I don't think engineers have any special insight into running governments, or are even particularly likely to beat lawyers at running governments. I know it's t

I don't think engineers have any special insight into running governments, or are even particularly likely to beat lawyers at running governments. I know it's tempting to believe this, given how many of us here are engineers, but I suspect the mentality of lawyers might be better suited to being democratic politicians than engineers and democratic politicians are clearly better suited to running countries than dictators - history is very clear on that point. What matters in a politician is primarily gathering wisdom from around the population and combining, synthesising it into policy. Reality is complex, nobody can see the big picture, there are millions of factors that can affect any nation-level decision. See it as hand-crafted logic (dictatorship/engineers) vs machine learning (votes/lawyers). Lawyering is likely especially suited to creating decent leaders because the heart of being a (trial) lawyer is debate and being able to represent people who you may not only disagree with, but actively suspect are criminals. You have to do your best to be the devils advocate anyway - which is a good skill to have if your job is or should be primarily implementing the decisions of the electorate.