[isgood12]

I agree that democracy is arguably just better than other alternatives. Nothing more. However I can't be happy about a candidate just because they are at least not a clown. Yes, they may do a good job. But that's as good as randomly choosing a candidate and hoping that they do a good job, right? We can surely do better than that.

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

"In governance, sortition (also known as allotment) is the selection of officers as a random sample from a larger pool of candidates.

In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the primary method for appointing political officials and its use was conventionally regarded at the time as a principal characteristic of democracy."

I think we ought to give it a go, see what happens.

[HCIdivision17]

I accidentally started to think seriously about your quip, and I think it belies the profound difficulty of the problem. I would contend that it's not obvious that we can do better than random elections.

There's all sorts of perverse and misaligned incentives otherwise. I'm not politician or historian, so I'd love some insight into the consequences of such a system. Intuitively, I would assume it'd just implode from incompetance, but bureaucracies are shockingly resilient on government scales. And I'd have no idea how to reliably find qualified individuals; the USA has a long history of effective leaders coming from seemingly random backgrounds. (Whether these individuals did good or not, well, that's hotly debated to this day... I don't often grok politics.)

[isgood12]

Yeah doing better than random is more of my wish than anything based on facts. Now that I think about it, considering the population that self selects itself out of politics in India, maybe random selection of a candidate from all of the population may do better than what we have currently.

[lotsofmangos]

"Now that I think about it"

This is one of the best phrases ever invented.

By the way, I am not meaning to attack. I completely understand the frustration of watching completely unqualified assholes run the country. I live in the UK.

However, to see what happens when qualified assholes run the country, look to China. They are the world's most successful technocracy. There are more people with engineering degrees in government there than anywhere else I know of. (if anyone cares to correct me on this, please do)

The results of this are nicely mirrored by your respective space programs.

China has people in orbit.

India found water on the moon.

Just so you know my biases, I like what I see as India's democratic openness and China's secular practicality (being a stereotypical Brit who goes around stereotyping stuff so it will fit into all the neat little display boxes).

[lotsofmangos]

We can certainly do a lot worse. We could select someone randomly and only be able to get rid of them by killing them. Historically that has been the usual method.

Also, if you plan who should have power, who gets to select the person who makes the plan?