Pretty interesting article that's relevant:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...inst-democracy


I do like Churchill's quote,
Seems pretty accurate. Some people think it's really dangerous that uninformed people are allowed to vote. The flipside to that is if only the truly intelligent and competent make decisions, they'll lean towards a bias that aids their kind and potentially institutionalize oppression against the working/lower class.

We also run into the problem that people who are in charge work towards aiding the problems affecting their "kind" disproportionately. It's a very real tradition that the rich, intelligent, powerful, and advantaged demographics address, attack, and fix their problems much more quickly and command far more media attention than poor. Just look at flight overbooking. One rich doctor has a problem in how overbooking of flights were handled, which is inherently a problem that troubles the middle/upper-class more than anyone else because poor people can't afford to fly. Within the next month, all the media is reporting are more and more cases of flight overbooking, and now legislation is being passed to stop this issue. Meanwhile Flint Michigan has now gone two years without clean water and surprise surprise, 57% of their demographics are african american. Oh and 40.1% of their population lives in poverty.

But then you have the argument of affirmative action and the problems with the reverse of meritocracy. People who are put into position of power not because of their competency but because of their race obviously do a worse job.

The nature of our political system in the US also has problems with terms and what people do with their terms. It's been said before that you're either working to stay in office, or working to acquire office if you're in the political game. There's not enough of people actually doing their job. People are so worried that they'll lose their upcoming election, that they spend their time kissing babies and shaking hands that they aren't drafting legislation, holding important public conferences, and actually solving problems.

Finally - the people who would actually qualify to be good at the jobs we need in our government are smart enough to know working in government sucks. The way they are treated, their compensation, the way the media misrepresents people, it's too big of a headache and it's not worth it.


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I don't really think any ideology works best. Democracy isn't terrible. Our two party system is pretty set up with two ideologies, Democrats vs. Republicans. Democrats want the lives of poor people to not suck, Republicans want it to be easier to be rich. Which in term means it'll be easier to go from poor to not poor. It's advantageous to be part of the majority in this country, and we apparently acknowledge that since we do things for people strictly because their a part of a minority. I always say "Republicans are the greedy asses who's system of government works, but some people's lives suck in it. Democrats are living in a dreamland who's system of government only works if people don't suck, and some people tend to really suck". Their counterbalancing of one another seems healthy. I think the only way we improve as a nation is by increasing our education. The smarter our society, the more compassionate we tend to be. When we're smart, effect, and compassionate, we live in a more awesome society.

I think a lot of those problems will be fixed by increasing automation. Once we can allocate most crappy jobs to automation, we're going to find ourselves in a much better spot.