Against Democracy
Jason BrennanQuotes
While drivers collectively cause the pollution, no single
driver makes any significant difference. If I were the only driver, I
could drive my turbocharged sports sedan to my heart’s content and never cause any noticeable pollution. And the same goes for every other driver.
How much we pollute makes a huge difference, but for each person, how much they pollute make no real difference. So each individual person has little incentive to stop polluting.
Democracy is much like that. Voters remain ignorant and irrational because democracy incentivizes them to remain ignorant and irrational. So we have to ask, What should we do about it?
Sayfa 53
Epistocrats need not assert that experts should be bosses. Epistocrats need only suggest that incompetent or unreasonable people should not be imposed on others as bosses. They need only contend that democratic decision making, in certain cases, lacks authority or legitimacy because it tends to be incompetent. This leaves open what, if anything, justifies political power.
Sayfa 17
Many take it as an unquestionable, nonnegotiable axiom that everyone ought to have an equal share of political power. Unequal political power is a marker of injustice. They have a point. For most of civilized history, political power was distributed unequally, on the basis of morally arbitrary, repugnant, or evil reasons. We’ve made progress, and
Sayfa 18 - Arbitrary versus Nonarbitrary Grounds for Political Inequality
Epistocrats strike many people as authoritarian. They seem to hold that smart people should have the right to rule over others just because they know better. On this point, Estlund claims that defenses of epistocracy typically rest on three tenets: truth, knowledge, and authority.
Truth tenet: There are correct answers to (at least some) political
questions.
Knowledge tenet: Some citizens know more of these truths or are more reliable at determining these truths than others.
Authority tenet: When some citizens have greater knowledge or
reliability, this justifies granting them political authority over
those with lesser knowledge.
Sayfa 16
Political knowledge and economic literacy are not evenly spread
among all demographic groups. Political knowledge is strongly positively correlated with having a college degree, but negatively correlated with having a high school diploma or less. It is positively correlated with being in the top half of income earners, but negatively correlated with being in the bottom half. It is strongly positively correlated with being in the top quarter of income earners, and strongly negatively correlated with being in the bottom quarter. It is positively correlated with living in the western United States, and negatively correlated with living in the South. Political knowledge is positively correlated with being or leaning Republican, but negatively correlated with being a Democrat or leaning independent. It is positively correlated with being between the ages of thirty-five and fifty-four, but negatively correlated with other ages. It is negatively
correlated with being black, and strongly negatively correlated with being female. As I’ll explore in chapter 8, the basis of one of the major objections to epistocracy is the fact that political knowledge is spread unevenly among demographic groups.
Sayfa 33 - Some Citizens Know Much More Than Others