information and democracy
Here's Byrne Hobart at The Diff, writing about the existence of a trillionaire:
It was inevitable that this would happen. 2% real GDP growth, 3% inflation, a 5% or so equity risk premium, some dispersion among equities, and—critically—being a species with five rather than six or seven fingers on each hand meant that some time this decade or next we'd cross the threshold where a single person is, on a mark-to-market basis, worth a trillion dollars. There's been a lot of discussion about this, most of which treats the threshold as meaningful. And, to be fair, there are plenty of people making arguments that are just as relevant at $990bn or $1.1tr or whatever. On the other hand, it's suspicious that the time to make those arguments is when one person's wealth passed an arbitrary threshold that's exciting to people who don't think about things so rigorously. I'm very suspicious of politicians who want some kind of reckoning about wealth inequality that coincides with a huge drop in how informed the average participant in the debate is. Personally, I'd rather the debate happen mostly among people who know what they're talking about. But I've never been any good at politics.
This is a very specific example of a common dilemma in public decision-making. How much democracy, and how much in various circumstances? That is, what should the structures and terms of democratic input be for various decisions. And assuming universal suffrage doesn't answer this question; what goes for popular vote/input is largely on a different dimension than any debate over the size/shape of the electorate.
Once you see this, you see it everywhere, in many different flavors:
The Constitution itself is a masterclass of architects trying to channel different amounts of democracy in different institutional structures.
Local elections are often held on separate dates from state or national elections, in order to create a turnout more focused on local issues, even if it is smaller. And also to avoid the increasingly-common use of presidential approval to guide votes for town council.
The existence of the Federal Reserve is an attempt to insulate monetary policy from immediate democratic accountability via representatives.
So-called "Secret Congress" aims to shield compromise policy development from the partisan food fight, in part by keeping the president and the loud public partisans as far away from it as possible for as long as possible.
Progressive reforms of the early 20th century invite something of the opposite---a push for direct democracy that bypasses the legislators in favor of majoritarian public lawmaking.
You might enact/revise major international agreements at very high thresholds insulated from popular opinion (2/3 Senate vote to ratify treaties) or very low ones that aren't (Brexit referendum by bare majority direct vote).
Should the executive consult Congress before launching a war? In some sense, that's the ultimate version of this; what constitutes an executive decision vs. a legislative decision cuts to the core of democratic input.
You can go on and on. And the answers aren't obvious to me, except to say that more democracy and more majoritarianism are not always appropriate, but both are very powerful impulse in a democracy.
As I wrote a long time ago in a post called In (partial) defense of less democracy:
[Much of this] is rooted in an impulse that I think is fundamentally wrong: the idea that more democracy always equals good, and that less democracy always equals bad. A lot of people tend to apply this sort of democracy=good frame by default when evaluating institutional designs, and I think it's a mistake.
My personal view is that direct democracy in particular has proven itself pretty awful, and we'd be better off a more purely representative democracy that restricts voters to only the picking of elected officials. And I believe in separation of powers; overlapping majorities and multiple veto players make sense to me.
I'm much more torn on things like Secret Congress and the anti-populist theory Hobart suggests in the Diff article. It's undeniably valuable at times for getting things done or maybe even getting to the right answer, and I'm no fan of populist leaders and their bullshit, but the meta-structure of a democracy is more or less setup to take the trade-off of worse policy in order to makes sure the average citizens doesn't get screwed.
Because one feature of low-salience issues is that they are easier to buy up just by throwing money at them in DC. And so you have to be careful; it may be true that low-salience means a higher average expertise is involved in the conversation, but it also might just mean concentrated interests can more easily get their way, be it regulatory capture, status quo entrenchment, or distributive carveouts.
That's not a reason to prioritize voter participation in all public choice decisions---again, this is a messy business and democratic input comes in all sorts of forms beyond voter participation in lawmaking---but its the proper frame to think about what's happening, or what might happen that you don't want to incentivize, in these circumstances.