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Sarokrae comments on "Progress" - Less Wrong
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Democracy without raising the sanity waterline first is pretty much as useless a form of government as any other we've had so far. It's not really much in the way of "progress". In fact, I'd wager to say that no form of government can be that great without a decent baseline sanity level.
I totally haven't been killed or robbed. Either by a citizen or by someone in the government. Sure, the government is useless but at least it serves as a way to comparatively harmlessly waste a bunch of competition.
That should also be correlated with e.g low corruption, good laws, low crime, good police, good courts, good neighbors / social norms, low poverty, etc. etc. It's much easier to see how these things can directly lower the chance of you being robbed or killed, while the relation to democracy seems less direct.
Non-democratic governments have in the past paid service to all these ideals and claimed to good results on these measures. Do we have good information on how democracy correlates with not being killed or robbed if you control for all those other variables? Are there models which predict that democracy causes some of these other factors, perhaps?
My comment was prompted by the concept of governments so far being 'useless', advocacy of democracy isn't especially intended.
The phenomenon of people not getting killed by other people much, and especially not getting killed by those with the most power is a remarkable achievement, given how humans and other animals usually behave. We can call our governments "useless" only in the sense of "Yay! We've managed to find a way to make the machinations of leaders to be irrelevant rather than a constant threat and net negative to the rest of the population!"
Right, I didn't notice your comment wasn't about democracy specifically. Even if democracy is "as useless" (=as useful) as some alternatives, it wouldn't imply it is useless (=of no use) as e.g. having no formal government at all.
This is what has been attempted by the Ferry laws in France. The high rates of atheists and agnostics in France are a consequence of these laws, which made education mandatory and reduced the influence of the Catholic church on education.
However, I do not think it raised the sanity line in other domains, and it had bizarre effects, such as an important part of the population which say they belong to a religion but do not believe in any god.