy The article's suggestion that baby boomers skewed perceptions resulting from being born in a rare window of almost unprecedented prosperity has been suggested as a general pattern: > “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” ― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain
ClayShentrup 7y ago
It's mostly a result of our voting system. Score voting or approval voting would change everything. https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting

41 points by deafcalculus 7y ago

I think the issue is that they are competent in the skill that matters; getting elected. Voters are not competent at the skill they need - voting for people who will do a good job running the government. I think part of it is because lies work so well in campaigns. People will believe things they want to believe, so if one candidate is telling a convenient lie and another a harsh truth, people will vote for the convenient lie. Of course, when it comes time to actually govern, the reality will come back to bite them, but by then it doesn’t matter. They already won the election.

Retric 7y ago
That’s one of the advantages to carrier politicians. It’s harder to sell the exact same lie across different campaigns. Though this can devolve into word games and meaningless platitudes. “I will fight for the American people.”
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  These people just merge into background for a time then make a comeback when everyone has forgotten the lie or a new even more outrageous one moves the set point...
nicholasjon 7y ago
Douglas Adams: "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/250456-anyone-who-is-capable-of-getting-themselves-made-president-should https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/250456-anyone-who-is-capabl...
- eli_gottlieb 7y ago
  Of course, looking back, it's hard to avoid the realization that Zaphod Beeblebrox was some sort of expy for Ronald Reagan.
WhompingWindows 7y ago
Lies are a broad category. If you mean overpromising / huge signature campaign promises, let's look at some of DJT's many, many promises. On healthcare and budgetary concerns, you see him pulling back from promises of better/cheaper healthcare, not trying to cut medicare/medicaid. Even on immigration and trade, he's walked a tough line but it's hard to say if he's really kept any of those promises. Do I blame him for that lack of delivery, were those promises lies? Well, he had GOP majority in 3 different branches and it didn't happen. He was a great campaigner for various reasons, however he has not effectively governed and delivered on promises, which his opponents would say is highly predictable. Is it then on his voters, they chose this politician who hasn't delivered? Is it their responsibility for not predicting the lack of progress he has made on even his own signature issues? Another theory is that candidates simply signal their stances/worldview/personality, and big/bold proposers like DJT and Obama are generally much more likely to get votes than incrementalists like HRC. Then, when it comes to real decisions, the bold promise-type politicians are practical and try to compromise to move towards their previous promises.
kolbe 7y ago
I disagree that it's the fault of anyone other than the process we've established. It's only a recent belief that democracy is a process for everyone to participate in. I personally think Locke and Rousseau were the two best early political theorists, and they would never have considered democracy a viable system if they knew people as poorly educated as most Americans are were enfranchised. The system collapses upon itself as poorly educated people vote their own pocket books and consistently fall for frauds. That's just inevitable when you build a system that's susceptible to it.
everdev 7y ago
I think both sides are competent. Electors at getting elected and voters at voting against what they don't want. We're pretty efficient at voting people out of office when they mess up egregiously. The two parties and winner take all system probably create what we see now where you want to have extreme positions to get elected, but only extreme enough to still win 50% + 1. It's like we're optimizing for agreement among the smallest majority possible. There's no incentive to win 90% of the vote. If your power as an elected official somehow increased in proportion to what % of the vote you got I think we'd see a lot more unique solutions to common problems rather than blaming the other side.
- Spivak 7y ago
  > There's no incentive to win 90% of the vote. There is also no path to get 90% of the vote across the entire US population. As soon as a politician takes a stance on a polarizing issue, and they're not allowed to not take a stance, they lose half the vote. One could try and blend the tribes by choosing stances evenly-ish across them but it's practically impossible because you need tribal backing to have a successful run and that backing comes with a promise of loyalty. It probably wouldn't really work anyway -- people don't really tally positive stances, they vote for whoever has the fewest bad checks so everyone would end up hating you. Our electorate is, sans cheating, a reflection of ourselves. As long as we are divided about issues that are important to us so too will Capitol Hill. If there were a best solution there would be nothing to argue about unfortunately.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    So according to your idea, a politician who would not flag many bad boxes while getting a few common issues nailed down would be a winner? Unfortunately, this is not what we see. We get politics playing to respective power bases and not the actual electorate as an aggregate, and politicians that are a reflection of these power bases and not electorate.
    - Spivak 7y ago
      > not flag many bad boxes while getting a few common issues nailed down would be a winner Easier said than done when you have to take a stance on a bunch of polarizing issues, and any choice you make will be a bad check for half the population. Not messing up the issues people generally agree on is the easy part.
goatlover 7y ago
Democracy as a vote-maximizing system, which is an example of unintended consequences with powerful and complicated systems.

jameskilton 7y ago

The natural, final consequences of the Peter Principle? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

AstralStorm 7y ago
Peter principle it is not. Politicians are competent, just not in the areas people need them to be competent in. They're competent in maintaining power bases (including outright lies in addition to just being weasels) and other political manoeuvering.

insulanian 7y ago

Because incompetent are stupid enough to "dare", while the smart ones are "too smart to mess with that".

polskibus 7y ago

Because creating ad distribution mechanisms delivers much more reward than governing. I'm being sarcastic but I think most would agree that current market mechanisms do not promise large enough financial rewards for solving the biggest problems for the society to attract the most competent in domains relevant to solving them and do not provide enough resources to do so.

AstralStorm 7y ago
Not even that. The rare competent people are consistently being sabotaged, denied and removed from posts to put people from "our team" in name of power. (Recent example in US was what happened to EPA.)
awinder 7y ago
Thinking out loud, but despite politicians going all over market-style structures (i.e., pay-for-performance with teachers, making welfare recipients jump through hoops, etc.) maybe you could flip this table on politicians for beneficial results: 1. Salary grading on some formula of bills proposed & bills voted on & passed could provide incentive for working together / compromising 2. Salary grading based on tenure could provide incentive to make your money in congress, versus using congress to make your money later 3. Maybe we need a mechanism where ideologues who waste time with meaningless votes on "crowd-pleasers" are disinvited from serving future terms

malvosenior 7y ago

We're governed by psychopaths. They may or may not be competent at the outward appearance of their jobs but they will be highly skilled at manipulation. See the Gervais Principle for a description of this in the private sector: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

afinlayson 7y ago

Well some ideas aren't based in reality. Brexit was anti-immigrant policy, and used non immigrant based lies to bring regular people onboard the idea. Aka the lie that 350 Million Pounds would go to NHS instead of EU. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/final-say-brexit-referendum-lies-boris-johnson-leave-campaign-remain-a8466751.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/final-say-bre... That coupled with the idea that every country thinks it's special, no one in America thought that kind of broad faced lie would happen in USA. Welcome to the new reality. I worry that the only way we have smart world leaders again is if they make a huge lie that gets ignored by some world event. Example: George W Bush and 9/11. No one worried about his promises afterwards, because national security was the prime focus.

hedora 7y ago
Current rates of ecosystem collapse imply salt water fish will be extinct by 2048, which will have unknown negative repercussions on the atmosphere’s ability to sustain human life, so I’m guessing you’re right: we’ll see global catastrophe before competent leaders.
vixen99 7y ago
For those strangely un-persuaded by an anonymous soapbox opinion, Pew Research has published some data relating to Brexit. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/24/brexit-vote-highlighted-uks-discontent-with-eu-but-other-european-countries-are-grumbling-too/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/24/brexit-vote...

AnimalMuppet 7y ago

Interesting. Baby boomers don't have the background life experience to see that politics actually matters, so they treat it like a game? Plausible, very plausible. And politics recently (increasingly over the last 20 years, say) has come to resemble sports - people support their team, for no rational reason, but just because they are fans of that team. But that leaves us with politicians (and therefore government as a whole) that is focused on winning, not on governing. And so they fight their trench warfare against each other while the country burns. (Not literally... yet.)

AstralStorm 7y ago
Additionally the whole process of becoming a prominent politician selects not for the best administrators nor planners nor visionaries. It selects for people who are best connected, most charismatic and most ruthless.
dr_dshiv 7y ago
Politics is entertainment -- sports teams. I don't think we can change that. Read the comments section in the WSJ -- always so depressing. I truly believe that philosophy is the answer. Unfortunately, modern philosophy has been stripped of rhetoric. And political philosophy is just sophistry.
mattrp 7y ago
I think you’re close in your perspective but I don’t think I would describe it as generational nor using the game analogy. Here’s my suggestion - coming from someone who spent a few years in the grassroots of a party’s infrastructure. First, the expectations of those who back a given party are way beyond reality. However the party elite sell this vision as achievable if only the party has the White House, both houses of Congress and the judiciary. Not only is this unreasonable, it completely unravels the minute all of these conditions aren’t met. Just look at all the executive orders and cornerstone legislation that Trump has been able to undo inside of a single term. Creating positions that requires an untenable, short-lived condition to be successful just doesn’t seem very smart to me. Yet both parties endorse this. At the same time, even when a single party controls everything it’s still not very good at getting what it wants — because there are a number of minority protections built in to the system. I think the first thing voters need to do is adjust our expectations. What can you compromise on? What positions can you live without entirely? What opposing policies might actually make sense over the next twenty or thirty years? I think it’s time we start thinking about how do we create laws that are sustainable when you don’t have all the power concentrated in one party.

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motohagiography 7y ago

At what thing would people who govern be competent at to be considered competent? For any regular readers of the Financial Times, the irony of quoting Simon Kuper in an appeal to competence is surely a bit rich, given his open, haughty, contempt for people who make their livings working at jobs that require physical competence to create value, vs. sustaining cognitive dissonance to achieve political ends. But the question of what would "qualify," someone for governance is a useful one. Arguably, the bar for representing the interests of a constituency is very low, but mere democratic election does not provide enough confidence to legitimize the pervasive powers of social intervention representatives and modern public employees grant themselves. It's not clear what would confer legitimacy on these new technologically enhanced powers, but it's becoming evident that a ballot is decreasingly sufficient.

chuckgreenman 7y ago
I really like this comment, because I think it gets to the root of the problem. People on Hacker News would probably be happy with an engineer, systems thinker turned politician. That's probably because all of the smart people that we know and interact with regularly are engineers and systematic thinkers. What ever the Business version of Hacker News would probably want someone with a business or economic background. Ditto for medical professionals, artists, etc. What seems clear is that the only bar for being elected is some amount of charisma. Barring that, just stoke fear in your chosen party's base.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Systems thinking is a thing. Choosing and finding other competent people for executives and advisors is even more important. Unfortunately most people cannot gauge competence in areas they are not themselves competent in, falling back on charisma. It is an extremely hard skill to learn and train. Additionally, having stones enough to ignore personal affinities, and just the right level of distrust. Essentially being the ultimate in HR and headhunting is good enough.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

The point about boomers is valid, but why? Let's simplify it a little more. In my parent's day, and my younger days, almost every politican had had a life first. Lawyer, doctor, surgeon, Special Forces, union official, plenty of WW2 service too, you name it. You may not agree with their policy, but there was usually a huge breadth of life-experience, and often demonstrated knowledge even if you vary on the conclusion. We generally had older politicians as they had experience. There was a remnant of the once popular idea that after a successful life you gave something back in politics - locally or nationally. Now there's an expectation politicians need to be younger, media friendly etc. So now we're overrun by professional politicans who get their degree in PPE and expect to start chasing power the moment they graduate, with little more than family wealth or the increasingly common short PR/media career to look back on. They can draw on short political experience and little else. They increasingly have no idea how the world works. No amount of advisers and civil servants can close that gap.

jcadam 7y ago
In the U.S., we need to add about 20 years to the minimum age requirement for representatives, senators, and the president. Those were set back when the constitution was originally written (different world, etc.) and need to be increased. Also, set the minimum voting age to 30. That might help... some.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  1) No, sorry, you will not get better politics with old politicians. We've had those before. 2) That will exclude interests of a major bloc that is increasingly more politically active nowadays and is essentially baiting a revolution. (Because young people do not know how destructive those can be.)
- rtkwe 7y ago
  What no... How will that actually change much, US politicians are currently quite a bit older than the minimum! > The average age of Members of the House at the beginning of the 115th Congress was 57.8 years; of Senators, 61.8 years, among the oldest in U.S. history Older doesn't mean better by default we've had year and years of governing by the old it's the default because they've had longer to raise their profile and to become independently wealthy enough to fund their campaigns. [0] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44762.pdf https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44762.pdf

netcan 7y ago

I think that the take-away from this affair is that we're not being governed by people, we are being governed by an institution, parliament. That institution is made up of other institutions, referendums, votes, political parties... In any case, the key institution for brexit was referendum. It was a particularly broken example of it too. First, the whole UK referendum thing is broken because they're not legally binding which means they don't end a debate. Second, both major political parties opposed it. This means Brexit was handed to a parliament (and pm) who didn't support it, to implement. Third, it's not something the UK is used to, referendums are a quirky rarity. ... This led to spectacle. 2 party politics also plays a bad role. May was stuck trying to get agreement from populists, extremists from her own party and the DUP.. She could have gone to her opposition instead, but it would have harmed the Tories politically. The recurring pathologies of democracy and nationalism are something we're used to. Obviously the proponents piled on the merits of Brexit and dismissed the opposite. They always do that. Anyway, it's the institutions failing. ..and I'm not sure they're failing, it's just taking forever. The only impossible thing about Brexit was northern Ireland, at least within the "red lines." The peace there was premised on the EU making sovereignty unimportant.

rndmize 7y ago

Variety of thoughts on this - We're governed by incompetents because we elect incompetents. We elect them because voting has become more of an emotional/cultural decision than a logical one. And this is largely because the big problems everyone could agree on have been solved - we're not under threat of attack from other countries; social security and medicare and other social welfare programs have taken care of much of the visible suffering in society; regulation has taken care of others. As a result we're left with issues that are harder to pin down and harder to solve (why are medical costs so high? how do we legislate on privacy?) and issues that have been turned into culture war elements by cranking up the emotional component and discarding the evidence and effects (abortion, Brexit, the wall, etc.) Also, I'm tempted to say that blaming this on boomers is a causation/correlation error - I'd look at the changes in media, starting with the TV debate between Nixon and Kennedy. It feels like since then, policy has mattered less and less, and appeal has mattered more. TV news feels like it has become ever more emotional over time - Fox appeals through fear, MSNBC through anger/frustration, CNN through surprise (breaking news alert!)

bilbo0s 7y ago
>We're governed by incompetents because we elect incompetents... Money quote. You're also right about this not really being the Boomers' fault.
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
"The fault lies not in our politicians but in ourselves."
SmirkingRevenge 7y ago
Its unclear to me if we have more or less competent people in power than in the past... but maybe its become more complex to govern, as society scales up and becomes more complex itself?
- pintxo 7y ago
  My take on this is that the relation between politics and the public has changed massively over the last 100 years and this seems to shape the sort of politicians we get. Today - as a politician - you need to be a media person, else you will easily look incompetent. This drives out mostly everyone who is not willing or able to handle the pressure of maintaining a public persona.

IOT_Apprentice 7y ago

Because we have an uniformed and often stupid citizenry. It now is apparent that this is not tied to any nation, as this spans the globe. For all knowledge and facts potentially available, most are uninterested and base their voting decisions off perception and their own biases. The competent are driven out when they don't hew to party doctrine or the cult of personality around the party leadership. You also now have a class of grifter idiot, who believes they have the skills to govern and implement policy that caters to the rich donor class that funds them. And those same candidates are voted in by people who say "it's time for a change". A change to what? And we've seen generations of poor vote in and keep in representatives who don't have their interests at heart, yet don't question why things haven't gotten better for them. Never underestimate the ability of everyday people to make catastrophic political decisions and empower corrupt and incompetent politicians. With the coming job apocalypse from machine learning, automation and robotics, ANGRY uninformed voters are going to make even more horrific choices for authoritarian monsters to rule them.

belorn 7y ago
Looking at voting statitics here in Sweden, the pattern is very similar to lobbying. A party that cater to one demographic gets votes for doing that, while loosing votes to demographics that the competition caters to. To me this shows the opposite of uninformed. The information about which political party is catering to which demographic is distributed well and effective. It becomes even more clear when two parties uses the others opposite demographic as "the other" for which all problems in society can be attributed to. When you are declared the enemy by one side and the targeted beneficiary by the other it is very easy for votes to align themselves accordingly. I don't blame them for that.

belorn 7y ago

For all the claim of incompetents, I must say I am enjoying this pause where the US has not started new wars. Looking at the list at wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States#21st-century_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...), a new war was started basically every second year. No new war since 2015. Maybe I just have a very low bar for competence.

rtkwe 7y ago
We're instead stuck in interminable wars basically fighting the idea of extreme fundamentalist Islam.
- belorn 7y ago
  Yes, it seems that rather than starting wars and sending military out to fight, the discussing has landed on more abstract aspects. If this period becomes the longest time between new wars since 1978 then I think that is an improvement. 40 years with constant news wars every second or third year is kind of crazy. It only takes that the US last until 2020 without starting a new war for it to reach that "record", and given current political internal fighting between the left and the right it seems this will actually happen. It would be amazing if as a result the military budget would start to shrink as current ongoing wars ends.
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - rtkwe 7y ago
    I think longest time without a new war is a pretty garbage metric considering we're just constantly in the same fight for the last 10+ years.
    - deleted 7y ago
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    - belorn 7y ago

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

There are a lot of structural reasons why this happens. In the US one of the major ones is that the US government was not constitutionally intended to be large. As a result, for example, there is one elected position in the entire executive branch. We don't elect the Secretaries of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, etc. We don't elect the head of the FCC or the director of the FBI. They're all appointed by the President. Then we use FPTP voting instead of something sane like approval voting, which gives us two parties, which hypercharges the "team sport" dynamics that make everything worse. So not only do you only get to elect one member of the executive branch, you de facto only have a choice between two people. And it's really the same for Congress. There is more than one Congressman but you only get to vote for one and it's still FPTP. We don't have separate committees with separate members who are voted on independently. But fixing this would presumably require amending the constitution. Of course, another way to fix it would be to stop trying to do everything at the federal level to begin with. Because a lot of states and cities do make many of the equivalent offices elected positions.

lordnacho 7y ago

My formative years were spent at one of the universities where a lot of these incompetents went, and I am not surprised. If you want to know what is wrong with UK political culture, here's my take. The student politics at Oxford were a playground for these people. I never came across anyone who said anything sincere when it came to politics: - At JCR election time, you could see the political kids from a mile away. They'd approach me in the way politicians approach their voters: acting as if they knew you, despite never talking to you otherwise. You could just tell these guys were thinking "right, what would this nerd here want me to say?" and then some BS about how they'd help you out in particular. - Backstabbing was part soap, part sport. There's even special Oxford vocab for "working for someone who turns on you". It was just disgusting to get told random rumours about one candidate or another. - Sincerity is weeded out from the population. Some kids start off okay: they make realistic promises and are measured in assessing their chances of being able to press through changes. Before long, they are replaced by that guy who knows how to manipulate the crowd with rhetoric. - Their belief in their own ability is inexplicably high. Particularly people who study PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) think their opinions matter more than everyone else's. In fact someone started a motion that only PPEists should be allowed on the council. Part of the problem here is they don't seem to understand what their education actually is. And so they make the comparison to doctors, who actually ARE specially qualified to practice medicine. - Politics is treated like a game. You saw this with Brexit, Boris Johnson wrote a column supporting remain just before reversing. (https://news.sky.com/story/boris-johnsons-secret-remain-article-revealed-10619546 https://news.sky.com/story/boris-johnsons-secret-remain-arti...) Is this because the facts changed? No, of course not. He thought it would be fun to challenge his old pal David Cameron. You saw it with the Gove knifing incident, that's something that happens all the time at uni. These guys treat politics like a board game, an entertainment in which you are supposed to shock people with your moves. - Virtue signalling. Since you never know what thay're actually doing, there's a lot of posturing. They want you to think they are this or that archetype. When I was there there was a huge amount of talk about opposing the Iraq War. I opposed it too, but there's no reason a student organisation needs to have an opinion of the war. We don't all have to go on a college demo in London, people can figure out how to do that themselves. - Skin in the wrong game. Once you're a senior politician, your life is far removed from ordinary people. Your incentives are to stay elected, rather than to do what's right. Years later I actually went to visit an MP in Parliament. I had an issue to bring up about kids in deprived neighbourhoods. Anyway, the guy I knew had taken a different course in life. He'd actually worked in industry for a long time before going into politics. But he was a back bencher. The people who joined as kids have sewn up all the nice jobs in government. They know each other, and they keep things within the club.

olooney 7y ago

A timeless question. "Who shall mend the ship of state?" - Socrates, by way of Plato, paraphrased by Bertrand Russell > Plato's Socrates compares the population at large to a strong but nearsighted shipowner whose knowledge of seafaring is lacking. The quarreling sailors are demagogues and politicians, and the ship's navigator, a stargazer, is the philosopher. The sailors flatter themselves with claims to knowledge of sailing, though they know nothing of navigation, and are constantly vying with one another for the approval of the shipowner so to captain the ship, going so far as to stupefy the shipowner with drugs and wine. Meanwhile, they dismiss the navigator as a useless stargazer, though he is the only one with adequate knowledge to direct the ship's course. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_State Plato was not a huge fan of democracy, perhaps because Socrates had been put to death by the Athenian democracy. He defined five regimes[2] of which Democracy is the second most degenerate and says that Oligarchy (rule by the rich), Timocracy (rule by land owners), and Aristocracy (rule by a privileged class) are all better than Democracy, which from his point of view is essentially rule by the mob. [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_five_regimes Yet Plato's Republic, his own design for a Utopia, is essentially an totalitarian state[3] explicitly based on a lie[4]. North Korea is much closer to Plato's Republic than any country in Europe. It doesn't say much for philosophers as potential rulers that they first declare themselves to be the only suitable rulers, and then immediately propose an unworkable Orwellian nightmare of a society. [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_political_philosophy [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie#Plato's_Republic Ever since, the question, "by what means may wise rulers be selected?" has remained open, with no alternative method reliably producing better results than democracy, which itself has failures. Notably, democracy turns out to be worthless if the government controls all information or can manipulate election results. For this set of problems, fair voting systems, rule of law, and freedom of speech seem to be necessary ingredients for the long term success of democracy. However there is another failure mode, for which no solution is known: democracies are susceptible to demagogues. Demagogues have popped up on a regular basis to trouble everyone from ancient Athens[5] and 20th century America[6], always peddling much the same brand of inflammatory and largely baseless rhetoric. [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleon [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy The article's suggestion that baby boomers skewed perceptions resulting from being born in a rare window of almost unprecedented prosperity has been suggested as a general pattern: > “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” ― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain

ClayShentrup 7y ago

It's mostly a result of our voting system. Score voting or approval voting would change everything. https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting