Contradicts actual economics research that voting out incumbents helps create opportunity for the public: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766
I’m far more inclined to listen to the second most influential economic policy group in the US (after Brookings) than a random blogger who makes it sound like giving a monopoly on power is a good idea.
As I see it, the incentives for longer terms would be the politicians are allowed to plan for longer time frames. Whether they do or not is another story. I would say this more applies to term limits as politicians can keep getting elected for essentially a life term.
The incentive for shorter terms, is you can get rid of the bad ones faster, whether we do or not is another story.
>And yet, the evidence is overwhelming that, in real life, the majority of voters do not keep track of what politicians are doing.
Of course, a constant barrage of the latest transgression of the culture war, and endless discussion of unsolvable wedge issues adds a whole lot of noise to this tracking mechanism. There is also a whole lot of spin, "he really didn't do that the way you say because ... the other party," etc. There's also not a lot of reporting on what bills are actually passed either.
IMO, we've gotta start voting out the incumbents until we start to have a government we feel comfortable ruling over us. It's the only power we really have.
The idea that politicians are corruptible chiefly through election campaigning is one thing. I rather have the impression that the corrupt environment is what attracts many candidates in the first place -- make it to congress, then rake it in from all the privileged information of the industries you're regulating, not to mention the unreasonably lucrative speaking engagements you're owed when out of office.
No amount of screwing around with term limits will somehow suddenly reduce corruption and make the U.S. a functioning democracy. No amount of voting out the incumbents will change much -- the parties significantly predetermine who you get to vote for in the first place, of course.
>No amount of voting out the incumbents will change much --
The theory I have is it will, over time, destabilize all the back room deals and self preservation mechanisms currently in place built over decades of incumbency. I can't really think of another option.
>the parties significantly predetermine who you get to vote for in the first place, of course.
I agree. Having said that, there is nothing in the constitution that even mentions political parties, they were an invention to gain power during the Washington administration, and they are highly effective. Would it be any worse to elect some third party representatives just as a protest vote?
"I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating."
You are essentially saying that if only we voted less frequently, we'd somehow have more democracy and less corruption.
This would increase the influence of the two major parties even more (candidacies would be more rare, after all, so even more is at stake for each election). Why would extending a term suddenly make a politician less concerned about their own power and wealth and suddenly start actually doing things for their _constituents_?
I think the root of the problem is that somehow we ended up with a congress full of people whose last thought is for their actual constituents. There are a lot of insightful observations on how this came to be, but none of them point to term limits or length of terms as being the cause.
Fair enough -- terribly sorry to have conflated your argument as being tacitly in support of the idea of the article.
FWIW, I basically agree with voting out these present incumbents, except that I think the major parties are irredeemable, so what's the point? I'd love for an election to show everyone voting 3rd party and no one voting for the duopoly.
Well as seen first-hand in some post-communists countries, many politicians do plan long-term - but not in a way you'd wish. They plan to build themselves into everything and suck profits from every money vein that country has. That's long-term planning too and it's happening as we speak. So yes I'm here with you, incumbents, hopefully real and not only front-ends, are still the only way we have to push for change.
Look we have plenty of long term officials in Congress.
It’s a train wreck. Their plans enacted insulate them from real work and threaten the public with repercussions for not doing the work they won’t.
It was tried. This is the result; another nostalgia obsessed group of elites an gerontocrats bleating story and words of power that are nonsense.
We should ban old people from roles that impact the next generations they won’t be around for.
It’s tacit ageism against the youth but no one will call it that.
It’s shocking how kowtowed we are by people we’ve just seen have no ability to support themselves without abusing workers. So much for American memes of self sufficiency. Their self sufficiency is still based upon dumping on lower castes.
We're voting right now in Switzerland about giving voting rights in some areas to 16yo. A common rhetoric against that is calling them "manipulation mass for the left". Of course that's conveniently ignoring the manipulation mass of the conservative right, the 70+ which vote having a completely different horizon in mind.
I've arrived at a personal observation that what is "good for the economy" is often bad for you as an individual and what is good for you as an individual is "bad for the economy". Yes, I know actual economics is ridiculously complex and can not be simplified and distilled so easily, but as a rule of thumb, just watch how often this observation seems to be true.
Actual economics is easy; people trade information innately.
Ok sure an economist can wrap it in math with correct order of operations as it looks like this geometric object on paper. But that’s unnecessary obfuscation intended to empower them and traditional talking points.
It’s 1984 levels of double speak going on; without economists counting there would still be trade. Their work does not give rise to human agency.
"""Again, the benefits of democracy have been well-documented. Amartya Sen (whose work we will review this coming February) won a Nobel Prize for showing that people in democracies do not suffer from famine. People in democracies are better protected against disease, are more likely to be vaccinated against common childhood illnesses, and tend to have better educations provided by their governments. In the long run, democracies tend to experience more economic growth than non-democracies, though at any given time there might be a non-democracy that is growing very fast. One study has shown that men are taller in democracies.
And yet, there is substantial evidence that most voters do not care much about politics, do not understand the issues, do not want to engage in study of the issues, and often sabotage their own interests. (See previous essays.)
So the benefits of democracy probably don’t come from the voters. The benefits must come from structural factors, such as the voting itself, the transfer of power among different political parties, the ability of the political parties to funnel the frustrations of the people into productive channels (rather than resorting to civil war), the ability of newspapers and media to mediate the conflicts among the most powerful interests, making the tensions transparent so that they can be better managed, or possibly the free and unfettered activity of the most important professions, such as lawyers and health professionals and religious leaders and the accountants, plus other sources of accountability for money. As we noted in a previous essay, those democracies that have frequent changes in power among parties tend to have less corruption than those democracies where one party has held power for several decades in a row, so the mere transfer of power among parties seems to limit corruption (and this is true even when the leaders of all parties are known to be corrupt!)"""
I agree it does not come from voting as politicians themselves are just rent seekers.
Economic opportunity comes from the masses clearly not wanting to kill each other but collaborate. If the opposite was true we’d have done it already.
The politics of it are a synthetic inner monologue implanted by power structures. Circle English constructs all they want, the scientific truth is people collaborate without the high minded bullshit of Anglo-gibberish. We did it before formal language, why believe sermonizing in historical script means anything?
Bridges and machines need a formal language for safety. I am unconvinced formal language defining social truths can be anything more than mind viruses intent on thought policing.
Am I freer by ogling images of Pelosi with her magic scepter and nodding along with McConnell’s obvious equivocations? No. I’m surrendering agency to standing there nodding along, memorizing their platform and sermons.
Coddling such things in our inner monologue is antithetical to free speech and agency.
I’m far more inclined to listen to the second most influential economic policy group in the US (after Brookings) than a random blogger who makes it sound like giving a monopoly on power is a good idea.