Why are we governed by incompetents?

I think the issue is that they are competent in the skill that matters; getting elected. Voters are not competent at the skill they need - voting for people who will do a good job running the government.

I think part of it is because lies work so well in campaigns. People will believe things they want to believe, so if one candidate is telling a convenient lie and another a harsh truth, people will vote for the convenient lie. Of course, when it comes time to actually govern, the reality will come back to bite them, but by then it doesn’t matter. They already won the election.

Variety of thoughts on this -

We're governed by incompetents because we elect incompetents. We elect them because voting has become more of an emotional/cultural decision than a logical one. And this is largely because the big problems everyone could agree on have been solved - we're not under threat of attack from other countries; social security and medicare and other social welfare programs have taken care of much of the visible suffering in society; regulation has taken care of others.

As a result we're left with issues that are harder to pin down and harder to solve (why are medical costs so high? how do we legislate on privacy?) and issues that have been turned into culture war elements by cranking up the emotional component and discarding the evidence and effects (abortion, Brexit, the wall, etc.)

Also, I'm tempted to say that blaming this on boomers is a causation/correlation error - I'd look at the changes in media, starting with the TV debate between Nixon and Kennedy. It feels like since then, policy has mattered less and less, and appeal has mattered more. TV news feels like it has become ever more emotional over time - Fox appeals through fear, MSNBC through anger/frustration, CNN through surprise (breaking news alert!)

The point about boomers is valid, but why? Let's simplify it a little more.

In my parent's day, and my younger days, almost every politican had had a life first. Lawyer, doctor, surgeon, Special Forces, union official, plenty of WW2 service too, you name it. You may not agree with their policy, but there was usually a huge breadth of life-experience, and often demonstrated knowledge even if you vary on the conclusion. We generally had older politicians as they had experience. There was a remnant of the once popular idea that after a successful life you gave something back in politics - locally or nationally. Now there's an expectation politicians need to be younger, media friendly etc.

So now we're overrun by professional politicans who get their degree in PPE and expect to start chasing power the moment they graduate, with little more than family wealth or the increasingly common short PR/media career to look back on. They can draw on short political experience and little else. They increasingly have no idea how the world works.

No amount of advisers and civil servants can close that gap.

Interesting. Baby boomers don't have the background life experience to see that politics actually matters, so they treat it like a game? Plausible, very plausible. And politics recently (increasingly over the last 20 years, say) has come to resemble sports - people support their team, for no rational reason, but just because they are fans of that team.

But that leaves us with politicians (and therefore government as a whole) that is focused on winning, not on governing. And so they fight their trench warfare against each other while the country burns. (Not literally... yet.)

At what thing would people who govern be competent at to be considered competent?

For any regular readers of the Financial Times, the irony of quoting Simon Kuper in an appeal to competence is surely a bit rich, given his open, haughty, contempt for people who make their livings working at jobs that require physical competence to create value, vs. sustaining cognitive dissonance to achieve political ends.

But the question of what would "qualify," someone for governance is a useful one. Arguably, the bar for representing the interests of a constituency is very low, but mere democratic election does not provide enough confidence to legitimize the pervasive powers of social intervention representatives and modern public employees grant themselves. It's not clear what would confer legitimacy on these new technologically enhanced powers, but it's becoming evident that a ballot is decreasingly sufficient.

There are a lot of structural reasons why this happens.

In the US one of the major ones is that the US government was not constitutionally intended to be large.

As a result, for example, there is one elected position in the entire executive branch. We don't elect the Secretaries of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, etc. We don't elect the head of the FCC or the director of the FBI. They're all appointed by the President.

Then we use FPTP voting instead of something sane like approval voting, which gives us two parties, which hypercharges the "team sport" dynamics that make everything worse. So not only do you only get to elect one member of the executive branch, you de facto only have a choice between two people.

And it's really the same for Congress. There is more than one Congressman but you only get to vote for one and it's still FPTP. We don't have separate committees with separate members who are voted on independently.

But fixing this would presumably require amending the constitution.

Of course, another way to fix it would be to stop trying to do everything at the federal level to begin with. Because a lot of states and cities do make many of the equivalent offices elected positions.

I think that the take-away from this affair is that we're not being governed by people, we are being governed by an institution, parliament.

That institution is made up of other institutions, referendums, votes, political parties...

In any case, the key institution for brexit was referendum. It was a particularly broken example of it too.

First, the whole UK referendum thing is broken because they're not legally binding which means they don't end a debate. Second, both major political parties opposed it. This means Brexit was handed to a parliament (and pm) who didn't support it, to implement. Third, it's not something the UK is used to, referendums are a quirky rarity. ... This led to spectacle.

2 party politics also plays a bad role. May was stuck trying to get agreement from populists, extremists from her own party and the DUP.. She could have gone to her opposition instead, but it would have harmed the Tories politically.

The recurring pathologies of democracy and nationalism are something we're used to. Obviously the proponents piled on the merits of Brexit and dismissed the opposite. They always do that.

Anyway, it's the institutions failing. ..and I'm not sure they're failing, it's just taking forever.

The only impossible thing about Brexit was northern Ireland, at least within the "red lines." The peace there was premised on the EU making sovereignty unimportant.

We're governed by psychopaths. They may or may not be competent at the outward appearance of their jobs but they will be highly skilled at manipulation. See the Gervais Principle for a description of this in the private sector:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Because creating ad distribution mechanisms delivers much more reward than governing. I'm being sarcastic but I think most would agree that current market mechanisms do not promise large enough financial rewards for solving the biggest problems for the society to attract the most competent in domains relevant to solving them and do not provide enough resources to do so.

Because incompetent are stupid enough to "dare", while the smart ones are "too smart to mess with that".

Because we have an uniformed and often stupid citizenry. It now is apparent that this is not tied to any nation, as this spans the globe. For all knowledge and facts potentially available, most are uninterested and base their voting decisions off perception and their own biases.

The competent are driven out when they don't hew to party doctrine or the cult of personality around the party leadership.

You also now have a class of grifter idiot, who believes they have the skills to govern and implement policy that caters to the rich donor class that funds them. And those same candidates are voted in by people who say "it's time for a change". A change to what?

And we've seen generations of poor vote in and keep in representatives who don't have their interests at heart, yet don't question why things haven't gotten better for them.

Never underestimate the ability of everyday people to make catastrophic political decisions and empower corrupt and incompetent politicians.

With the coming job apocalypse from machine learning, automation and robotics, ANGRY uninformed voters are going to make even more horrific choices for authoritarian monsters to rule them.

It's mostly a result of our voting system. Score voting or approval voting would change everything.

https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting

My formative years were spent at one of the universities where a lot of these incompetents went, and I am not surprised. If you want to know what is wrong with UK political culture, here's my take.

The student politics at Oxford were a playground for these people. I never came across anyone who said anything sincere when it came to politics:

- At JCR election time, you could see the political kids from a mile away. They'd approach me in the way politicians approach their voters: acting as if they knew you, despite never talking to you otherwise. You could just tell these guys were thinking "right, what would this nerd here want me to say?" and then some BS about how they'd help you out in particular.

- Backstabbing was part soap, part sport. There's even special Oxford vocab for "working for someone who turns on you". It was just disgusting to get told random rumours about one candidate or another.

- Sincerity is weeded out from the population. Some kids start off okay: they make realistic promises and are measured in assessing their chances of being able to press through changes. Before long, they are replaced by that guy who knows how to manipulate the crowd with rhetoric.

- Their belief in their own ability is inexplicably high. Particularly people who study PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) think their opinions matter more than everyone else's. In fact someone started a motion that only PPEists should be allowed on the council. Part of the problem here is they don't seem to understand what their education actually is. And so they make the comparison to doctors, who actually ARE specially qualified to practice medicine.

- Politics is treated like a game. You saw this with Brexit, Boris Johnson wrote a column supporting remain just before reversing. (https://news.sky.com/story/boris-johnsons-secret-remain-arti...) Is this because the facts changed? No, of course not. He thought it would be fun to challenge his old pal David Cameron. You saw it with the Gove knifing incident, that's something that happens all the time at uni. These guys treat politics like a board game, an entertainment in which you are supposed to shock people with your moves.

- Virtue signalling. Since you never know what thay're actually doing, there's a lot of posturing. They want you to think they are this or that archetype. When I was there there was a huge amount of talk about opposing the Iraq War. I opposed it too, but there's no reason a student organisation needs to have an opinion of the war. We don't all have to go on a college demo in London, people can figure out how to do that themselves.

- Skin in the wrong game. Once you're a senior politician, your life is far removed from ordinary people. Your incentives are to stay elected, rather than to do what's right.

Years later I actually went to visit an MP in Parliament. I had an issue to bring up about kids in deprived neighbourhoods. Anyway, the guy I knew had taken a different course in life. He'd actually worked in industry for a long time before going into politics. But he was a back bencher. The people who joined as kids have sewn up all the nice jobs in government. They know each other, and they keep things within the club.

The natural, final consequences of the Peter Principle?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

A timeless question.

"Who shall mend the ship of state?" - Socrates, by way of Plato, paraphrased by Bertrand Russell

> Plato's Socrates compares the population at large to a strong but nearsighted shipowner whose knowledge of seafaring is lacking. The quarreling sailors are demagogues and politicians, and the ship's navigator, a stargazer, is the philosopher. The sailors flatter themselves with claims to knowledge of sailing, though they know nothing of navigation, and are constantly vying with one another for the approval of the shipowner so to captain the ship, going so far as to stupefy the shipowner with drugs and wine. Meanwhile, they dismiss the navigator as a useless stargazer, though he is the only one with adequate knowledge to direct the ship's course.

  [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_State

Plato was not a huge fan of democracy, perhaps because Socrates had been put to death by the Athenian democracy. He defined five regimes[2] of which Democracy is the second most degenerate and says that Oligarchy (rule by the rich), Timocracy (rule by land owners), and Aristocracy (rule by a privileged class) are all better than Democracy, which from his point of view is essentially rule by the mob.

  [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_five_regimes

Yet Plato's Republic, his own design for a Utopia, is essentially an totalitarian state[3] explicitly based on a lie[4]. North Korea is much closer to Plato's Republic than any country in Europe. It doesn't say much for philosophers as potential rulers that they first declare themselves to be the only suitable rulers, and then immediately propose an unworkable Orwellian nightmare of a society.

  [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_political_philosophy

  [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie#Plato's_Republic

Ever since, the question, "by what means may wise rulers be selected?" has remained open, with no alternative method reliably producing better results than democracy, which itself has failures. Notably, democracy turns out to be worthless if the government controls all information or can manipulate election results. For this set of problems, fair voting systems, rule of law, and freedom of speech seem to be necessary ingredients for the long term success of democracy. However there is another failure mode, for which no solution is known: democracies are susceptible to demagogues. Demagogues have popped up on a regular basis to trouble everyone from ancient Athens[5] and 20th century America[6], always peddling much the same brand of inflammatory and largely baseless rhetoric.

  [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleon
  
  [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy

The article's suggestion that baby boomers skewed perceptions resulting from being born in a rare window of almost unprecedented prosperity has been suggested as a general pattern:

> “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” ― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain

For all the claim of incompetents, I must say I am enjoying this pause where the US has not started new wars. Looking at the list at wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...), a new war was started basically every second year. No new war since 2015.

Maybe I just have a very low bar for competence.

Well some ideas aren't based in reality. Brexit was anti-immigrant policy, and used non immigrant based lies to bring regular people onboard the idea. Aka the lie that 350 Million Pounds would go to NHS instead of EU. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/final-say-bre...

That coupled with the idea that every country thinks it's special, no one in America thought that kind of broad faced lie would happen in USA. Welcome to the new reality. I worry that the only way we have smart world leaders again is if they make a huge lie that gets ignored by some world event. Example: George W Bush and 9/11. No one worried about his promises afterwards, because national security was the prime focus.