Frank Furedi on Democracy; Roland Fryer on measuring discrimination; Robin Hanson on social norms and population decline; Aaron Renn on building institutions
Hanson's essay was outstanding. I don't have children, but I have observed the child-raising of my three younger sisters- it is vastly different from the child-rearing done by our parents. We were definitely benignly neglected. I was literally a latch-key child by age 6 since both my parents worked. My friends and I regularly roamed far from home pretty much every day by the time I got my first bicycle at age 6. It really was a different world, and a far better one for producing well balanced adults, and my observations of my sisters' children supports this belief.
As a free range kid myself I am glad for the independence I experienced. At the same time I can look back and see that some lessons of life could have been learned with less pain if parents had been more involved in my teenage years. And there were opportunities I missed because I was so much on my own. But then I tell myself I wouldn't have listened anyway to what my parents recommended me to do.
My wife is much more involved with our kids than my parents ever were with me. But she respects their independence - she is not in any way a "helicopter parent". I think our kids appreciate having a mom that sincerely cares for them, even if some times she can be nibby. They know mom cares but they also know they have to prove themselves responsible and solve their own problems.
My key observation is my wife's approach to parenting does not scale. We had 4 kids and the first and the last got 55% of mom's energy - middle child phenomenon is real. If we had had more children there would have been more "middle kids" with a decreasing share of parental attention and an ever more exhausted mom.
As you note, both your parents worked. The rise of helicopter parenting (itself an expansion of the 1980s "soccer mom" phenomenon) seems to have arisen following the realization of women who wanted to stay home and raise children that their aspirations were being undermined. They perceived increasing expectations that women should have careers and contribute financially to their households, not leaving that solely to their husbands (we also saw shifting cultural expectations for men to do more at home - which are still occasionally mentioned in pro-working-women circles). By driving up cultural expectations for childraising and engagement with children, as well as driving up the cost and down the availability of non-parental child care (read up on the day care moral panic of the late '80s/early '90s, and the expansion of required qualifications for day care workers), traditionalists re-established the consensus that women with children would need to be heavily involved with them - essentially devoted to them and nothing else (and that men's primary role in life was breadwinning for those women). For employers, training and advancing women became less attractive due to the concern that, despite early commitment to career, they would in fact "take the mommy track" after having children (while men, conversely, would face enormous pressure to work and have little time for family), making success harder for actual career women and making the career track relatively less attractive for women. All this helped to reduce any perceived pressure on stay-home women to "get a job".
The problem, of course, is that this reaction effectively dramatically increased the cost of having children, both per-child and in total, and when something costs people more they tend to have less of it.
Residual variance: Reminiscent of the "Solow residual" in productivity. We economists invented a name for it, "Total Factor Productivity" which kind of sounds like an explanation but in fact it is just a catch-all term for "everything we don't know how to measure". Saying that some change in productivity is "due to" TFP is like Moliere's pedant explaining that opium induces sleep "due to" its dormitive properties.
I learned the model from Bob Solow, as I recall he was careful to emphasize that the Solow residual is just a name for the statistical residual. It's something we should try to explain, not an explanation.
I once interviewed a candidate who stank of body odor. He smelled like he hadn't bathed in a week. His resume was otherwise very impressive- Harvard Ph.D, Scripps post-doc, etc. and his published work was outstanding. He didn't get a single up-vote from the people who interviewed him, however.
The way kids used to play: talk about inclusive! The simple need to have the number to make our games fun, typically involved going from door to door trying to round everyone up, irrespective of age or how much you liked them. Our manners were unpolished. To the mom who answered the door: "Can Doug come out?", without preamble.* I specifically recall observing a convention of asking these two very namby-pamby siblings out, though they most often didn't, when we played a game called "Colored Eggs", because their yard and front door were particularly suited to it. Having asked, we felt entitled to their yard. We used the entire street, of course, and reflexively called out "Car" - or - "Turning" meaning no need to interrupt play.
*Kids are more mannerly now, perhaps precisely because they spend less unsupervised time with each other. Those who come to the door at Halloween are so polite, almost shy of grabbing candy. Like the boy who couldn't have been more than seven who asked me "What kind of a day did you have?" (!) after he said "Trick or treat".
The more people are treated like 4 year olds outside the voting booth, the more they will act like 4 year olds in the voting booth.
Ferudi is missing the point. Living Democratically” if it means anything, means being independent and self-governing inasmuch as possible. That is, a truly democratic society is one that maximizes individual choice, power and autonomy. That sort of citizen doesn’t need to go to the ballot box to opine on most decisions. He simply makes them himself, and allows other citizens to make those choices for themselves.
Modern, illiberal societies (ironically like he’s promoting) do the opposite of this. They infantilise individuals and thereby replace liberal democracy with illiberal mob rule.
Individual choice, power, and autonomy all mean different things to different people. Talk to an earnest young left-winger, and they will see no contradiction in saying that their power and autonomy requires the restriction of their political rivals. And this is true, just like the antebellum plantation owner gets more freedom, autonomy, and individual choice by owning chattel slaves. The Spartan's freedom comes from mastery over the helots and the Athenian's freedom comes from all the tribute paid by their allied cities and trade coming in through the harbor. This is why there can never be any such thing as total civic peace. TANSTAAFL is not just a principle in economics but in politics also.
We can insist until the end of time that people all learn to trade peacefully with one another, but this is not convincing to the very large numbers of people who naturally want to live off of tribute extracted by force.
Well, no. This is conflating membership in the polity (i.e. citizenship) with subjugation. Which might be why the left is fundamentally illiberal, but it does not follow that political peace (or citizenship) requires subjugation of others.
A leftist who says this is implicitly saying what the Athenian or Spartan or plantation holder made explicit. Only members of the party are citizens. The rest are subjects. You imply the numbers are on the side of people who want to live off tribute, but those who do are also a minority.
Our kids occasionally have unscheduled play with neighborhood kids, but one of the biggest limitations is that all the neighborhood kids are over scheduled. Just yesterday we were all together but they had to jet off to dance class. Today something else. Tomorrow yet another thing. If the kids aren't in the neighborhood, there can be no neighborhood play.
And when your in a spread out community, there aren't that many kids in walking distance.
I think part of the reason for play dates is that its the only reliable way to ensure that the kids will actually be there to play with.
I did visit a new HOA development in Florida where they had a central lagoon and event area that seemed to be the focus of the community. From what I could see it had a critical mass of kids and activities such that you could show up there and have kids to play with whenever. I think that kind of spontaneous "drop off" play might be the future.
As someone who has his parents living with him the biggest barrier is the grandparents desire to offer unsolicited advice and contradict the parent. This appears to be personality thing, my father never did so but my mother does it constantly. I've spoken about it with her many times and she can't seem to help herself.
Other than that it's been a very successful union, but that has been a really big issue. Especially now that we've been doing it long enough that I know she isn't going to change.
The modern confidence in materialism (only matter exists) seems to produce rejection of ideas (mind doesn’t exist).
And deep antipathy to religious principles and lessons from religious sources.
George Washington’s farewell address . . .
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.’’
Describes modern society.
“The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity.’’
So true. This before Robespierre. Lenin. Hitler. Where are the ‘volumes’ written.
Maybe, Robert Conquest. Lord Acton.
“Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.’’
Has not ‘reason and experience’ confirmed this opinion?
Various thinkers offer the observation for centuries ‘one proof of bible teaching is that humans imperfect, flawed. We all have proof from own heart, life.’’
The most hated idea from enlightenment was original sin. Rousseau.
Humans in state of nature good. Produced the ‘terror’, not religious zealots, but, French lawyers.
In which AK self-classifies under Jefferson’s taxonomy:
“Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interests. In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. Call them, therefore, Liberals and Serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, Whigs and Tories, Republicans and Federalists, Aristocrats and Democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same parties still and pursue the same object. The last one of Aristocrats and Democrats is the true one expressing the essence of all.”
I think Hanson is writing here from the perspective of a doting grandparent and wants to emphasize how important grandparents are. Out of my son's three grandparents, only one of them is useful (neither of them my parents). One small anecdote as a Catholic is that strangers from the parish constantly approach us to praise us and to give our son gifts and offer to do things for us. We volunteer a little bit, but really it is just because we show up, look young, and have kids. It's not something that you could easily replicate through policy, even if you were giving Soviet or Nazi-style fertility prizes.
I think it is easier to attribute fertility suppression to short term incentives rather than signaling theory. Corporations in practice are mechanisms for the shareholders to squeeze as much value as they can out of markets and employees. Corporations do not have infinite time horizons, and for the shareholders, a lot of them really will get "enough" value from an enterprise through short term extraction. It is very common for people to be in business just long enough to get rich enough by their lights.
One way to do this is to pump as much value as possible out of employees as you can within their youth. Youths tend to have weak bargaining power. The government in turn extracts from these entities and has an incentive to encourage more productivity. Babies hurt short term productivity. So, all the incentives are working in favor of operating like a more cuddly-friendly version of the sugar plantations of the 17th century, which were famous for working slaves very hard for short periods of time until they dropped dead before replacing them with new slaves. It's just in our system, the time horizons are a longer; they do not care that the host society dies because of this labor pattern.
Right, South Korea is the apotheosis of this extractive corporate model in which the state and its companies work in tandem to extract as much value as possible from a population without much concern for planting the next human crop. If you were looking at the SK situation not from the modern point of view with all the magical rhetoric built up around it, you would see a country under long-term military occupation, kept under mortal threat of a new war for a few generations, with the entire population under massive pressure to generate as much value as possible. It exists to feed the US and our friends with cheap, high quality electronics, cars, machinery, and plastics. The people are kept stimulated by plentiful entertainment and food, but they are spiritually dead.
Charles Murray had a quote to the affect that the essence of the modern western worldview is that human life is just a collection of atoms that activate and then after awhile de-activate. There is nothing outside of that time of activation and the purpose within that activation is to while away that time as pleasantly as possible.
If that is your worldview you are of course going to regard children as an unnecessary burden. Some individual humans may get enough personal joy out of children to have one or two (almost never more), but no institution would want more twenty year long investments that no politician or shareholder will be around to see.
Wherever this attitude takes hold you end up with below replacement fertility.
Yes, correct. It only seems remarkable because many of them have grandchildren our age or younger that have no children, and there are so few visible children in the community also.
Re: young people-- it probably would not be so bad if there was either no middle class women's lib or all the time spent on luxury and entertainment were instead spent on family. But that isn't the culture that we see in the post-boomer generation, rather we see SK-like behavior, with extraction on the working side and on the spending side (student loans, landlord, entertainment, etc.). It isn't something that is irresistible, but if enough people fail to resist it, it doesn't matter that much if there are escape hatches.
"Constitutional limits on government powers and Madisonian checks and balances" have repeatedly failed to contain government power. Why should we think that bringing them back would work this time?
Furdedi writes: "Democracy is the only medium through realising a better world."
Nope. Sometimes a popular vote or movement yields a better world. Most of the time the popular will of the people leads to more of the same, only with different names occupying the seats of political power.
Consider that the Revolutionary war was never "popular" and the collapse of the Berln Wall occurred without a vote. Democracy can be helpful for enabling people to "fire" bad leadership, but it is inadequate for ensuring good governance of a nation.
"Some of the essay is too politically incorrect to be quoted here."
I didn't see anything more politically incorrect than what you typically write. Did I miss something?
I'm thinking you said that because you had a reason to want people to read the whole piece. But again, I don't know why. I thought it was largely on target but I didn't see anything great about it.
Isn't there an easy way to judge the proper level of democracy? Compare the bills coming out of the senate and the house. I don't know if Garrett Jones or anybody else has studied this but it seems like an obvious natural experiment. Long terms seem to encourage more moral grandstanding.
The constitutional restrictions on the federal government lasted, what, about 70 years? Constitutionalism has been fighting a retreat since 1861. There is almost nothing left of it today. The first 10 amendments were supposed to be inviolable by anything short of the approval of 3/4s of the state legislatures. Yet every single one of those amendments enforcement now appears to be at the whim of a bare majority of Congress.
Furedi might be wrong, but I don't think constitutionalism works in practice, which leaves me feeling pretty hopeless about the future.
Hanson's essay was outstanding. I don't have children, but I have observed the child-raising of my three younger sisters- it is vastly different from the child-rearing done by our parents. We were definitely benignly neglected. I was literally a latch-key child by age 6 since both my parents worked. My friends and I regularly roamed far from home pretty much every day by the time I got my first bicycle at age 6. It really was a different world, and a far better one for producing well balanced adults, and my observations of my sisters' children supports this belief.
As a free range kid myself I am glad for the independence I experienced. At the same time I can look back and see that some lessons of life could have been learned with less pain if parents had been more involved in my teenage years. And there were opportunities I missed because I was so much on my own. But then I tell myself I wouldn't have listened anyway to what my parents recommended me to do.
My wife is much more involved with our kids than my parents ever were with me. But she respects their independence - she is not in any way a "helicopter parent". I think our kids appreciate having a mom that sincerely cares for them, even if some times she can be nibby. They know mom cares but they also know they have to prove themselves responsible and solve their own problems.
My key observation is my wife's approach to parenting does not scale. We had 4 kids and the first and the last got 55% of mom's energy - middle child phenomenon is real. If we had had more children there would have been more "middle kids" with a decreasing share of parental attention and an ever more exhausted mom.
As you note, both your parents worked. The rise of helicopter parenting (itself an expansion of the 1980s "soccer mom" phenomenon) seems to have arisen following the realization of women who wanted to stay home and raise children that their aspirations were being undermined. They perceived increasing expectations that women should have careers and contribute financially to their households, not leaving that solely to their husbands (we also saw shifting cultural expectations for men to do more at home - which are still occasionally mentioned in pro-working-women circles). By driving up cultural expectations for childraising and engagement with children, as well as driving up the cost and down the availability of non-parental child care (read up on the day care moral panic of the late '80s/early '90s, and the expansion of required qualifications for day care workers), traditionalists re-established the consensus that women with children would need to be heavily involved with them - essentially devoted to them and nothing else (and that men's primary role in life was breadwinning for those women). For employers, training and advancing women became less attractive due to the concern that, despite early commitment to career, they would in fact "take the mommy track" after having children (while men, conversely, would face enormous pressure to work and have little time for family), making success harder for actual career women and making the career track relatively less attractive for women. All this helped to reduce any perceived pressure on stay-home women to "get a job".
The problem, of course, is that this reaction effectively dramatically increased the cost of having children, both per-child and in total, and when something costs people more they tend to have less of it.
Residual variance: Reminiscent of the "Solow residual" in productivity. We economists invented a name for it, "Total Factor Productivity" which kind of sounds like an explanation but in fact it is just a catch-all term for "everything we don't know how to measure". Saying that some change in productivity is "due to" TFP is like Moliere's pedant explaining that opium induces sleep "due to" its dormitive properties.
I learned the model from Bob Solow, as I recall he was careful to emphasize that the Solow residual is just a name for the statistical residual. It's something we should try to explain, not an explanation.
I once interviewed a candidate who stank of body odor. He smelled like he hadn't bathed in a week. His resume was otherwise very impressive- Harvard Ph.D, Scripps post-doc, etc. and his published work was outstanding. He didn't get a single up-vote from the people who interviewed him, however.
That is your residual variance.
The way kids used to play: talk about inclusive! The simple need to have the number to make our games fun, typically involved going from door to door trying to round everyone up, irrespective of age or how much you liked them. Our manners were unpolished. To the mom who answered the door: "Can Doug come out?", without preamble.* I specifically recall observing a convention of asking these two very namby-pamby siblings out, though they most often didn't, when we played a game called "Colored Eggs", because their yard and front door were particularly suited to it. Having asked, we felt entitled to their yard. We used the entire street, of course, and reflexively called out "Car" - or - "Turning" meaning no need to interrupt play.
*Kids are more mannerly now, perhaps precisely because they spend less unsupervised time with each other. Those who come to the door at Halloween are so polite, almost shy of grabbing candy. Like the boy who couldn't have been more than seven who asked me "What kind of a day did you have?" (!) after he said "Trick or treat".
The more people are treated like 4 year olds outside the voting booth, the more they will act like 4 year olds in the voting booth.
Ferudi is missing the point. Living Democratically” if it means anything, means being independent and self-governing inasmuch as possible. That is, a truly democratic society is one that maximizes individual choice, power and autonomy. That sort of citizen doesn’t need to go to the ballot box to opine on most decisions. He simply makes them himself, and allows other citizens to make those choices for themselves.
Modern, illiberal societies (ironically like he’s promoting) do the opposite of this. They infantilise individuals and thereby replace liberal democracy with illiberal mob rule.
Individual choice, power, and autonomy all mean different things to different people. Talk to an earnest young left-winger, and they will see no contradiction in saying that their power and autonomy requires the restriction of their political rivals. And this is true, just like the antebellum plantation owner gets more freedom, autonomy, and individual choice by owning chattel slaves. The Spartan's freedom comes from mastery over the helots and the Athenian's freedom comes from all the tribute paid by their allied cities and trade coming in through the harbor. This is why there can never be any such thing as total civic peace. TANSTAAFL is not just a principle in economics but in politics also.
We can insist until the end of time that people all learn to trade peacefully with one another, but this is not convincing to the very large numbers of people who naturally want to live off of tribute extracted by force.
Well, no. This is conflating membership in the polity (i.e. citizenship) with subjugation. Which might be why the left is fundamentally illiberal, but it does not follow that political peace (or citizenship) requires subjugation of others.
A leftist who says this is implicitly saying what the Athenian or Spartan or plantation holder made explicit. Only members of the party are citizens. The rest are subjects. You imply the numbers are on the side of people who want to live off tribute, but those who do are also a minority.
Our kids occasionally have unscheduled play with neighborhood kids, but one of the biggest limitations is that all the neighborhood kids are over scheduled. Just yesterday we were all together but they had to jet off to dance class. Today something else. Tomorrow yet another thing. If the kids aren't in the neighborhood, there can be no neighborhood play.
And when your in a spread out community, there aren't that many kids in walking distance.
I think part of the reason for play dates is that its the only reliable way to ensure that the kids will actually be there to play with.
I did visit a new HOA development in Florida where they had a central lagoon and event area that seemed to be the focus of the community. From what I could see it had a critical mass of kids and activities such that you could show up there and have kids to play with whenever. I think that kind of spontaneous "drop off" play might be the future.
As someone who has his parents living with him the biggest barrier is the grandparents desire to offer unsolicited advice and contradict the parent. This appears to be personality thing, my father never did so but my mother does it constantly. I've spoken about it with her many times and she can't seem to help herself.
Other than that it's been a very successful union, but that has been a really big issue. Especially now that we've been doing it long enough that I know she isn't going to change.
Arnold
The modern confidence in materialism (only matter exists) seems to produce rejection of ideas (mind doesn’t exist).
And deep antipathy to religious principles and lessons from religious sources.
George Washington’s farewell address . . .
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.’’
Describes modern society.
“The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity.’’
So true. This before Robespierre. Lenin. Hitler. Where are the ‘volumes’ written.
Maybe, Robert Conquest. Lord Acton.
“Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.’’
Has not ‘reason and experience’ confirmed this opinion?
Various thinkers offer the observation for centuries ‘one proof of bible teaching is that humans imperfect, flawed. We all have proof from own heart, life.’’
The most hated idea from enlightenment was original sin. Rousseau.
Humans in state of nature good. Produced the ‘terror’, not religious zealots, but, French lawyers.
Why are these beliefs still accepted ?
Thanks
Clay
In which AK self-classifies under Jefferson’s taxonomy:
“Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interests. In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. Call them, therefore, Liberals and Serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, Whigs and Tories, Republicans and Federalists, Aristocrats and Democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same parties still and pursue the same object. The last one of Aristocrats and Democrats is the true one expressing the essence of all.”
--T. Jefferson to H. Lee. May 8, 1825.
I think Hanson is writing here from the perspective of a doting grandparent and wants to emphasize how important grandparents are. Out of my son's three grandparents, only one of them is useful (neither of them my parents). One small anecdote as a Catholic is that strangers from the parish constantly approach us to praise us and to give our son gifts and offer to do things for us. We volunteer a little bit, but really it is just because we show up, look young, and have kids. It's not something that you could easily replicate through policy, even if you were giving Soviet or Nazi-style fertility prizes.
I think it is easier to attribute fertility suppression to short term incentives rather than signaling theory. Corporations in practice are mechanisms for the shareholders to squeeze as much value as they can out of markets and employees. Corporations do not have infinite time horizons, and for the shareholders, a lot of them really will get "enough" value from an enterprise through short term extraction. It is very common for people to be in business just long enough to get rich enough by their lights.
One way to do this is to pump as much value as possible out of employees as you can within their youth. Youths tend to have weak bargaining power. The government in turn extracts from these entities and has an incentive to encourage more productivity. Babies hurt short term productivity. So, all the incentives are working in favor of operating like a more cuddly-friendly version of the sugar plantations of the 17th century, which were famous for working slaves very hard for short periods of time until they dropped dead before replacing them with new slaves. It's just in our system, the time horizons are a longer; they do not care that the host society dies because of this labor pattern.
South Korea’s anti-natal public policy was explicitly justified in that it would boost economic growth for a generation. Now they are in free fall.
Right, South Korea is the apotheosis of this extractive corporate model in which the state and its companies work in tandem to extract as much value as possible from a population without much concern for planting the next human crop. If you were looking at the SK situation not from the modern point of view with all the magical rhetoric built up around it, you would see a country under long-term military occupation, kept under mortal threat of a new war for a few generations, with the entire population under massive pressure to generate as much value as possible. It exists to feed the US and our friends with cheap, high quality electronics, cars, machinery, and plastics. The people are kept stimulated by plentiful entertainment and food, but they are spiritually dead.
Charles Murray had a quote to the affect that the essence of the modern western worldview is that human life is just a collection of atoms that activate and then after awhile de-activate. There is nothing outside of that time of activation and the purpose within that activation is to while away that time as pleasantly as possible.
If that is your worldview you are of course going to regard children as an unnecessary burden. Some individual humans may get enough personal joy out of children to have one or two (almost never more), but no institution would want more twenty year long investments that no politician or shareholder will be around to see.
Wherever this attitude takes hold you end up with below replacement fertility.
Yes, correct. It only seems remarkable because many of them have grandchildren our age or younger that have no children, and there are so few visible children in the community also.
Re: young people-- it probably would not be so bad if there was either no middle class women's lib or all the time spent on luxury and entertainment were instead spent on family. But that isn't the culture that we see in the post-boomer generation, rather we see SK-like behavior, with extraction on the working side and on the spending side (student loans, landlord, entertainment, etc.). It isn't something that is irresistible, but if enough people fail to resist it, it doesn't matter that much if there are escape hatches.
"Some of the essay is too politically incorrect to be quoted here." ??
"Constitutional limits on government powers and Madisonian checks and balances" have repeatedly failed to contain government power. Why should we think that bringing them back would work this time?
Furdedi writes: "Democracy is the only medium through realising a better world."
Nope. Sometimes a popular vote or movement yields a better world. Most of the time the popular will of the people leads to more of the same, only with different names occupying the seats of political power.
Consider that the Revolutionary war was never "popular" and the collapse of the Berln Wall occurred without a vote. Democracy can be helpful for enabling people to "fire" bad leadership, but it is inadequate for ensuring good governance of a nation.
"Some of the essay is too politically incorrect to be quoted here."
I didn't see anything more politically incorrect than what you typically write. Did I miss something?
I'm thinking you said that because you had a reason to want people to read the whole piece. But again, I don't know why. I thought it was largely on target but I didn't see anything great about it.
Isn't there an easy way to judge the proper level of democracy? Compare the bills coming out of the senate and the house. I don't know if Garrett Jones or anybody else has studied this but it seems like an obvious natural experiment. Long terms seem to encourage more moral grandstanding.
The constitutional restrictions on the federal government lasted, what, about 70 years? Constitutionalism has been fighting a retreat since 1861. There is almost nothing left of it today. The first 10 amendments were supposed to be inviolable by anything short of the approval of 3/4s of the state legislatures. Yet every single one of those amendments enforcement now appears to be at the whim of a bare majority of Congress.
Furedi might be wrong, but I don't think constitutionalism works in practice, which leaves me feeling pretty hopeless about the future.