As I browsed through the paper, it occurred to me that readers here on Hacker News may want to know more about public choice theory, a theoretical perspective t

As I browsed through the paper, it occurred to me that readers here on Hacker News may want to know more about public choice theory, a theoretical perspective that suggests some reasons why representative democracy will not work as ideally as hoped in any country. (The founders of the United States, writing about two centuries before public choice theory was studied under that name, were actually quite hard-headed about such issues, as you can see by reading The Federalist, the book including essays mostly by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton about why the federal Constitution should be ratified, although imperfect, in the 1780s.) Some links that I like for introductions to public choice theory (something I studied in a law school class on legislation in the 1980s) include these that I've Google up a few times before. http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21569692-james-buchanan-who-died-january-9th-illuminated-political-decision-making http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21569692... http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/publicchoice.htm http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/publicchoice.htm http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/pdf%20links/Booklet.pdf http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/pdf%20links/Booklet.... http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Public_choice_theory.html https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Public... As usual, the Winston Churchill quotation gets it right: "Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill