Posted: May 19, 2018 8:58 am
Xerographica wrote:Pebble wrote:I don't think anyone here feels democracy is a good system, rather the least worse. Further it is not based on no evidence, rather the evidence is limited e.g. considerable work on the superiority of collective decision making.
If you perceive that democracy (using voting to rank things) is the least worst system, then you obviously must believe that it's better than the market (using spending to rank things). However, as far as I know, there isn't any evidence that this is truly the case....
When it comes to organising whole societies (rather than e.g. book rankings) there's another way of ranking besides democracy and the market, which is fighting. If people want something badly enough, they will fight for it, not merely spend money (spending money would only be a part of it). On this view, a free-for-all would be the best way of finding out what people really want. At a global level, I think it's what we've got.
The wrinkle here, is that humans are a species which cooperates as well as competing, and the better cooperators, the individuals who succeed in forming the largest and most effective groups, tend to win. Passing over one or two intermediate steps, nation states are the primary military units in the world today, there's a stand-off in the global free-for-all which might yet turn into WW3. An ongoing problem for any nation state is avoiding civil war, or a complete breakdown into a failed state with gangs of armed thugs. There are some such places in the world today, and I think there's a good deal of evidence that they are not happy places, or well able to defend themselves against more unified neighbours. On the supposition that one objective most reasonable people have is to avoid civil war, democracy seems to be working at least as well as any other system. Government by the wealthy for the wealthy, which as far as I can tell is what Xerographica is suggesting, tends to lead to French revolutions and such.