Monday, May 02, 2011

The Wisdom of the Masses

There is a very difficult aspect of politics, and democracy: the understanding of the people. In a world where everyone had perfect knowledge, then their own beliefs would dictate their opinions on any of a number of issues. We don't have perfect knowledge. More, the imperfections vary in size and distribution. So whenever you read a poll that asks opinion but really requires that those being polled have a fairly sound knowledge base, you need to take results with a grain of salt. Since there have been plenty of recent polls that indicate that the general public has no clue what government spends money on, public opinion on how it should reduce deficits is pretty meaningless in terms of whether it should dictate policy.

Unfortunately, politics doesn't care how poorly informed the populace is. It only cares about the opinion of [voters]. So that poll is very important to the politicians and therefore becomes important to policy despite the fact that it could be a monumentally bad idea to have policies derived from the opinions of the uninformed.*

*This is more important with respect to energy and climate issues.

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