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Comment by MonkeyMalarky | Hacker News Reader

It's tempting to suggest electing people based on their past experiences of successfully administering something, except all the real world examples I can think of are former CEOs getting elected to run the government "like a business" and it just leads to shortsighted privatization (and eventual degradation) of public services.

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That is true, though I feel like the issue has overlap in the emergence of public relations and the paradigm shift in advertising (from qualitative appeals to emotional appeals) over the 20th century. Basically it is a lot harder to accurately judge if someone can do something, but in modern politics that doesn't matter because emotional appeals are much more successful at capturing an audience. So the business ceo is just an archetype that appeals to an idea, and doesn't have much of a qualitative value outside of that. An example would be Carly Fiorina who ran in 2016 as the candidate with business acumen from her time as CEO with HP, when in reality her tenure at HP painted a different story.

When news broke that Carly Florina was stepping down, HP's stock gained 3 billion dollars in response.

Also up where I live there's still anger over the layoffs. For a lot of people HP was something more than a job, but more like the hub of their entire community.

This is the reason why a lot of countries will elect the mayor or governor of some part of the country. Having successfully administered a smaller part of the country is probably the best predictor we have for being able to administer a larger part.

Private sector experience can sometimes translate well, I've seen it in my country in a few places.

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