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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

I think you'd have to fix the educational system in the US before you could have meaningful direct democracy. Any form of democracy, be it representational or direct is only as good as the people that make it up. The more directly you empower the people, the more directly their opinions and ideas will be expressed in the country's laws.

The average person is woefully prepared to judge laws on their merits, be it economic laws or otherwise. They're arguably better prepared in Switzerland, but still not great compared to experts in the field. If you look to Africa, you can see what a mess you can make when your average person is not educated well at all. Democracy is often described as the best of a lot of bad options, but there's also a big variance in how well it works.

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Africa is a mess because of relentless Western imperialism, not because of "too much democracy".

It's rather elitist to say that more educated (AKA richer) citizens make "better" political decisions than less educated (AKA poorer) citizens. They both make decisions with relatively similar amounts of clarity in their respective class interests.

I'm sorry, but this is just foolish. It's like saying, "It's elitist to say that more educated engineers make better products than less educated one." One of the reasons the US wanted to have people read, why we made it part of public school, is to have an informed, i.e. educated, citizenry.

I'm glad that your political system is working well, not full of corruption, and that you have bright leaders who have a deep understanding of matters of education.

Here you assume that both engineering and politics are purely objective sciences, where one's cultural background is irrelevant, but that is true in neither case. The fact that silicon valley is mostly white men of a certain age and economic status has a big effect on what gets built, and what doesn't get built -- think about elon musk's obsession with tunnels and car transportation and disdain for public transit. Regardless how you feel, tht isn't just an objective rational problem, the fact that Elon isn't someone who has ever taken or relied upon public transit matters.

The same is true if social policy -- it's easy to look at the voting decisions of people without college degrees as "stupid" and "uninformed", but I would challenge you to think about how their actions are just as informed and reasoned as people in your demographic, they just come to a different conclusion because of their economic and cultural background. "Education" is often a proxy for race or class in political discussions. I would argue that policy (and engineering) is much more about values than knowledge -- is housing a human right? Is healthcare a human right? Should the United States acknowledge and repair the damages of slavery and systemic racism? Should we accept asylum seekers? Everyone may have compelling, reasoned arguments to these questions, but it is naive to say only college educated specialists have the correct ones.

Democracy leading to tyranny of the majority in form of a popularly approved authoritarian leader is unfortunately common, and not just in Africa - I'm from a country that walked that path as well. I don't know if it's because Western liberal democracies are more educated, or because their political culture evolved certain safeguards over time, but there clearly is a difference, and it's not elitist to point it out.

It's not elitist, it's reality. Do you really think uneducated people can make decisions requiring deep knowledge across many complex domains as well as well-educated people? That's tautologically false. Even well-educated people are pretty lost outside their own domain.

The kind of everybody is equal mentality that must underlie such a statement boggles my mind. It's an attitude that is shockingly disconnected from the real world. We may as well be talking about Santa Claus.

"Education" isn't just "knowing more things", it spending time at specific institutions -- institutions which some people have more access to than others, and institutions that impart a specific worldview. Going to a Chinese university vs an American University, or even an Ivy League vs a state school is a very different experience. And people can be educated about politics in a non-institutional context, ie through news media, local activism, friends and co-workers, unions, etc. What is shockingly disconnected from the real world is the idea that elite American educational institutions are somehow totally disconnected from social realities and study politics in a field of pure, unbiased reason

Yes, actual knowledge can come in many forms. But are you actually saying that, on average across populations, people who go to school/college aren't more knowledgable than people who do not? If that is in fact the case, we should completely abolish the entire education system, because it's clearly not effective.

No, I'm saying they are equally equipped to make decisions in a democracy.

That depends a lot on how you define knowledge.

If you take two 25 year olds, and one spent 7 years in the university system learning 'book knowledge', and one spent 7 years in industry learning via an apprenticeship (this sort of situation is common in Switzerland), then who is really more knowledgeable? What even is knowledge? Is knowledge obtained only from professors, or from managers and supervisors on the job, or practical experience, or a blend of all of these?

There's a reason the most famous successful tech CEOs in the USA seem to be college dropouts.

Most decisions put to referendum in Switzerland don't require deep knowledge. In fact most decisions governments make don't - they can't because neither politicians nor civil servants are chosen on the basis of their specialised knowledge.

Typical issues that go to referendum in Switzerland range from the trivial (shall we raise taxes to build a new football stadium/road tunnel/etc), to the constitutional (should international treaties be able to override referendums... that one is running at the moment). In none of these cases is a decision so complex that it can't be understood by everyone in a short time.

Generally, I've found that anyone claiming a government-level decision is too complicated to explain to an average person is trying to cover up major weaknesses in the underlying arguments.

The kind of everybody is equal mentality that must underlie such a statement boggles my mind. It's an attitude that is shockingly disconnected from the real world

The extent to which people differ in their moral and intellectual potential is the defining difference that creates right wing vs left wing politics in basically any democratic society. Read Thomas Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions" to get a very insightful analysis of why this is so. Far from being mind boggling, it's entirely expected that different people have different intuitions about the capability of the average person.

People may have different intuitions about the capability of the average person, but they're wrong. Not all opinions are equally valid.

Reality is one way, and we build models of it in our minds to differing degrees of accuracy - the better your models the better you are equipped to make decisions in life. This applies to political decisions, major life choices, what you eat for breakfast.

Politicians are not only not very well versed in the fields they need to understand, they're sometimes purposefully ignoring it in order to do something popular among their voters. Direct democracy makes this a bigger problem - it turns into tyranny of the majority and there is no check on what is popular (in Switzerland there are actually a lot of checks, but I'm talking more in general here about Athenian style direct democracy.)

Imagine a direct democracy in France once they have a majority Muslim population - you could start to watch the freedoms we take for granted in the West being rolled back one at a time. And it's not that their ideas are equally as good as our Western ideas - not all ideas are equal, and I think despite being obviously biased, it's true for me to say that many of our ideas are superior.

If you had a direct democracy in South Africa, they would take all property from the rich and redistribute it. The country would promptly fall apart like Venezuela and Zimbabawe where similar things happened. In Switzerland I think people understand the ramifications of doing, what on the surface, sounds like a good thing.

Representative democracy doesn't save us from this at all (the scenario in South Africa looked like it would come to pass, and they reversed course under international pressure) but it may curb some of the worst excesses of a direct democracy.

> Africa is a mess because of relentless Western imperialism

That's one hypothesis but there are many things it can't explain. We could compare African countries that were colonized to African countries that were not colonized. The hypothesis predicts a big difference but is there?

We could compare non-African countries that were colonized to African countries that were colonized. Hypothesis predicts a small difference, is there?

Imperialism continued after the end of formal colonization, and takes place even in countries that weren't formally colonized. Capitalism and imperialism are global systems that affect every nation on Earth, there is no unaffected country to compare to.

But there was a time before colonialism. And the comparisons for sub-Saharan Africa don't look that great that way either.

Sub-Saharan Africa had some pretty advanced and successful civilizations before colonialism.

Such as? All that I'm aware of is Ethiopia and you could make a pretty good case that that's primarily because of Ethiopia's proximity to the Dar al-Islam.

This is explored by Francis Fukuyama in "The Origins of Political Order" and "Political Order and Political Decay". He presents compelling arguments for why we have failed states but more interestingly, he works through how we got successful ones. Non-failed states are far more rare in history, and they are the goal, after all.

If it's education in a technical sense you're probably right; it's more about having some kind of institution where people learn to think politically and historically.

Democracy by itself is not necessarily a stable institution. In the absence of a strong social commitment to rule of law and an effective and disciplined state, it doesn't work. The path that some societies took to get to this state did involve education, and in particular literacy, to a fair degree.

Africa is a mess due to western imperialism but failed democracy is a different topic than that: because most societies started off in some kind of mess, either in disarray, or in a state of tyranny. We don't have any examples of states going directly from tribal societies to functioning democracies with rule of law in one, peaceable step. Looking only at the west, it took centuries of violent conflict.

Africa is a mess for a number of reasons. Western imperialism is probably the biggest, but there are plenty of other. Tons of deadly parasites and diseases and a general lack of good arable land in most places are also significant factors.

Point number one: agreed, Western Imperialism.

However (ignoring the ad hominem), I don't agree with your second point that a more education citizen will not necessarily make better decisions than less educated ones. Obviously everyone will make decisions that benefit themselves, but only with Education can someone understand the ramifications of their decisions in a broader context. Many political situations have little-to-no effect on an individual in the short-term, so making a decision (since it's not based on personal gain) must be based on something else. I would argue that something would be an individual's understanding of the impact on society in general - an understanding that a "good education" is supposed to cultivate.

Apologies if that was read as ad hominem, I meant that the argument is in my view elitist not that you personally are. My point is that formal education is not the only way to develop informed political consciousness. And in fact formal education may in many cases overlook the struggles of marginalized groups.

It is not only about Education in terms of knowledge in specific domains either, it is more about the population being able to some sort of critical thinking, which is more of an ideal than reality.

One of the reason why I think it didn't work out so well in poorest countries. I think they will need 10 to 20 years of Well placed Educational structure before Representative Democracy being used as a political system, and then hopefully moving to Direct Democracy.

While in representative democracies, decisions get made by "experts in the field" like [checks notes...] washed up reality TV hosts with a career defined by bankruptcy and white collar crime.

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