“Nobody’s vote makes very much difference, so people are happy to vote for signaling/psychological reasons rather than financial ones. If casting my vote to help the poor makes me feel like a good person, but losing money in redistribution schemes makes me poorer, well, my vote 100% determines whether I feel good or not, but only 1/300-million determines whether I get poorer.” — Scott Alexander
See also: “Most people discuss political ideas not in order to help other people, but in order to signal how concerned and intelligent they are, or as part of group bonding rituals.”
“If you move from a democracy of the elites to a pure democracy of the will of the people, you will pay a very, very heavy price. Governing is a complicated and difficult job — it’s not something which can helpfully be outsourced to the masses, especially when the people often base their opinions on outright lies. […] If you really believe in democracy, you don’t just kick out the elites. You take it upon yourself to put together a coherent alternative platform — one which will spread prosperity more evenly. All democracies need effective leadership, and plan beats no plan every time.” — Felix Salmon in response to Brexit
“The writing down of history turned out to be a self-perpetuating activity. Anytime kids asked questions, adults would yell, ‘READ THE FUCKING MANUAL!’ (later shortened to ‘BECAUSE I SAID SO’). These kids, when they grew up, tended to reproduce this behavior. This was called culture.”
“Armed with priestly justifications, and supported by good people, political leaders could finally begin going beyond mere intentions and retcons and actually begin inventing history. They were no longer limited to merely encountering it in the form of unpleasant surprises, and reacting to it on an improvised case-by-case basis. The ability to separately define ‘good’ and ‘people’ allowed history writing to become truly predictable, proactive, scalable and deployable to large populations. Sometimes history could even be written before it happened.”
“I like that the electorate is able to vote against the establishment when they’re pissed off. But I don’t like it when they don’t seem to know who the establishment is (say, a third generation real estate scion with inherited wealth who appears to have squandered much of it) and that the most important decisions that we make as citizens require no real accountability on the part of the electorate — just a general impression of who the candidate is, based on soundbites and entertainment-oriented media constructions. […] People who can’t locate Benghazi on a map will invoke it while not being able to articulate what our Libyan policy was in the first place because it’s a meme at this point, not an actual event that happened with verifiable facts. […] People who flock to demagogues don’t exactly have an empirical bent in the first place.” — Elizabeth Spiers
“The great fortunes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were built on the backs of worker-consumers in primarily inward-looking national contexts. By contrast, today’s plutocrats thrive by selling their goods and services globally; their success is dramatically less connected to the fortunes of their fellow national citizens than was that of previous generations. Moreover, the two signature types of massive wealth accumulation in the early 21st century have been high technology and financial services. Neither of these industries relies on masses of laborers, so their productivity is detached from the health of any particular national middle class. […] While plutocrats sewed up the licit opportunities afforded by the integration of the global economy, they mostly avoided dealing in goods and services that were banned for moral or prudential reasons. By contrast, deviant entrepreneurs realized that arbitraging the moral and regulatory differences that existed in different jurisdictions worldwide presented fantastic business opportunities — with opportunities continuously emerging as the capacities of different states contracted at differing rates.” — Nils Gilman for The American Interest
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