Against epistocracy

Wouldn’t “epistocracy” mean rule by people who write a lot of letters?

Good post, John.
Brennan´s idea is a bad one. Every philosopher-king perspective is not an experimental option and the “philosopher-citizen mini king” idea is a lousy experimental option.
How to decide who is “well informed”? College degrees? Trump and Kushner have some of those…

I’ve done university! It’s full of idiots, just as much as any other place. (I was surprised at first. Small-town boy, only actually smart kids were ever sent off to university.)
I’ve also met many professional politicians. They were very knowledgeable about politics, but still, our parliaments are full of idiots.
I’m a teacher. A voting cadre entirely of teachers would probably do pretty well, but still, more than enough idiots in our ranks to send things doolally on any given day.

Silly idea.

“Jason Brennan is the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Associate Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.”

I have lived in academia for many years, and this may be the most confusingly grand and deflationary–and simply surreal–job title I have ever seen. It does have the virtue of being funny.

It’s in itself evidence that those who deem you expert may not be expert.

Rather than formal education, an epistocracy could weigh votes by demonstrated knowledge.

So, in the Australian context, the Australian Electoral Commission would formulate and administer a multiple-choice test to determine a voter’s understanding of Parliament, the Senate, the role of the Reserve Bank and other institutions, and key moments in Australian political history and current affairs.

Anyone could take the test at any time, supported by regular AEC educational sessions to improve voter knowledge, and the test score becomes equivalent to vote value.

That way, a rich political ignoramus with a PhD would have less electoral influence than a highschool dropout with strong political awareness.

Obviously this could be gamed in all sorts of ways – and maybe Brennan discusses something similar – but there are more meritocratic methods of doing epistocracy than by education or wealth.

Dammit, I knew I should have finished this paper sooner. There goes my catchy title.

I’ll just leave this link here; suffice it to say, this approach has a history in the US, and it’s not a good one. Some states had this, applied of course to only some voters (e.g. southern blacks), and it was banned in 1964 by the Civil Rights Act. In earlier years it was a tool used against recent immigrants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test

It’s the oldest idea in modern (I mean, post-classical) European democracy, really: that voters should only be enfranchised if they have some ‘stake’ in the polis upon which their votes will have an effect. For the longest stretch of democratic history this ‘stake’ was defined monetarily: property owners with property of a rentable value above a certain sum, for instance. This I’d argue underlay the exclusion of women, whose property was legally only theirs after majority and until they married (I’m not denying the broader structural sexism of these societies of course). The arguments used then were basically the ones Brennan uses, swapping out ‘expertise’ for property ownership. But since the education he is talking about it expensive to acquire and socially/culturally overdetermined by class attitudes he is, in essence, simply reaffirming 18th-C British constitutionalists that only the middle class can be trusted to vote ‘correctly’.

It’s worth remembering that the last hundred-years-or-so of expansion to a universal suffrage is the exception, not the rule, in the larger history of democracy as such. And there’s nothing about it that guarantees it will remain. Robert Heinlein spent his later decades arguing that only people who had devoted some portion of their lives to ‘public service’ should have a vote, since only such people had proved that they were able to put the state’s collective interest before their private concerns (his paradigm for public service was military service, of course). He also suggested, a la Brennan, that voting booths should automatically lock the door once the voter had stepped inside, present him/her with a IQ test of some kind, allow them to vote if they passed and kill them if they didn’t.

Wonderful irony, no?

This is one of those ideas that sound intuitively attractive at first, because who hasn’t met somebody who is too ignorant to make an informed choice as a voter? (Let’s start with “leave your government hands off my Medicare”, pause to consider the many Spanish voters interviewed on TV in 2011 who said they hated the austerity implemented by the socialists and were now voting conservative, which party had of course campaigned on much harsher austerity, glance quickly in the general direction of the British voters who thought that Brexit meant deporting the citizen descendants of immigrants who had come in the 1960s, and end on my Eastern German relative who had somehow come to believe that Helmut Kohl was personally responsible for the economic prosperity of the Western Germany.)

But yes, who gets to decide what topics are crucial and by what measure somebody is competent enough? It is just unworkable in practice. Politics is in the first instance about competing interest groups, and only secondarily about expertise.

Achen and Bartels Democracy For Realists 2016 and the Myth of the Rational Voter.

“They demonstrate that voters―even those who are well informed and politically engaged―mostly choose parties and candidates on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not political issues. They also show that voters adjust their policy views and even their perceptions of basic matters of fact to match those loyalties. ”

JQ:Who gets to decide who is well-informed? And who gets to decide who gets to decide?

Well, standardized objective national tests of course. I am having a little trouble distinguishing epistocracy, noocracy and sophocracy, but the principle of being ruled by embodied knowledges is very old. The questions are what kind of knowledge will rule, and how it is to found and empowered.

Plato and the Chinese Mandarins thought we should be ruled by scholars of history philosophy, maybe political economy and of course law, the embodiment demonstrated by a staged set of competitive examinations and contests. (Best poems helped in many cultures.) Law, business, and military knowledge tested and ranked by competition (including elections) still rule us.

Democracies as nations have struggled to determine the most efficient form of knowledge to rule, needing a universal knowledge to make public discourse efficient, and since the Enlightenment have sought the most and evermore universal common forms of knowledge/experience, in a process of abstraction that parallels and served the rise of capitalism. A knowledge that transcends and unifies the usefully competitive interests of the populace, like what, a shared humanity? A nation? But mostly it is about the wisdom of crowds, the rational voter and an equilibrium reached via the clearing of the marketplaces of ideas. Not just a General Will, but a emergent General Wisdom, a Collective Intellect. But also a kind of epistocracy.

What kinds of ruling knowledges/experiences we desire to rule/serve us varies tremendously, and is the basis of identity politics. Needless to say, personal experience of oppression and subordination was not previously valued so highly.

When I consider various failed social policies, especially the “bootstraps” kinds, I am reminded that actually, rich people are not informed or expert about the lives of the poor.

In particular, I’m reminded of all the proposals to add “just a dollar” as a co-pay for medicine provided on state programs. “It’s only a dollar,” say the middle classes. “It makes people more responsible!” And of course, programs like that actually decrease the rate of treatment, because “just a dollar” is what people are already spending on bus fare to the clinic, or they have ten medications because they are disabled and they can’t swing $10, etc.

“Who are the experts” is an important question, but it needs to be modulated into “what do we consider worthy of ‘expertise'”? In general, we do not consider what life is actually like for poor people or any marginalized group to be especially important in creating policy.

I am obviously totally in favor of epistocracy (even in the entertaining Heinlein variety), as long as I get to design the test.

To me, epistocracy, its cast of apparent supporters, their apparent inability to conceive of the obvious counterarguments, their apparent ignorance of the historical precedents Marc and Adam Roberts above recall and even their rather bancal command of etymology (the latter two suggesting it would be appropriate to bar them from voting according to their own tenets) are much more interesting as symptoms than as object in themselves. According to Piketty et al., we are entering a level of inequality which has never historically co-existed with meaningful democracy with universal suffrage and equal share of the political power. It is thus perhaps not surprising to see voices arguing against universal suffrage getting louder, actual policies restricting it half-heartedly challenged (if that) and general defiance against the “one man, one vote” idea rising.

Surely we need to test whether a potential voter is adequately able to judge their own desires? That’s why we need to restrict the franchise to people who can describe the history of psychoanalytic thought, up through Winnicott.

Test answers will also be useful for rooting out Lacanians, who will be sentenced to hard labor.

That Current Affairs article is very good, and robustly angry!

I think our governments in the US already kill too many people; let’s not start offering voter-roulette/suicide booths.

Let’s try two kinds votes—one for what we Feel and one for what we Think—perhaps providing a common Sense result…

The current issue of The Economist has data, probably more current than the Guardian ones JQ links to, showing Clinton even with Trump among those earning over $100K while 12 points behind him among those earning less than $50K, and 21 points ahead of him among those with postgraduate degrees while 5 points behind him among those with only high school degrees. These data make the income effect weaker, and the education effect stronger, than the OP suggests.

The argument that the common people are all too stupid and ignorant to be trusted with a vote has a long pedigree. In the UK, it did not survive Benjamin Disraeli’s Representation of the People Act, 1867. (Note for US readers: Disraeli was both a Jew, as you might have guessed, and a Conservative prime minister who greatly broadened the franchise. Does not compute?)

Small step in this direction. In the UK and I think the Irish Republic (Ronan if he is still around will correct me here) there used to be University seats in the Parliament/Dail. Not many, but sometimes they were useful. Look up the reforms brought in by Alan Herbert.

Step too far. Why stop at having a university degree for the franchise? Nowadays, some are patently worthless. BSc, University of Poppleton, in yoghurt knitting is a fictional example; degrees in dance & equine studies, aromatherapy, judicial astrology and so forth are alas not. Surely we should restrict the franchise to those having degrees in serious subjects (to be decided by serious people) from serious universities. In the UK, Oxbridge of course, Edinburgh to keep the Scots if not exactly happy (a futile objective) at least no more aggrieved than usual, the London trio of ICL, UCL, KCL, possibly Manchester which has become semi-civilised since so many BBC people moved there … are there any others?

Adam Roberts@15:

Robert Heinlein spent his later decades arguing that only people
who had devoted some portion of their lives to ‘public service’
should have a vote, since only such people had proved that they
were able to put the state’s collective interest before their
private concerns (his paradigm for public service was military
service, of course).

That’s the original version, as published in _Starship
Troopers_. Later, in an essay in _Expanded Universe_ he talks
about what’s essentially a variation (he didn’t remember
precisely what he’d said), where conscientious objectors could be
put to work doing something else to earn their vote.

He also suggested, a la Brennan, that voting booths should automatically lock the door once the voter had stepped inside, present him/her with a IQ test of some kind, allow them to vote if they passed and kill them if they didn’t.

That’s just one of the ideas he floats in the _Expanded Universe_ essay. Another idea was that the franchise could be restricted to women-with-children on the theory that they’d have an instinctive long-term perspective. He also thought there would be some justice in this because women had been denied the vote for so long.

“Against epistocracy”

I always find it funny that such things even get argued.

“First, suppose for the moment that university/college education was the criterion for having the franchise.”

The short version of your explication on this is that we already have a de facto epistocracy.

“Who gets to decide who is well-informed?”

Again, these mullahs already de facto exist in the form of elite media, the permanent political party duopoly (speaking of the US here), and so forth. They get their way the vast majority of the time, and on those rare occasions they don’t we notice. Looks like de facto Epistocracy isn’t the perfect system either, huh.

My observation that 75 percent of California’s male African-Americans of high school age cannot read, or right was greeted with yawns.

and even their rather bancal command of etymology

We need a name for the Law that when lamenting the English skills of others in forum posts, a howling solecism, typo or other error will happen.

There’s no need to resolve these divergent positions here. The crucial point is that Brennan has chosen to illustrate his argument for requiring voters to be better informed about the issues by picking an issue on which he himself is clearly not well-informed. This is, I think, a case where ad hominem argument is entirely appropriate.

I like to think I’m roughly expert in what I’m a specialist in and in its implications for society as a whole. I also like to think that, as an expert at such and such and roughly an expert, very roughly, on its implications for society as a whole, that my expertise has taught me enough to teach me the absurdity of epistocracy. I do not for a second think it’s credible for there to be an institution that reliably, even remotely reliably, or at all, restricts voting rights in the name of expertise. Simple knowledge of the nature of expertise itself teaches you this. Living with the word “epistemology” for a significant amount of time would teach you this. Teaching teaches you this . . .

Neville Shute ” In the Wet “, 1953

Australian ( and eventually British ) citizens could acquire up to seven votes, in any combination, according to the following criteria:

The first vote is given to every citizen on reaching the age of 21.
The second vote is for university graduates and commissioned military officers.
The third vote is earned after living and working abroad for at least two years.
The fourth vote is for raising two children to the age of fourteen without divorcing.
The fifth vote is for earning at least £5000 in the year before the election.
The sixth vote is for officials in any of the recognized Christian churches.
The seventh vote is given only at the discretion of the monarch.

At the time £5000 was a substantial income, of course.

Joseph Brenner@40 Starship Troopers is most of all about the utopian army, where everybody fights and the generals go into the field first. There’s science fiction, and then there’s stuff like that.

As for the franchise limited to veterans…ancient Rome and ancient Athens and even ancient Sparta had franchises limited to soldiers (when Spartans were forced to resort to arming Helots, they acquired a kind of citizenship, neodamodeis.) Contra Heinlein, they were not notably stable because of the moral training in responsibility conferred by military service. Heinlein was a smart man. I’m sure he knew this, but he was writing a juvenile. Lying to kids is a time-honored conservative tradition.

But even in its own terms, Starship Troopers is fishy. On the one hand, everybody fights, on the other non-combatant service jobs are apparently farmed out to private contractors. There will always be more people in war production and logistics and so on than in combat in modern warfare. Donald Rumsfeld would approve, but how does a military justify putting a physician into the front lines with a gun? Quite aside from that ambiguity, there’s the story in the novel about a disabled person who insisted on enlisting. Some explainer of the system says they’ll make the dude count the hairs on a caterpillar until he gets the idea and gives up. Of course if he’s determined to put up with the abuse, then he’s proven he really, really wants it, so presumably then the army can condescend.

Contemplating voting under Heinlein’s system. Are you feeling smart today? Wouldn’t want to risk trying to vote when your brain is having a bad day…….

I read Starship Troopers recently. Acknowledging that the way I read it may not be the way other people read it, here’s how I read it.

The essential qualification for full citizenship with franchise was preparedness to put your life at risk for social benefit; if you were prepared to risk your life for the benefit of other people, this was supposed to demonstrate that you could be trusted to make decisions for society — that is, about other people’s lives.

Military service was the paradigmatic example for this kind of preparedness, but not the only kind. There were brief descriptions, not fully fleshed-out, of some of the other kinds of service that could also qualify people for full citizenship with franchise, but an essential element of all of them was that you risked death. By the same line of reasoning, because the system could not assume that people who undertook military service would face actual combat (yes, there’s a war going on through most of the book, but the system isn’t designed around that particular war), the risk of death was clearly a designed-in feature of the military training the protagonist undertook.

The essential qualification was not intelligence or education or training; it was not skill in combat, or experience of it, or aptitude for it; it was the disposition to self-sacrifice.

In order, therefore, to find the most qualified/trustworthy people, they systematically killed off a percentage of them, because the logic of the system meant the risk had to be real.

sancho #9: “Rather than formal education, an epistocracy could weigh votes by demonstrated knowledge.””

We already find it impossible to evaluate “demonstrated knowledge” among school children who undergo instruction according to a standardised curriculum, delivered by teachers whose training and certification have been aligned. The idea that this is in any way feasible to judge this in a fair and equitable way for adults is ridiculous. The speculation is of the same caliber as “If my aunt was a man she’d be my uncle”.

If this whole mess with Trump etc. has one small aspect that I call a good thing, and that is the fact that a bunch of people went back to vote again. They didn’t vote they way I want, indeed, they voted to undermine democracy, but arguably it undermines democracy in the long run as well if they don’t vote. Of course, if the whole sorry mess ends up triggering another war or delays our dealing with climate change and other global problems, the price would have been extremely high.

Claudio López-Guerra, a brilliant mexican political theorist (CIDE). It is a serious analytic work. Claudio is not another Brennan…

I haven’t read the particular work mentioned, and rather dislike the use of the term “brilliant” almost every time it’s used, but the work by López-Guerra that I have read (mostly pieces on immigration) are very good, and he’s a careful and thoughtful scholar (I’ll leave it to others to make the comparison with Brennan) so I’m eager to look at this book, and expect that others will also profit from it.

I keep bringing this back to the basic question – what is the justification for democracy in the first place. Is it to make the best decisions? Or is it to ensure that the authorities are legitimate (i.e. they derive their power from an acceptable source).

I think the US has a broken democracy, not because it makes bad decisions or good decisions, but because it doesn’t respond to the wishes of the electorate.

Sure it is good to have an aware and educated electorate that treats voting as a responsibility more than a right (after all everyone’s single vote makes little difference to themselves so it really more sensible to vote to for what is right than what reflects their own narrow interests). But I think having a government responding to the interests of the broad population is the most likely way to end up with an aware, educated and responsible electorate.

Metatone @14

I’d propose that the reawakening zombie of epistocracy does relate to a real concern:
How do our democracies grapple with complex problems?

I think the reawakening zombie of epistocracy relates to the diverging social trajectories fueled by extreme inequalities and social rigidity (look at the typical policies that epistocrats say the uninformed populace is depriving us of, and try to find one which would lessen inequalities), but your question remains an important one.

“Complex” in your quotation has several possible meanings but I’m assuming you are intending what seems to me the most relevant from the point of view of social organization: that which involves a multitude of factors of different nature, so that for instance what makes climate disruption a paradigmatic complex problem is that it intertwines geophysics, ecology, economics, engineering, patterns of mass consumption, geopolitical considerations, individual choices, historical trends… In view of Frowner’s observation above, I’d wager that the best way to tackle a problem that involves many conflicting perspectives is one which is designed to allow the emergence of multiple perspectives and the constructive confrontation of collective intelligence, and so that more democracy-that is to say a more meaningfully egalitarian distribution of political power-is the way to go. Perhaps even the only way to go (this is indeed why I have personally arrived at the conclusion that in our contemporary world, the political management of environmental destruction and climate disruption is for all intent and purpose indiscernable from the construction of a less inegalitarian social model: only such a society will muster the collective intelligence and collective strength required to face the myriad problems, and the collective fortitude to embrace the necessary choices).

so Heinlein thinks only people who weee willing to die for their country are qualified to judge the best policy on global warming? Fucking idiot.

The closest thing that has ever existed to Heinlein’s limited franchise democracy is the modern Chinese Communist Party. The 10% of the population who are willing to show loyalty and commitment to the Party, and accept the risk of getting shot in a purge, get to participate in deciding things. Those who don’t, don’t.

As a system, it has some obvious flaws. But the resulting policy on global warming does seem to meet the low bar of ‘better than Trump’.

Faustusnotes

Well, I don’t know to what extent that was actually Heinlein’s view. To me the book read more like an exploration of a specific individual and collective mindset; it doesn’t have to follow that it was a mindset with the author’s endorsement, although it did seem as if the narrative voice was tilted towards a positive evaluation. One oddity was that the system didn’t give you the vote while you were on active service, only when you retired; the only hint at a reason given in the book was that if soldiers could vote, they’d never vote to put themselves in harm’s way, which seems to me to contradict the rest of the reasoning, even though the protagonist never perceives the contradiction.

To soru’s point, the cost and benefits of extreme epistocracies are probably similar to those of the rule of ‘meritocratic’ bureaucrats sometimes seen in East Asia. Singapore is the example people quote to me most often, but the PRC has some elements of it also (it’s quite clearly not a straightforward Marxist-Maoist government any more), as did Japan formerly. I’d love to hear from some people who know those societies better, but on a pragmatic basis these systems do seem to offer relatively stable governance and feature a willingness to at least examine long-term problems in a long term way. Of course, the success of these systems is dependent on the fact that the population seems to broadly accept them – in Western countries I think this would not be possible.

Brennan is the guy who unironically tweeted that people who don’t like Uber shouldn’t be allowed to vote. He’s just a propagandist for the robber-capitalist class; in any case, I refute him thus.

James@67 writes “Heinlein’s argument in star ship troops is the only people with the moral authority to order the sacrifice of others is those who are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice themselves.”

He further quotes Starship Troopers: ‘You. What is the moral difference, if any, between the soldier and the civilian?”
“The difference, I said carefully, “lies in the field of civic virtue. A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not.’ p26

Accepting personal responsibility for “the body politic” is not to be confused with the real world outside science fiction. Accusing the average grunt of personally taking responsibility for killing Muslims all over the world so “we” can be safe is to claim they are rabidly murderous. Charging them with the determination to take back the American liberty stolen away, then hidden in Muslim homes all across the world, is to claim they are uniformly stupid. One of the most notable differences between soldiers and “civilians” is that soldiers are supposed to take orders, not personally decide stuff. And so far as sacrificing one’s life goes, fire fighters seem willing to do that. Supposedly policemen are too. For that matter it is not clear that men who engage in dangerous occupations that provide the necessities of life aren’t taking responsibility too.

None of this translates to global warning in my opinion. I do think the pervasive militarism in this society keeps people from laughing out loud at the lunacy of stuff like this. Heinlein is very much like the libertarians he resembles: The shameless, seamless blend of falsehoods and fallacies armors him against sanity.

steven t johnson@49

As for the franchise limited to veterans…ancient Rome and ancient Athens and even ancient Sparta had franchises limited to soldiers (when Spartans were forced to resort to arming Helots, they acquired a kind of citizenship, neodamodeis.) Contra Heinlein, they were not notably stable because of the moral training in responsibility conferred by military service. Heinlein was a smart man. I’m sure he knew this, …

He may have known it and forgotten, or may disagree with your
take on the stability of Rome– 500 years as a republic and 1500
years or so of empire isn’t doing so bad.

Lying to kids is a time-honored conservative tradition.

Not quite as popular as attacking everyone else’s motives.

For what it’s worth, a lot of use were inclined to wonder how serious Heinlein was about “Troopers”, but later commentary by him indicates he was indeed out to “glorify the infantry”– in those days he expected imminent war with the Soviets (his later take was he hadn’t anticipated the “three-way standoff” with China– myself I think he was having trouble grasping that the threat of both Russia and China had been exaggerated, though he was on his way there).

But even in its own terms, Starship Troopers is fishy.

No kidding. Soldiers are supposed to be self-selected for public spirit, but what we actually see on stage is the main character drifts into the military almost randomly, signing up without thinking about it very much because he knows someone else who did. In the first few pages of the book he compares himself to a racehorse or a bullet fired from a gun– there seems to be some self-awareness that there’s something amiss there.

The way I would put it is that Heinlein’s imagination ran in realistic directions, and he wasn’t quite capable of just faking things the way someone like Ayn Rand did. On the surface it’s a book intended to depict war as inevitable and glorious but it’s thoroughly unconvincing.

On the one hand, everybody fights,

No, there are confirmed civilians who don’t miss their vote. As I remember it, they regard the people who sign-up as suckers.

… on the other non-combatant service jobs are apparently farmed out to private contractors. There will always be more people in war production and logistics and so on than in combat in modern warfare.

A point, but it’s not an aspect Heinlein talks about, as far as I remember. Weapons production might be handled by the civilian economy, or maybe it’s managed by veterans?

Anyway, as other people have tried to explain, what Heinlein was trying to set-up was a system that would select for civic virtue– as I mentioned before, one of his later ideas was a government restricted to mothers, on the theory that on average they’d care more about the future of the society.

There is actually another angle on this that Heinlein brings up– one of the breakdown modes for democracy is military coup. Heinlein claims the “Troopers” system is more stable because the foxes are in charge of the henhouse by design.

I reviewed Lopez-Guerra’s book for the JAP. It is very good (I don’t, ultimately, think his proposal works, but that is neither here nor there, regarding the quality of the book).

Moz – are you based in Aotearoa? Have you been a student of mine? Your opinions on youth voting sound like ones I try to sell my students on.

Howard Frant

There are only a few states where ex-felons can’t vote.

For detailed information (below) I am relying on the website of The Sentencing Project.

In two States, felony conviction does not restrict the right to vote; in fourteen States and the District of Columbia, felons lose the right to vote only while imprisoned; in four, while in prison or on parole; in eighteen, while in prison, on parole, or on probation; and in twelve, the right to vote can be lost not only while in prison, on parole, or on probation, but also in some categories of cases (varying from State to State) for periods extending beyond the expiry of sentence. The estimate for 2016 of the total number of people disenfranchised as a result of felony convictions is 6.1 million, equivalent to one in forty adults, up from 1.2 million in 1976, and including 3.1 million who have completed their sentences (in the twelve States where that possibility exists).

I keep bringing this back to the basic question – what is the justification for democracy in the first place. Is it to make the best decisions? Or is it to ensure that the authorities are legitimate (i.e. they derive their power from an acceptable source).

If you take it — axiomatically or as a lemma — that most people are more-or-less capable of making reasonable conclusions given the evidence presented, and if the evidence presented in public discourse is pretty reasonable, you get the result that “popular decisions” and “good decisions” pretty much collapse together, and the dichotomy you’re trying to draw isn’t relevant.

Amongst the fallout of the recent UK election is that the pro-Brexit right have suddenly had to consider the possibility that all they will achieve is making things easier for a nationalising Corbyn government that will take over shortly. This is causing some think-tankers such as Andrew Lilico to have wobbly moments on the need for “checks and balances” to keep socialism off the agenda, and also to reconsider whether maybe an unelected EU bureaucracy is a good thing. See here for a quick intro:
https://flipchartfairytales.wordpress.com/2017/07/07/the-end-of-the-state-shrinking-dream/

reason @ 59 “what is the justification for democracy[?]”
Collin Street @ 79

“If” of course.

I’ve already made the point, but I will reiterate that the processes of republican democracy matter. Politics needs what I earlier called the processes of deliberation and a republican (constitutional) order that presses both officials and the people over and over to deliberately rationalize policy choices as general rules gradually and eventually tends to produce better government. An actual decision in a particular instance may be the usual human result of impulse and immediate self-interest, but the social process will demand an explanation that is rational. Even if the explanation for the particular impulsive and selfish decision is merely rationalized hypocrisy in a particular instance, it joins the flow that presses precedent toward principle and design.

A republic demands a system of rules and law derived logically from principle to form a system that is rationalized and understandable. It presses against a human nature that doesn’t want to make the effort to genuinely know things, does not want the painful doubt actual knowing entails. Authoritarian government tends to be arbitrary and arbitrary tends toward stupid.

Democracy complements the republican idea, by broadening the constituency, demanding that rationales for the exercise of authority be explained to a broad and variously interested public.

It can be hard to remember what democracy is for, when we are drowning in the cacophony of pointless and ill-reasoned scorn masquerading as disputation and as secrecy and the nearly naked self-interest of plutocrats swallows the rest, and even the supremely reasonable (see Henry, Gellner, Mair and Europe) argue for paralysis on the grounds of “it’s all too complicated”.

As Collin said, “If”.

Z –

Wait a minute! bancal: from medieval Latin bancalis, which has feet like a bench, that is to say not straight. By extension, anything that is not straight. I was not mocking their English, I was mocking their etymology, and mine was perfect, as far as I can see. OK, I should have put it in italics, and OK it was exceedingly pedantic, but if you are not allowed to be pedantic when mocking would-be epistocrats, when can you be? (And OK, I confess, I checked “bancal” in my English dictionary to see if it existed before choosing this word, my dictionary confirmed it did with the appropriate meaning, and it is only when I read your remark that I realized that what my dictionary had confirmed was that it was a French word with the appropriate meaning, thanks for the catch :-)).

That was my mistake, then. I thought it was a typo for “banal”.
I thought I should fess up, although I’m amused my so brilliant “catch” was nothing of the sort :D

soullite @62:
That’s not the argument here. Sometime a democratic polity fails quite miserably to redistribute power or meet the needs of its citizens (or fails even more throughly when it elects demagogues that undermine the basic existence of the democracy itself). Examining how to make democracy a better system for collective decision-making is a fair question (although epistocracy isn’t it, as far as I can tell).

James @66:
Global warming is an international problem that will require international cooperation and sacrifice. Those who are willing and trained to defend exclusively national interests will be the least well-equipped to deal with this kind of decidedly extranational undertaking.

Joseph Brenner @84
It’s important to remember that the actual recruitment process in the US has little to do with “civic service”. The US military basically send their recruiters into high schools, who then regale the kids with tales of how awesome and amazing it is to kill brown people (they may word their propaganda a bit differently). The rest of those who sign up after graduating typically do it for the GI bill, not a sense of civic duty. Heinlein’s experience of serving as a navy engineer during WWII along with his equally-bright friends, L. Sprague de Camp and Isaac Asimov, probably coloured his views of service, but given his distaste for Vietnam he really should have known better.

http://www.rinkworks.com/bookaminute/b/heinlein.starship.shtml

Starship Troopers could be a good example of Derrida-inspired deconstructive reading.

Whatever Heinlein’s intentions as the author might have been, the text takes on a life of its own and can take the reader to a different conclusion

In any case, is this idea so bad that the best exponent of it that comes to mind is a SF work that is arguably dystopian, and arguably satirical?

Some friends of mine from EU countries with mandatory military service argue in favor of it, on the grounds that the electorate is less likely to vote for foreign wars if theres a realistic prospect that they, personaly, might end up having to fight them. Which is maybe a weaker form of the Heinlein argument, and also requires that being drafted potentially happens after being eligible to vote, contra to my memory of Starship Troopers.

Back to the question, “Who gets to decide who is well-informed?” — This is being answered in practice, on both the federal and state levels, in Donald Trump’s USA and for instance Scott Walker’s Wisconsin (as continually documented on James Rowen’s Political Environment blog), where scientists… and one might say science itself… have been carefully ousted from policy roles, in favor of [industrial] corporate spokesbeings.

That not only in Wisconsin, but in peninsular Florida fa’Pete’s sake where the mean ocean levels are rising all around (NASA posts photos), the state governments could order their natural resources department employees not to mention climate change… says it all.

Joseph Brenner @ 94: In Heinlein’s storyworld polity as in our real one, the military took orders from a civilian government, and did not make the ultimate decisions about war and peace. The 1997 Verhoeven film strongly suggested top-down militarism, which is a real change from the book, and made many Heinlein fans including me unhappy.

In the book, “citizens” were veterans, not active members, of national service, not necessarily the military. (It’s just that when they signed up, they didn’t get to choose which type of service they would do.) So not only did the military did not control the decisions of government; unlike our system, there the military could not even vote until they’d left active service.

Heinlein apologists who fixate on a throwaway line about Federal Service ignore the question of what Federal Service could possibly be in this fictional universe. Most of the encounters with government personnel clearly indicates they are veterans, usually missing limbs. Every child is required to be exposed to a Federal Service employee, a veteran, teaching a course called History and Moral Philosophy, which is a combination of straightforward indoctrination…and detailed surveys of the opinions of the students. In the book, this has benign effects for the narrator, who is favored by his particular interrogator. But if the HMP surveillance can report favorably, it must also report unfavorably.

Most of the book is the story of basic training, which is clearly meant to break the recruit from civilian ways of thinking. And it is, just like the caterpillar hair counting exercise, deliberately designed to drive away people who think differently. And the reason for the serving members not voting on wars is so they can’t vote against a war.

The book, like Heinlein, is thoroughly dishonest and you cannot cite a sentence or two to defend it. The scene where the narrator exclaims in amazement about how the DI chews out a recruit *without using profanity* is Heinlein just laughing at his audience of kids.

And yes, Starship Troopers was written as a juvenile.

I’m sorry, Raven, a turd is not a Clark bar. The non-combatant Federal Service is referenced as a fig leaf, but in the book it’s not a thing. There is nothing for them to do, not even providing the logistical tail of the fighting forces! In the story it is not even clear that there are any government jobs that aren’t filled by veterans, usually handicapped. All citizens are veterans of military service. And not even all military service. The story specifically says old-fashioned (in SF world) water navies don’t count. It’s why there’s brawling between sailors and soldiers.

You may read the story about making a disabled guy count caterpillar hairs as a commitment to allowing everybody to “earn” their citizenship. This is nothing but a determination to accept whatever the book says at face value. It’s an announcement that in practice the weaklings will be excluded. No soldier wants a fellow trooper who can’t pull their weight. Officially everybody is going to be able to get their citizenship but in practice they won’t.

And by the way, given the limited franchise (and it is limited) there is no reasonable sense in which one can say there is a “civilian” government.

https://crookedtimber.org/2017/07/06/against-epistocracy/#comment-713183
The estimate for 2016 of the total number of people disenfranchised as a result of felony convictions is 6.1 million, equivalent to one in forty adults, up from 1.2 million in 1976, and including 3.1 million who have completed their sentences (in the twelve States where that possibility exists).

I assume in the background here is the part Jeb Bush’s faction played in disenfranchising ex-felons in the Florida presidential count of 2000. . . Of course, it came to pass that for Bush-Cheney ‘s liberation of Iraq it was useful to make ex-felons newly eligible for military service.

Also as you recall the reserves which shielded people like G W Bush during the American war in Vietnam were deployed in Iraq (partly as a means to quell domestic war opposition).

Law and Order
P S Also on the 2000 election: illegal overseas mail-in ballots were counted for Bush as a salute to our patriotic servicemen and women.

… and I must correct myself: it’s only in the film that he even attended high school in Argentina. In the book, only his mother died while visiting relatives in Buenos Aires (which is why his father then joined the MI).

Oh, and the revealing passage I was thinking of:

     … I added something to myself and Bennie said, “What did you say?”
“Sorry, Bernardo. Just an old saying in my own language. I suppose you could translate it, more or less, as: ‘Home is where the heart is.’ ”
“But what language was it?”
“Tagalog. My native language.”

Guys guys guys, why not talk about “The Forever War” by Joe Haldeman instead? At least that has a sub-plot about how sexuality and gender identities are changing back home and confuse the veterans coming back.

Raven@102:

Joseph Brenner @ 100: “[Heinlein] thought he’d made this clearer than he did.”

Heinlein was clear. Verhoeven has a lot to answer for.

The James Gifford analysis points out that Heinlein’s statements
circa 1980 don’t quite match what’s in the 1958 novel:
https://www.nitrosyncretic.com/pdfs/nature_of_fedsvc_1996.pdf

“and we haven’t even touched on the race and gender angles.”

As I just noted above, in the novel women are in demand as active-duty Navy pilots …

The narrator, Johnny Rico, … is himself shown to be ethnically Filipino …

Tell me about “the race and gender angles” you speak of…

Well, okay. I haven’t seen the Verhoeven flick, by the way, it has no influence on anything I’m saying.

Yes, Johnny Rico is clearly Filipino, but we learn that very late in the story, in passing. This is evidently a thoroughly “post-racial” society, and we pick up on this just by implication: the fact that he’s not white doesn’t seem to matter to anybody, it’s barely worth commenting on. (Samuel R. Delany found this the most striking thing about the book.)

In comparison, the aliens they’re at war with are treated with casual contempt, they’re labeled with what amounts to ethnic slurs: “Skinnies” and “Bugs” (ala “Japs” or “Gooks”). The nature of their civilizations is of no interest, whatever their motives are for fighting have been made irrelevant by the stated philosophy, which is I remember it: “All wars are the result of population pressure”, and so every species expands or dies. Given that philosophy, diplomatic negotiations of any sort are completely off the table: kill ’em now or later are the only choices.

The idea that we might someday form a larger federation of intelligent species, much in the way that the different races and nations of earth have unified, that would be just crazy talk.

(And to my eye, there’s something oddly disturbing about the “Skinnies”– the “Bugs” are depicted as just scary monsters, but the “Skinnies” that Rico is busy trying to slaughter at the outset of the book seem rather human, you get the feeling that there’s something very wrong happening.)

Gender angles: as you point out, the pilots are all female– and for Heinlein, “pilots” have always been intelligent, technically-trained professionals. However, there doesn’t appear to be any intentional gender-segregation going on: the society is at least depicted as entirely meritocratic– and yet, the best-qualified people for different roles just happen to follow gender lines. Here, Heinlein’s take would seem to be that women deserved to be taken more seriously than they often were in the late-50s, but his angle is very different from what you might call the standard-feminist expectation of equal capabilities.

J-D @ 104: “There is disjointedness and incoherence, and not deliberately designed for effect….” — I beg to differ: it might have been a clue that the battle scenes themselves are very specifically intended to convey ‘disjointedness and incoherence’, as the narrator/protagonist and comrades are repeatedly sent into situations with incomplete information and then surprised (ambushed) from new directions they had not suspected.

Metaphorically, so is the reader, by the narrative jumping back-and-forth, and e.g. by the “Tagalog” passage at book’s end upending whatever ethnic assumption he or she may have had in mind’s eye until then. The information is all there, eventually… but to believe that the fog-of-war effect was not deliberate is, I suspect, to not have realized what kind of novel one was reading.