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MugaSofer comments on Privileging the Question - Less Wrong
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I was suggesting that it might serve to render governance better.
You still have to focus on retaining popularity, via attacking political opponents and increasing PR skills, unless the elections are total shams.
Also, to be clear, I'm not advocating this position; just pointing out there are other arguments for it than the "Divine Right of Kings".
Under democracy, the people can decide if their stable government has outstayed its welcome after so many years.
Whilst aristos just have to keep slipping their rivals the poisoned chalice...much more discreet.
Got that.
Except that due to problems with rational ignorance they frequently make bad choices. Furthermore, this system encourages politicians to made shortsighted decisions.
Whereas aristos can be batshit crazy due to problems with genetics. Furthermore, this system encourages them to make selfcentered decisions.
What do you mean by "self-centered"? It is after all in a noble's self-interest to pursue the success of his manor and its inhabitants.
I'm not sure the lord of the manor and the tenant farmer define "success" the same way.
The politician and the voter in a democracy also don't define "success" in the same way.
There's an ordinary selection mechanism for politicians, and an ordinary selection mechanism for lords of the manor.
Ideally, the ordinary selection mechanism for politicians (elections) would choose people who define success the way the voter would define success. That said, we both know that this is not how things actually work. For principal-agent delegation reasons, politicians often have their own agendas that conflict with voter preferences. The politician agenda diverges increasingly from the voter agenda as the number of voters increases (i.e. national figures generally have more freedom to pursue their own ends than county officials).
Still, politician agendas cannot completely diverge from voter preferences. Observationally, many voter preferences are implemented into law. As an extreme example, bribery is illegal even though the prohibition is bad for most politicians. So there is reason to think that the ordinary selection process for politicians leads to some connection in the definition of success (teleologically, if not cognitively).
By contrast, there is no particular reason to think the ordinary selection mechanism (inheritance) picks lords of the manor who want to implement tenant farmers preferences. Unless you include revolutionary change, which does not seem like an ordinary selection process.
I think that is what I was trying to say, but you said it much better.
Inasmuch as democracy woks, they do. In an ideal democracy, representatives are servants of the people who are fired if they don't deliver. Diverging interests are failures, not inherent to democracy.
What do you mean by "inherent to democracy"? Certain types of failures, e.g., politicians pursuing short sighted policies because they're not likely to be around when said policies implode, are systemic to democracies.
In practice short-termism is ameliorated by life presidents, second chambers, career civil servants, etc.
Its in their economic interest to tax the peasantry to almost but not quite the point of starvation, and use the excess to fund land-acquisition, which is pretty much what they did for centuries. You could argue that with the benefit of hindsight, what they should have done is abandoned agriculture+war for education+industrialisation, since [by some measures] ordinary citizens of the present are wealthier than the aristocrats of the past. But I could argue right back that the industrial revoiution wasn't that good for the aristocaracy, as a class, in the end.
Only if you consider absolute gains preferable to relative/"zero-sum" gains, which our evolved psychological makeup isn't really prepared to do very well.
Social animals with a natural dominance hierarchy will often see "how well am I doing right now, compared to how well everyone else around me is doing right now?" as a more salient question than "how well am I doing right now, compared to how well I was doing before / how well I could be doing?".
That's what I meant.
nod I just felt it needed to be stated more explicitly.
Yes and it's in the interest of elected politicians to take all the property of 49% of the population and divide it among the remaining 51%.
Except that that never happens, and it's not in their interests to disrupt the economy that much, and it's also not in their interests to do something that might lead to civil unrest...and it never happens.
Well, it never happens at the 49%-51% level, but that's because there aren't any countries where 49% of the country is wealthy enough to be worth plundering (see Pareto). Massive redistribution of wealth away from minorities has happened quite a bit, as in Zimbabwe, Haiti, Germany, and others. The various communist revolutions seem to be an example of this, if you allow 'democracy of the sword', and I would suspect pogroms are as well, to the extent that property is looted as well as destroyed.
I don't think you have many good examples of democracies there.
Like Vaniver said, it's never happened this explicitly, but demanding that [group you've just demonized] pay their "fair share" is relatively common rhetoric. And yes, politicians are willing to do this even as it gradually destroys the economy as is happening right now in Europe.
Quite. It's hard to make it stick unless it is seen as fair.
You mean southern Europe? I don't know who you think the 49% are. (In fact, given the tendency of democracies to alternate between parties of the left and right, one would expect the 49% and 51% to switch roles, leading to an averaging out).
In any case, if Greek or Spanish voters vote for unsustainable benefits, more fool them, It wasn't done to them, they did it to themselves.
It is also in a factory-owner's interest to pursue the success of his factories and their workers. And yet...
What's more, it's in an emplyers interest to have workers who are stakeholders..
Only if we define "interest" in a rational sense (i.e., "how rational agents embodying the role of 'employers' should optimally behave if their goals/values are X), rather than in an evopsych sense (i.e., "how human apes embodying the role of 'employers' will tend to behave, and what that implies that the encoded values of human apes actually are").
Maintaining or improving position within the dominance hierarchy often co-opts other concerns that a human ape might have, up to and including bare survival. Often, that cognitive dissonance is "resolved" by that human ape convincing themselves that strategies which improve their position within the dominance hierarchy are actually strategies to achieve other goals that seem more palatable to the parts of their brain that cogitate palatability.
(In Anglo: "We like bossing more than we like living well, but we like thinking that we're trying to live well more than we like thinking that we're trying to boss. So, we trick ourselves into believing that we're trying to live well, when we're really just trying to boss.")
A stable government that loses power when it loses an election is, in fact "unstable".
Eh, taste-testers, bodyguards and damn good doctors are cheaper than election campaigns.
Well, I suppose all govt. is unstable, then. Which dynasty has been in power forever?
What good is that going to do a peasant like me? It's not like they are going to knock off the cost of electioneering from my taxes.
Stability is a matter of degree, as you're well aware. Few dynasties lose power after four years of rule.
Even a massive amount of spending on election campaigns is less likely to succeed (and thus less stable) than a (relatively) small amount of spending an safeguarding from assassination.
Also, election campaigns have negative effects on, among other things, the rationality of the populace; and they encourage polarization in the long term - in contrast, bodyguards discourage trying to off your rich uncle for the inheritance.