Quote:
Originally Posted by Marie Monday
I think you're right about the issues of democracy but I don't agree that there may be a better alternative. Unless something changes very fundamentally in our world, a 'meritocracy' (or any way at all of selecting the people who can have power) will be a plutocracy. I think the changes in order to make democracy work would be less difficult, and it comes with less danger. Leaving only the policy part to specialists but having a democratic process of electing and controlling them is good, but that's just how our democracy is supposed to work
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As you kinda mention, democracies today are also meritocracies to some degree. From having a management position in local government, I do see and am involved in many processes and most of them are actually meritocratic. One of the big reasons for that is I work in water management (wastewater and surface- / rain water). Our biggest wastewater treatment facility is inside a mountain and of course our pipes run underground, so people don't see them or know anything much about them, politicians included.
On behalf of the town and its citizens, we manage a lot of funds and stuff like where to do rehabilitation efforts and what objects go on those plans is a typical meritocratic process. Determining the funding for that is a democratic process.
At least in terms of infrastructure, I do think that meritocratic processes often end up with better decision making overall. A typical example here might be city expansion. Politicians may decide to expand the city, build more houses and develop new areas. Sometimes, this happens with no consideration or blatant disregard for wastewater infrstructure. We need capacity, or else sewage isn't going to reach our facilities, but will instead go to a water recipient (usually the local fjord in our case).
A way to hopefully avoid problems is to have competent people sorta upstream when the plans are discussed, but their competence is lacking and anyways tend to be very theoretical. They never got their hands dirty and don't know the practical reality of running these things.
For politicians, they get case notes beforehand and perhaps someone to show them a presentation, but I get the impression there's just too much for them to digest and a complicated reality doesn't always distill into a neat 10 minute powerpoint presentation. There can be a gap between what's a sensible, fact based decision and what ends up as policy that can be hard to close.
For wastewater infrastructure where people can't see the cracks or know the problems, a thing that politicians do care about is that citizens should not feel burdened economically, so wastewater across the country is perpetually underfunded. This leads to pollution and other problems. A stance on immigration can be kinda sexy, but we gotta fix the holes in our leaking pipes that you never even see isn't quite as interesting politically. At least here, that sort of thing doesn't win any elections or even come up.
I do feel like there is a similar theme in road development. Here, if there's an important stretch of road that goes through regions, many local governments want a say in the location of that road. They may want the road closer to their towns for the business and taxes it can bring and for convenience. But on the other hand, you might think hey, this makes the road longer than what was the original intention. Big transport may have to travel further. That's more pollution into the atmosphere, you have to remove more nature, perhaps you get the road close to drinking water sources, etc. But from the point of view of one local government, they may have little to gain by seeing a bigger picture or abstaining from making those kind of demands because their neighbours probably will anyways and so you may end up with something like a tragedy of the commons.
Politics of course has subterfuge built in because you have to entice voters to your cause and there's just a lot of incentives etc. that doesn't promote reality based decision making. I also feel like the decisions they make are more often short term decisions instead of based on the really long term.
My rant is getting long now, but something slightly related about measures, I also mentally divide measures into measures that actually make a difference or measures that change attitudes. Take carbon emissions for example. I was at a conference where a local government was using drones and a heat seeking camera to find leaky windows as a way to reduce energy use and carbon emissions. To me, that's a measure that targets attitudes. It looks cool on an instragram post. In reality, if you spent a bit of that time flying drones getting someone to build 1 meter less road (asfalt and road production has huge emissions), you probably could've made up for years of window hunting.
We see something similar with water saving. It's something everyone can do and it engages kids and it kinda makes for good policy because people feel like they can contribute. But in reality, how much water you use when brushing your teeth means absolutely nothing when we lose 30% of all water produced from leaky pipes which amounts to thousands upon thousands of m3s. Promote instead better funding / more taxation and you may actually make a difference.
Anyways, I like democracies, but still feel like long term important decisions could often benefit from at least a bigger degree of meritocracy.