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Americans don't elect scientists for a simple reason: scientists by their nature lack the skills necessary to succeed as a popular politician. Singapore isn't
by Duff 15y ago
Americans don't elect scientists for a simple reason: scientists by their nature lack the skills necessary to succeed as a popular politician.
Singapore isn't a democracy in the same sense as the US or Britain. China is a not a democracy at all. So comparing the education levels of elected officials isn't really an apples-to-apples comparison.
In the US, a person's charisma, ability to relate to and attract the attention of voters, ability to build a political organization and ability to get things done within the political system define your success as a politician. Politicians start local, and build tight social networks as city councilmen, mayors, state legislators, etc. They then use those networks to get into Federal offices.
The great exception are candidates that skip the political process and reach high office by spending prestige capital (ie. President/General US Grant) or by spending lots of financial capital (ie. New York City Mayor Bloomberg). Even in these cases, these folks are actually buying access to someone else's political infrastructure.
None of this means that the US government does not have scientists working on policy. Scientists do work for the government as political appointees (ie. Secretary Chu of the US Department of Energy), as civil servants (ie. employees of NOAA), as contractors to government (ie. the RAND Corporation), or indirectly via unaffiliated think-tanks (ie. Federation of American Scientists).
- grecy 15y ago>In the US, a person's charisma, ability to relate to and attract the attention of voters, ability to build a political organization .... define your success as a politician. Exactly. In the US, being a successful Politician is a popularity game, much like Hollywood. Unfortunately, it has little to do with intelligence or if that person will actually do anything good for anyone.
- smsm42 15y agoElections can not be anything but the "popularity game" by the very definition - one that is most popular, i.e. appeals to the most people - wins the election. The only way to avoid it is to abolish the elections and the democracy. Now what constitutes the basis of this popularity - is it good looks, smooth talk, shiny awards or ability to promise most appealing bribes to the least moral populace - can differ. It would be nice if everybody would be so educated as to use only the "right" criteria to choose the most appealing candidate - the only wrinkle is nobody has any idea what those right criteria are and what makes one a successful manager on the scale of millions of people. We do know that many of the criteria in popular use - like spousal fidelity 30 years ago, formal education degree, or ability to successfully fake sincerity - are pretty bad predictors, but since we have very short supply of good ones, people have to do with what we have.