Democracy of Fools

Sorry I have been gone for several weeks, but I was swamped writing papers for the HFES conference. Anyway, I am back.

Thanks to Bryan Caplan for this post on his econlog blog. He reports (and links to evidence) that the main premise of his research is that "democracies adopt bad policies because most people are irrationally committed to systematically mistaken economic (and other) beliefs, and politicians have to heed public opinion to get elected." I am not at all surprised. What we need to do is elect politicians based on their core values rather than specific policies and then reward them when they surround themselves with brilliant experts from all perspectives to argue the positives and negatives of different policy choices and then the politician weighs these and picks the (hopefully) best one.

How can we make this happen?