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As a side note, he raises an interesting question that has been floating in my head for a while. Two hundred years ago, politicians were the most educated and i

• rw 17y ago
  That's complicated by the trend towards cronyism.
• DrJokepu 17y ago
  [citation needed] - seriously though, I'm struggling to believe that politicians used to be any more competent a couple of hunderds of years ago. It's just that the incompetent ones aren't remembered. The United States had it's fair share of incompetent presidents in the 1850s for example.
  • chrischen 17y ago
    It could be based off the same argument for why there are less polymaths now, and that's simply because we know too much. Politicians need to know more to achieve the same level of well-roundedness as they did in say, the 1700s.
    • anamax 17y ago
      He's claiming that politicians were better informed than the rest of us in the past, not that they were informed enough in the past.
      • deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
      • chrischen 17y ago
        So politicians in the past were more informed because they had an easier time informing themselves. Those capable of being more well-rounded may have found politics to be a better fit since it was still manageable at that time. But now with more advancements in every specific area, it's harder to be well-rounded and perfectly up-to-date. So politicians nowadays cannot keep up and become more educated on issues because it requires more effort to thoroughly understand diverse topics. Is that what he meant?
        • anamax 17y ago
          > So politicians in the past were more informed because they had an easier time informing themselves. "Easier" isn't enough - they had to have it easier than other people. > Those capable of being more well-rounded may have found politics to be a better fit since it was still manageable at that time. "may"? How about some evidence (either way)?
          • chrischen 17y ago
            My point was that back then it was probably easier to be more generally educated to a useful degree relative to the general population. So the elite would have occupied the political positions while still being able to maintain a useful degree of general knowledgeness (forgive the made up word), whereas now it doesn't matter who goes into politics because he/she will have a hard time because it's so much harder to be knowledgeable about everything to the same useful degree as they did back then. My original point was that this doesn't need evidence because it can be reasoned out. But I guess that depends if my reasoning is faulty or not.
            • anamax 17y ago
              > My point was that back then it was probably easier to be more generally educated to a useful degree relative to the general population. That's not the same as "So politicians in the past were more informed because they had an easier time informing themselves." let alone "Those capable of being more well-rounded may have found politics to be a better fit since it was still manageable at that time." However, they do share common theme - you think that they favored those in political positions or the reverse more than they do now. > My original point was that this doesn't need evidence because it can be reasoned out. You're making claims about the relative ease of being a 1700s well informed farrier and 1700s politician and the relative ease of being a w2000s ell informed programmer and 2000s politician. How can those claims be evaluated without evidence?
    • munctional 17y ago
      I don't know. I'd seriously consider having a Thomas Jefferson instead of the last ten US presidents even armed only with the knowledge from his era.
  • BrentRitterbeck 17y ago
    And post 2008 as well.
  • aristus 17y ago
    This is a special case of the "they don't make things like they used to" fallacy. You only see the old stuff that was so exceptionally well-made that it survived.