{"id":71,"date":"2005-06-14T14:03:54","date_gmt":"2005-06-14T22:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/2005\/06\/14\/problems-with-democracy\/"},"modified":"2015-10-11T16:14:42","modified_gmt":"2015-10-12T00:14:42","slug":"problems-with-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/2005\/06\/14\/problems-with-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Problems with Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> In the past few weeks two different studies showing the shortcomings of democracy have been getting a modest amount of publicity, but they deserve more.<br \/>\n One <a href=\"http:\/\/econlog.econlib.org\/archives\/2005\/05\/reviving_politi.html\">reports<\/a> evidence that voters reward politicians for manipulating the economy so that personal income is maximized in the two quarters before an election.<br \/>\n That short-sightedness isn&#8217;t good, but it leaves plenty of room for defenders of democracy to claim it&#8217;s unclear that the effect is harmful on balance. The most recent <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scienceblog.com\/cms\/node\/8151\">report<\/a> claims to demonstrate that the outcomes of about 70 percent of recent U.S. Senate races are predicted by a measure of how babyfaced each candidate is. The bad part about this is that this effect is negatively correlated with measures of competence such as intelligence, education, and ability to win military medals.<br \/>\nI guess I should think harder about what I can do to create something like <a href=\"http:\/\/hanson.gmu.edu\/futarchy.pdf\">Futarchy<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the past few weeks two different studies showing the shortcomings of democracy have been getting a modest amount of publicity, but they deserve more. One reports evidence that voters reward politicians for manipulating the economy so that personal income is maximized in the two quarters before an election. That short-sightedness isn&#8217;t good, but it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p80O1l-19","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":402,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions\/402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}