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Punoxysm comments on First(?) Rationalist elected to state government - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'll have bug fixed by Friday
Also, STEM backgrounds are much more common in other countries. It's moderately quirky that so many US lawmakers are lawyers.
This may be a feature of Anglosphere political systems. UK and Australian parliaments are very lawyer-heavy.
I'd suggest that maybe it is a feature of Common law legal systems, where laws are developed by judges and precedent plays a huge role. The US, UK and Australia are Common Law systems. Civil law, where legal principles are codified into a referable system which serves as the primary source of law, are a lot more easily understood and handled. So maybe the former system makes legal expertise both more challenging and more necessary for lawmaking.
If that hypothesis were true, other common law states (India, Canada, Israel) should tend to have more lawyers in office than civil law states (pretty much all other industrialized nations).
Colombia is a civil law state, and our presidents have included poets, journalists, and more recently, economists.
A good example is the PRC, where a clear majority of top officials have scientific or engineering backgrounds.
I recall reading that this was the result of PRC politicians picking up degrees because this helped them advance up the ladder? And that the degrees were mostly fake?
(Searching now I can't find anything on this, though.)
Yes, that is a problem. I believe it applies especially to advanced degrees, as officials are typically well past college age before they have the kind of pull needed to get themselves a fake degree.
As an example of a high official who got a STEM degree while still young and mostly unknown, take former president Hu Jintao, who got an engineering degree in the 1960s. (Source alert: It's the People's Daily. I assume they are trustworthy on this particular issue.)
But they are not elected, are they? So I don't think that's a very good example for this discussion.
Whether they are elected: They are not elected in universal suffrage elections, though they are chosen through a voting mechanism.
Assuming they are not elected, whether it is a good example: The comment to which I was responding used the term "public official" not "elected official." Second, all of the bullet points apply to unelected officials too. In the last bullet point, the constituents would be senior officials.