... people in democracies on average vote for more political power for the average Joe, which consequently means more power to those who form Joe's opinions -- the schools and the media. [...] To me it seems essentially correct.
Does it seem correct to you because it is the way you would expect the world to be, or because you have good observational data to back it up? I ask mainly because to me it seems a question whose answer is hard to establish; it's true that in all democratic countries the average Joe gained some additional power in the course of the last century, but 1) it was mainly a result of suffrage extension; after establishing universal suffrage over 18 I don't see any systematic increase of average Joe's power, 2) when trying to conclude the direction of a very slow power shift, we need precise ways to define and measure power, unless we want to risk our conclusions being infested by bias and random errors; when asked whether the average José in Spain has more power now than he had fifteen years ago, not only I am unable to answer, but I also lack a clear idea what information to check if I seriously intended to do some research and find it out.
Not only I am not sure whether the average Joe has, on average, more power now than he had ten or twenty years ago (not speaking about countries which went through an abrupt regime change), but I also doubt whether the average Joe actually votes for more (political) power. I see election campaigns putting much emphasis on social security, taxes, crime, healthcare, corruption, even morality and religion in some countries, but comparably few parties promise more power to the citizens. If getting more power was one of the more important goals of the average Joe, why do the parties so rarely include it in their programs?
Another question is whether the average Joe thinks he's an average Joe -- given how self-serving biases work, I doubt it -- and if not, why would he vote for more power for someone else?
Another question is whether the average Joe thinks he's an average Joe -- given how self-serving biases work, I doubt it -- and if not, why would he vote for more power for someone else?
The average Joe knows that he is not a millionaire, he is not a movie star, and he did not get Nobel price. His biases will probably make him believe that he is between 60th and 70th percentile. He can still vote for less power for the top 10%, or more popularly 1%.
The rest of your questions... I don't really know. Right at this moment it occurred to me that perhaps the ...
I've seen several people on Less Wrong recommend Mencius Moldbug's writings, and I've been curious about how he became so popular here. He's certainly an interesting thinker, but he's rather obscure and doesn't have any obvious connection to Less Wrong, so I'm wondering where this overlap in readership came from.
[EDIT by E.Y.: The answer is that he's not popular here. The 2012 LW annual survey showed 2.5% (30 of 1195 responses) identified as 'reactionary' or 'Moldbuggian'. To the extent this is greater than population average, it seems sufficiently explained by Moldbug having commented on the early Overcoming Bias econblog before LW forked from it, bringing with some of his own pre-existing audience. I cannot remember running across anyone talking about Moldbug on LW, at all, besides this post, in the last year or so. Since this page has now risen to the first page of Google results for Mencius Moldbug due to LW's high pagerank, and on at least one occasion sloppy / agenda-promoting journalists such as Klint Finley have found it convenient to pretend to an alternate reality (where Moldbug is popular on LW and Hacker News due to speaking out for angry entitled Silicon Valley elites, or something), a correction in the post seems deserved. See also the Anti-Reactionary FAQ by Scott Alexander (aka Yvain, LW's second-highest-karma user). --EY]