
Why are we governed by incompetents? - deafcalculus
https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2019/05/why-are-we-governed-by-incompetents.html
======
cortesoft
I think the issue is that they are competent in the skill that matters;
getting elected. Voters are not competent at the skill they need - voting for
people who will do a good job running the government.

I think part of it is because lies work so well in campaigns. People will
believe things they want to believe, so if one candidate is telling a
convenient lie and another a harsh truth, people will vote for the convenient
lie. Of course, when it comes time to actually govern, the reality will come
back to bite them, but by then it doesn’t matter. They already won the
election.

~~~
nicholasjon
Douglas Adams: "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President
should on no account be allowed to do the job."

[https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/250456-anyone-who-is-
capabl...](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/250456-anyone-who-is-capable-of-
getting-themselves-made-president-should)

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Of course, looking back, it's hard to avoid the realization that Zaphod
Beeblebrox was some sort of expy for Ronald Reagan.

------
rndmize
Variety of thoughts on this -

We're governed by incompetents because we elect incompetents. We elect them
because voting has become more of an emotional/cultural decision than a
logical one. And this is largely because the big problems everyone could agree
on have been solved - we're not under threat of attack from other countries;
social security and medicare and other social welfare programs have taken care
of much of the visible suffering in society; regulation has taken care of
others.

As a result we're left with issues that are harder to pin down and harder to
solve (why are medical costs so high? how do we legislate on privacy?) and
issues that have been turned into culture war elements by cranking up the
emotional component and discarding the evidence and effects (abortion, Brexit,
the wall, etc.)

Also, I'm tempted to say that blaming this on boomers is a
causation/correlation error - I'd look at the changes in media, starting with
the TV debate between Nixon and Kennedy. It feels like since then, policy has
mattered less and less, and appeal has mattered more. TV news feels like it
has become ever more emotional over time - Fox appeals through fear, MSNBC
through anger/frustration, CNN through surprise (breaking news alert!)

~~~
SmirkingRevenge
Its unclear to me if we have more or less competent people in power than in
the past... but maybe its become more _complex_ to govern, as society scales
up and becomes more complex itself?

~~~
pintxo
My take on this is that the relation between politics and the public has
changed massively over the last 100 years and this seems to shape the sort of
politicians we get.

Today - as a politician - you need to be a media person, else you will easily
look incompetent. This drives out mostly everyone who is not willing or able
to handle the pressure of maintaining a public persona.

------
NeedMoreTea
The point about boomers is valid, but why? Let's simplify it a little more.

In my parent's day, and my younger days, almost every politican had had a life
first. Lawyer, doctor, surgeon, Special Forces, union official, plenty of WW2
service too, you name it. You may not agree with their policy, but there was
usually a huge breadth of life-experience, and often demonstrated _knowledge_
even if you vary on the conclusion. We generally had older politicians as they
had _experience._ There was a remnant of the once popular idea that after a
successful life you gave something back in politics - locally or nationally.
Now there's an expectation politicians need to be younger, media friendly etc.

So now we're overrun by professional politicans who get their degree in PPE
and expect to start chasing power the moment they graduate, with little more
than family wealth or the increasingly common short PR/media career to look
back on. They can draw on short political experience and little else. They
increasingly have no idea how the world works.

No amount of advisers and civil servants can close that gap.

~~~
WhompingWindows
Can you specify example names of professional politicians we are overrun by?
I'm thinking and I can't even think of a single one. The majority of the
famous politicians I can think of have some kind of law background, which is
the former category you describe as the past.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Bill Clinton, born 1946, entered politics in 1977 (state attorney general), so
at age 31. Before that he was in law school, graduating in 1973. That leaves
four years between graduation and entering politics. (Note, for correlation
with the article's theme, that he is a baby boomer.)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez graduated in 2011, entered politics in 2018. She
actually had _more_ real-world experience than Bill Clinton, by quite a bit
(seven years instead of four). Still, she was 29 when first elected. (Not a
boomer.)

Nancy Pelosi was 42 when first elected (though she became a member of the DNC
when 36). But her father was a politician (Congressman from Maryland), and she
helped with his campaigns, so she was literally working in politics from
childhood. (She's slightly too old to be a boomer.)

George W. Bush was born in 1946, graduated in 1968. He first ran for office in
1978, ten years after graduation. (He's a boomer.)

Those are just the first four names that came to my mind, though in fairness
AOC came to mind precisely because she's so young. Also, Pelosi is from a
political family, which I didn't realize, but it often leads to earlier
political involvement. Still, it seems that there are NeedMoreTea's point is
valid: We've got more politicians who have been politicians for most or all of
their professional lives, and less politicians who have been something else
for an extended period and then went into politics.

------
AnimalMuppet
Interesting. Baby boomers don't have the background life experience to see
that politics actually _matters_ , so they treat it like a game? Plausible,
very plausible. And politics recently (increasingly over the last 20 years,
say) has come to resemble sports - people support their team, for no rational
reason, but just because they are fans of that team.

But that leaves us with politicians (and therefore government as a whole) that
is focused on _winning_ , not on _governing_. And so they fight their trench
warfare against each other while the country burns. (Not literally... yet.)

~~~
HuShifang
Agreed. I would note too that the closest thing to a broad-spanning
"formative" experience for US baby boomers was the Vietnam War -- but unlike
WWII, elites essentially sat that one out, afflicted as they were with "bone
spurs" and the like, and not _that_ many people actively participated in it.
(And, it was a more politically and morally problematic conflict than WWII to
boot.)

Anecdotally, I find that the baby boomers I personally know who did serve in
Vietnam tend to be more politically conscientious/open-minded and less
tribalistic than those who didn't.

------
motohagiography
At what thing would people who govern be competent at to be considered
competent?

For any regular readers of the Financial Times, the irony of quoting Simon
Kuper in an appeal to competence is surely a bit rich, given his open,
haughty, contempt for people who make their livings working at jobs that
require physical competence to create value, vs. sustaining cognitive
dissonance to achieve political ends.

But the question of what would "qualify," someone for governance is a useful
one. Arguably, the bar for representing the interests of a constituency is
very low, but mere democratic election does not provide enough confidence to
legitimize the pervasive powers of social intervention representatives and
modern public employees grant themselves. It's not clear what would confer
legitimacy on these new technologically enhanced powers, but it's becoming
evident that a ballot is decreasingly sufficient.

~~~
chuckgreenman
I really like this comment, because I think it gets to the root of the
problem. People on Hacker News would probably be happy with an engineer,
systems thinker turned politician.

That's probably because all of the smart people that we know and interact with
regularly are engineers and systematic thinkers. What ever the Business
version of Hacker News would probably want someone with a business or economic
background. Ditto for medical professionals, artists, etc.

What seems clear is that the only bar for being elected is some amount of
charisma. Barring that, just stoke fear in your chosen party's base.

~~~
AstralStorm
Systems thinking is a thing. Choosing and finding other competent people for
executives and advisors is even more important.

Unfortunately most people cannot gauge competence in areas they are not
themselves competent in, falling back on charisma. It is an extremely hard
skill to learn and train.

Additionally, having stones enough to ignore personal affinities, and just the
right level of distrust.

Essentially being the ultimate in HR and headhunting is good enough.

------
AnthonyMouse
There are a lot of structural reasons why this happens.

In the US one of the major ones is that the US government was not
constitutionally intended to be large.

As a result, for example, there is _one_ elected position in the entire
executive branch. We don't elect the Secretaries of Health and Human Services,
Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veterans
Affairs, Homeland Security, etc. We don't elect the head of the FCC or the
director of the FBI. They're all appointed by the President.

Then we use FPTP voting instead of something sane like approval voting, which
gives us two parties, which hypercharges the "team sport" dynamics that make
everything worse. So not only do you only get to elect one member of the
executive branch, you de facto only have a choice between two people.

And it's really the same for Congress. There is more than one Congressman but
you only get to vote for one and it's still FPTP. We don't have separate
committees with separate members who are voted on independently.

But fixing this would presumably require amending the constitution.

Of course, another way to fix it would be to stop trying to do everything at
the federal level to begin with. Because a lot of states and cities _do_ make
many of the equivalent offices elected positions.

------
netcan
I think that the take-away from this affair is that we're not being governed
by people, we are being governed by an institution, parliament.

That institution is made up of other institutions, referendums, votes,
political parties...

In any case, the key institution for brexit was referendum. It was a
particularly broken example of it too.

First, the whole UK referendum thing is broken because they're not legally
binding which means they don't end a debate. Second, both major political
parties opposed it. This means Brexit was handed to a parliament (and pm) who
didn't support it, to implement. Third, it's not something the UK is used to,
referendums are a quirky rarity. ... This led to spectacle.

2 party politics also plays a bad role. May was stuck trying to get agreement
from populists, extremists from her own party and the DUP.. She could have
gone to her opposition instead, but it would have harmed the Tories
politically.

The recurring pathologies of democracy and nationalism are something we're
used to. Obviously the proponents piled on the merits of Brexit and dismissed
the opposite. They always do that.

Anyway, it's the institutions failing. ..and I'm not sure they're failing,
it's just taking forever.

The only impossible thing about Brexit was northern Ireland, at least within
the "red lines." The peace there was premised on the EU making sovereignty
unimportant.

------
malvosenior
We're governed by psychopaths. They may or may not be competent at the outward
appearance of their jobs but they _will_ be highly skilled at manipulation.
See the Gervais Principle for a description of this in the private sector:

[https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
principle-...](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-
the-office-according-to-the-office/)

------
polskibus
Because creating ad distribution mechanisms delivers much more reward than
governing. I'm being sarcastic but I think most would agree that current
market mechanisms do not promise large enough financial rewards for solving
the biggest problems for the society to attract the most competent in domains
relevant to solving them and do not provide enough resources to do so.

~~~
AstralStorm
Not even that. The rare competent people are consistently being sabotaged,
denied and removed from posts to put people from "our team" in name of power.

(Recent example in US was what happened to EPA.)

------
insulanian
Because incompetent are stupid enough to "dare", while the smart ones are "too
smart to mess with that".

------
IOT_Apprentice
Because we have an uniformed and often stupid citizenry. It now is apparent
that this is not tied to any nation, as this spans the globe. For all
knowledge and facts potentially available, most are uninterested and base
their voting decisions off perception and their own biases.

The competent are driven out when they don't hew to party doctrine or the cult
of personality around the party leadership.

You also now have a class of grifter idiot, who believes they have the skills
to govern and implement policy that caters to the rich donor class that funds
them. And those same candidates are voted in by people who say "it's time for
a change". A change to what?

And we've seen generations of poor vote in and keep in representatives who
don't have their interests at heart, yet don't question why things haven't
gotten better for them.

Never underestimate the ability of everyday people to make catastrophic
political decisions and empower corrupt and incompetent politicians.

With the coming job apocalypse from machine learning, automation and robotics,
ANGRY uninformed voters are going to make even more horrific choices for
authoritarian monsters to rule them.

~~~
belorn
Looking at voting statitics here in Sweden, the pattern is very similar to
lobbying. A party that cater to one demographic gets votes for doing that,
while loosing votes to demographics that the competition caters to.

To me this shows the opposite of uninformed. The information about which
political party is catering to which demographic is distributed well and
effective. It becomes even more clear when two parties uses the others
opposite demographic as "the other" for which all problems in society can be
attributed to. When you are declared the enemy by one side and the targeted
beneficiary by the other it is very easy for votes to align themselves
accordingly. I don't blame them for that.

------
ClayShentrup
It's mostly a result of our voting system. Score voting or approval voting
would change everything.

[https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-
voting](https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting)

------
lordnacho
My formative years were spent at one of the universities where a lot of these
incompetents went, and I am not surprised. If you want to know what is wrong
with UK political culture, here's my take.

The student politics at Oxford were a playground for these people. I never
came across anyone who said anything sincere when it came to politics:

\- At JCR election time, you could see the political kids from a mile away.
They'd approach me in the way politicians approach their voters: acting as if
they knew you, despite never talking to you otherwise. You could just tell
these guys were thinking "right, what would this nerd here want me to say?"
and then some BS about how they'd help you out in particular.

\- Backstabbing was part soap, part sport. There's even special Oxford vocab
for "working for someone who turns on you". It was just disgusting to get told
random rumours about one candidate or another.

\- Sincerity is weeded out from the population. Some kids start off okay: they
make realistic promises and are measured in assessing their chances of being
able to press through changes. Before long, they are replaced by that guy who
knows how to manipulate the crowd with rhetoric.

\- Their belief in their own ability is inexplicably high. Particularly people
who study PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) think their opinions
matter more than everyone else's. In fact someone started a motion that only
PPEists should be allowed on the council. Part of the problem here is they
don't seem to understand what their education actually is. And so they make
the comparison to doctors, who actually ARE specially qualified to practice
medicine.

\- Politics is treated like a game. You saw this with Brexit, Boris Johnson
wrote a column supporting remain just before reversing.
([https://news.sky.com/story/boris-johnsons-secret-remain-
arti...](https://news.sky.com/story/boris-johnsons-secret-remain-article-
revealed-10619546)) Is this because the facts changed? No, of course not. He
thought it would be fun to challenge his old pal David Cameron. You saw it
with the Gove knifing incident, that's something that happens all the time at
uni. These guys treat politics like a board game, an entertainment in which
you are supposed to shock people with your moves.

\- Virtue signalling. Since you never know what thay're actually doing,
there's a lot of posturing. They want you to think they are this or that
archetype. When I was there there was a huge amount of talk about opposing the
Iraq War. I opposed it too, but there's no reason a student organisation needs
to have an opinion of the war. We don't all have to go on a college demo in
London, people can figure out how to do that themselves.

\- Skin in the wrong game. Once you're a senior politician, your life is far
removed from ordinary people. Your incentives are to stay elected, rather than
to do what's right.

Years later I actually went to visit an MP in Parliament. I had an issue to
bring up about kids in deprived neighbourhoods. Anyway, the guy I knew had
taken a different course in life. He'd actually worked in industry for a long
time before going into politics. But he was a back bencher. The people who
joined as kids have sewn up all the nice jobs in government. They know each
other, and they keep things within the club.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Fascinating to read a glimpse from the other side of the fence, which very
much reinforces my take from the outside. Even the parts I thought might be
just me getting a bit too cynical as I age. :)

> Particularly people who study PPE think their opinions matter more than
> everyone else's

This is why I hope for - but don't ever expect - a decline of professional
politicians, only concerned with party. A few more ex-army or navy would be
against silly wars _for good reason,_ even if young enough to have only seen
service in the first Iraq war. Some who have the basics of how tech works,
rather than inserting foot when they speak of it. Or actually worked in the
NHS or wherever. Even if there's the odd idiot commodity trader that gets
through. :)

On the left it's also become the home of the privileged, with far fewer who've
actually experienced poverty or disadvantage before making policy about it.

The back benchers no one knows, who make up many committees are far more
likely to have had a fair bit of real life experience. Select committees that
often do manage to come up with intelligent recommendations or criticisms.
None of whom are ever likely to get into cabinet, as you say, just to toe the
party line when whipped.

------
jameskilton
The natural, final consequences of the Peter Principle?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle)

~~~
AstralStorm
Peter principle it is not.

Politicians are competent, just not in the areas people need them to be
competent in. They're competent in maintaining power bases (including outright
lies in addition to just being weasels) and other political manoeuvering.

------
olooney
A timeless question.

"Who shall mend the ship of state?" \- Socrates, by way of Plato, paraphrased
by Bertrand Russell

> Plato's Socrates compares the population at large to a strong but
> nearsighted shipowner whose knowledge of seafaring is lacking. The
> quarreling sailors are demagogues and politicians, and the ship's navigator,
> a stargazer, is the philosopher. The sailors flatter themselves with claims
> to knowledge of sailing, though they know nothing of navigation, and are
> constantly vying with one another for the approval of the shipowner so to
> captain the ship, going so far as to stupefy the shipowner with drugs and
> wine. Meanwhile, they dismiss the navigator as a useless stargazer, though
> he is the only one with adequate knowledge to direct the ship's course.
    
    
      [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_State
    

Plato was not a huge fan of democracy, perhaps because Socrates had been put
to death by the Athenian democracy. He defined five regimes[2] of which
Democracy is the second most degenerate and says that Oligarchy (rule by the
rich), Timocracy (rule by land owners), and Aristocracy (rule by a privileged
class) are all better than Democracy, which from his point of view is
essentially rule by the mob.

    
    
      [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_five_regimes
    

Yet Plato's Republic, his own design for a Utopia, is essentially an
totalitarian state[3] explicitly based on a lie[4]. North Korea is much closer
to Plato's Republic than any country in Europe. It doesn't say much for
philosophers as potential rulers that they first declare themselves to be the
only suitable rulers, and then immediately propose an unworkable Orwellian
nightmare of a society.

    
    
      [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_political_philosophy
    
      [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie#Plato's_Republic
    
    

Ever since, the question, "by what means may wise rulers be selected?" has
remained open, with no alternative method reliably producing better results
than democracy, which itself has failures. Notably, democracy turns out to be
worthless if the government controls all information or can manipulate
election results. For this set of problems, fair voting systems, rule of law,
and freedom of speech seem to be necessary ingredients for the long term
success of democracy. However there is another failure mode, for which no
solution is known: democracies are susceptible to demagogues. Demagogues have
popped up on a regular basis to trouble everyone from ancient Athens[5] and
20th century America[6], always peddling much the same brand of inflammatory
and largely baseless rhetoric.

    
    
      [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleon
      
      [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy
    

The article's suggestion that baby boomers skewed perceptions resulting from
being born in a rare window of almost unprecedented prosperity has been
suggested as a general pattern:

> “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times
> create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” ― G. Michael Hopf, Those
> Who Remain

------
belorn
For all the claim of incompetents, I must say I am enjoying this pause where
the US has not started new wars. Looking at the list at wikipedia
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States#21st-
century_wars)), a new war was started basically every second year. No new war
since 2015.

Maybe I just have a very low bar for competence.

~~~
rtkwe
We're instead stuck in interminable wars basically fighting the idea of
extreme fundamentalist Islam.

~~~
belorn
Yes, it seems that rather than starting wars and sending military out to
fight, the discussing has landed on more abstract aspects.

If this period becomes the longest time between new wars since 1978 then I
think that is an improvement. 40 years with constant news wars every second or
third year is kind of crazy. It only takes that the US last until 2020 without
starting a new war for it to reach that "record", and given current political
internal fighting between the left and the right it seems this will actually
happen. It would be amazing if as a result the military budget would start to
shrink as current ongoing wars ends.

~~~
rtkwe
I think longest time without a new war is a pretty garbage metric considering
we're just constantly in the same fight for the last 10+ years.

~~~
belorn
Lumping together Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Kenya, Indian Ocean,
Libya, Uganda, Syria, and Yemen as the same fight is a rather garbage argument
considering that the US has different reason in each case to go to war and
with different goals.

------
afinlayson
Well some ideas aren't based in reality. Brexit was anti-immigrant policy, and
used non immigrant based lies to bring regular people onboard the idea. Aka
the lie that 350 Million Pounds would go to NHS instead of EU.
[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/final-say-
bre...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/final-say-brexit-
referendum-lies-boris-johnson-leave-campaign-remain-a8466751.html)

That coupled with the idea that every country thinks it's special, no one in
America thought that kind of broad faced lie would happen in USA. Welcome to
the new reality. I worry that the only way we have smart world leaders again
is if they make a huge lie that gets ignored by some world event. Example:
George W Bush and 9/11\. No one worried about his promises afterwards, because
national security was the prime focus.

~~~
vixen99
For those strangely un-persuaded by an anonymous soapbox opinion, Pew Research
has published some data relating to Brexit.

[https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/24/brexit-
vote...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/24/brexit-vote-
highlighted-uks-discontent-with-eu-but-other-european-countries-are-grumbling-
too/)

