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Comment by JohnJamesRambo | Hacker News Reader

Democracy only works well with an informed and educated populace and we have been defunding education for a decade. Add in the power of lobbyists and the newfound power of tech giants to inflict misery on humanity and you get the current “corporate rule” we are experiencing.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/a-punishi...

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This is a tired cliche that needs to die: Americans of voting age are the most educated they have ever been in history.

The problem is corruption and collusion between the parties to maintain the two party tyranny.

You can educate everyone to a PhD in political philosophy or political science for free and it would not noticeably change things unless they're willing to coordinate to vote for a third party (assuming that they can get the votes to change the system everywhere, which they probably can't) or pick up a rifle to break up the two party tyranny by threat (or enactment, should the powers that be not go peacefully) of force.

Almost nobody who went through the educational system in the last decade is even voting. People who are voting today were educated during a period of massively growing education funding: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/mar/02/dave-brat/...

In most states, your vote literally does not count.

(mine doesn't for a different reason since I'm a foreign citizen)

Only for the presidential race. Everything else (local offices, local ballot props, state office/props) counts quite a bit!

>Almost nobody who went through the educational system in the last decade is even voting.

Do I need more proof that defunding education was a bad thing?

I see this argument mentioned often, but what would really change with a well informed and educated population? They would still need to elect representatives from 2 different parties. Representatives who would still operate in the current framework. We would still see lobbies, bad short term policies implemented to be reelected, etc.

Support voting reform in an effort to weaken the grasp our first pst the post system retains on our politics?

I guess the idea is that those two parties would have more to gain from having evidence-based policies, and more to lose from outright lies.

Would they? I'm gonna be cynical here but why would they care? What would the "educated people" do otherwise? Not vote? So what? One of the 2 parties would gain power regardless.

If the populace are better educated, informed, and engaged, then having policies which are more evidence-based than your opponents' is more likely to get a greater vote share. This shifts the direction of the arms race away from senseless posturing and towards actual policy debate.

That's the idea at least, and I think it's worth considering. But yes, speaking as someone looking in to the US from outside, a more proportional voting system would also do wonders for your democratic legitimacy.

Can you point me to that wonderful time when the populace was informed and educated?

The average IQ is 100 - do you consider the capabilities of a person with less than 100 IQ (half the population) to be capable of being informed by your definition of informed? Does a person with less than 100 IQ want to be educated by your definition of educated?

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Alternative theory regarding power/politics:

The only thing that's happened in the last 100 years as far as I can tell, is introduction of new ideas has outpaced the human birth/death cycle in most places on earth.

When this happens, people who utilize new ideas to gain power are at odds with people who already have power but aren't ready to transfer it using the natural birth/death cycle.

This causes a great deal of friction. If you don't want the friction to be lubricated by human blood, those who have power need to have the humility to step down and let the younger generation utilize new ideas to keep things moving.

American politicians are incredibly arrogant, they think the populace is going to put up with another 4-8 years of 70+ year old dinosaurs and their dinosaur friends in Washington fine dining their country to irrelevancy. Hopefully we don't end up using human blood to resolve this friction like we've done historically.

I do not believe IQ is a relevant metric to determine ones ability to be informed politically.

You don't 'believe' an IQ range of 20-34, labelled as 'severely retarded' [0] is relevant to one's ability to be informed?

https://paulcooijmans.com/intelligence/iq_ranges.html

You're putting words into that poster's mouth as you shift the goalpost, but an IQ of 20-34 isn't especially common as IQ is not distributed uniformly. You might have a hard time being informed with a 34 IQ but that applies to all matters. IQ isn't designed to assess political competence nor even one's ability to be informed. Politically it's pretty irrelevant.

I believe that is an edge case and you know it

That's a fair point, but even then there's some good policies such as the breaking up of some monopolies that are backed up by the absolute majority of the American public, yet they aren't put in practice. It would seem to me that one would have to conclude that the problem is deeper, then.

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