Sunder wrote:
I've recently seen people post Churchill's famous "democracy is the worst system of government except for all others that have been tried" and had other people respond as though it were a legitimate criticism of democracy. Both disapprovingly and approvingly I might add.
That quote is no indictment of democracy, but surely what we've learnt in the past few centuries has demonstrated that democracy is at least in dire need of reform.
First, we realized that the simple and intuitive first-past-the-post system is extremely broken, but multiple proposals on replacing it have been rejected in the UK and Canada by popular vote.
Arrow's impossibility theorem also shows that no voting system can satisfy all of the following conditions: 1) non-dictatorship, 2) independence of irrelevant alternatives (if voters prefer Obama to Romney, then Nader entering the race shouldn't cause Romney to rank above Obama), 3) Pareto efficiency (if voters unanimously prefer Bush to Hitler, then the result should rank Bush above Hitler).
Second, democracy requires an educated and politically active and savvy electorate. Events of the past few decades have shown that despite massive improvements in education, the electorate is still easily manipulated. Political apathy persists in countries with mandatory voting laws.
Third, democracy, with its focus on approval ratings and need to win re-elections term after term, fosters short-sighted governance and post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc thinking. The reality is that national economies and social progress are like drunken juggernauts with great inertia. They lurch this way and that unpredictably, and any government can at best hope to nudge them in the hoped-for direction. It's rather dubious whether any fluctuations in national economies can ever be rightly attributed to the administration that happens to be at the helm at the time or governed right before the current administration, but that's exactly what the electorate (as well as every administration) does. Politicians are also thus disincentivized from making long-term plans, and the electorate has short memories. Democracy seems ill-equipped to tackle the problems of climate change, pollution, mass extinctions, resource depletion, etc.
Now, a common criticism of democracy is that it's mob rule or tyranny of the majority. However, that supposition ignores group dynamics and human nature. In reality, mob rule is exactly the opposite of both tyranny of the majority and (ideal) democracy, in that mobs always consist of a few leaders and a great number of followers that could be swayed either way. When one speaks of mob rule, the French Revolution is often brought up as an example. However, as I've written in the past, even at the height of the French Revolution, the number of people taking part never even reached a tenth of the population of Paris. Fewer than a thousand people stormed the Bastille, and as many as 7,000 marched on Versailles, while the population of Paris peaked at around 600k in the 18th century and troughed at around 100k. And as the
median voter theorem shows, it is the median voter who decides the outcome in majority rule systems. In short, tyranny of the majority is pure fantasy.
How can we fix democracy? Honestly I don't think it's possible. The only hope is to pour money into AI research for the explicit purpose of designing AI to rule over human societies. We need a system that is beholden to no one and nothing but life itself and cold, hard logic.