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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

It does underline the comparative disadvantage of America’s uneducated population: something like this wouldn’t get through because most of the population is too stupid to grok it. We’re foreclosed from an entire domain of solutions because idiots won’t or can’t tough through understanding them.

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The United States has one of the best education systems in the world, as proxied by the PISA test. US Asians have better results than anywhere but Singapore, Macau and Taiwan. US whites have better results than every majority white country besides Estonia and Switzerland. US Hispanics do better than every Hispanic country bar Spain. US Blacks outscore Jamaica, the only majority Black Country in the OECD and many European and South American countries.

I guarantee you the average Icelander does not understand how votes are distributed among parties. They trust the people who do it though.

Interesting that they do so good as young and end up mediocre (or below) as adults https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?plotter=h5&prim...

That’s for the entire US population. If you look at the US population without even attempting to correct for demographic factors the US looks unimpressive at all ages.

This is true, this is an inherently more complex system. Personally I prefer the French two-round system as a balance between complexity and proportionality -- America sorta has this with primaries, although them being months in advance and the districts being gerrymandered to hell doesn't help.

The French two-round system is wildy unproportional to the point that it is just very marginally less undemocratic than first past the post.

The good thing is — you don’t have to suffer the idiots. It’s a choice

> you don’t have to suffer the idiots. It’s a choice

Sure. And I don’t anymore. But the casualty of that choice is social empathy.

And yet we push the idiots to vote.

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