10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less

By Garett Jones

George Mason economist Garrett Jones makes the case that we would get better policy outcomes if we could be slightly less democratic. I do appreciate that he broadcast his thesis clearly in the title instead of going with something like “Against Democracy” as this isn’t actually an argument against democracy in general. I took the argument to have two main pillars:

• Democratic accountability is really good at preventing the worst-case outcomes in societies such as mass famine.
• There is a Laffer curve for democratic governance whereby too much democratic accountability leads to suboptimal policy outcomes

I basically already agreed with his premise so the argument seemed eminently reasonable to me, but I got the sense that it was circular and wouldn’t be at all convincing to anyone who didn’t already hold the position. Many of the specific lines of reasoning went something like “technocrats who are chosen by other technocrats make policy choices which technocrats like better” which is undoubtably true but if you don’t actually hold the prior that the specific policies favored by technocrats are actually good then the argument doesn’t seem very convincing.

I couldn’t help think that here is a sort of epistemic confusion in the author. He wants to take desired policy outcomes as a given and then argue that technocratic elites are best equipped to achieve those outcomes which, sure, I guess is true. But, to take the contrary position, the point of democratic processes is to clarify the desired policy outcomes themselves (or at least aggregate the preferences of the populace). He wants to side-step that problem by hand-waving a bit about having the democratic process set the parameters and desired outcomes and the technocrats execute it. But in practice it’s not so cleanly separable.

Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America

Christopher Leonard

Journalistic history of Charles Koch and Koch Industries. So much of the journalism around the Kochs is so transparently sensationalistic or hagiographic that it was actually really refreshing to read a nuanced, grounded history.

The story of business success is actually pretty mundane. There seems to be a sort of template for how corporations thrive in the modern world. A stable, highly profitable cash cow matched with a level of patience in the corporate leadership allows for persistent, counter-cyclical investments that pay off handsomely over time. And that seems to be the basic story of Koch Industries.

The really interesting story though is about the evolution of the Koch political organization. If there is one thing the American system of government is beautifully designed for it is to allow recalcitrant obstructionists plentiful opportunities to prevent meaningful legislation. And the Koch political organization has been amazingly effective over the last decade in exploiting that fact.