One of the features of democracy is that almost any adult, no matter how unintelligent or uninformed, has a vote. Does this result in poor policy choices? If it does, how can the problem be fixed? Or is a democracy which makes rational policy choices a pipe dream?

A large mass of ignorant voters not necessarily result in worse decisions than an intelligent and well-informed electorate - if 90% of voters were completely ignorant and voted completely randomly but 10% were perfectly well-informed and rational, then the votes of the 90% would average out as noise and a politician could be elected by appealing to a majority of the 10%. A large amount of ignorance can thus be cancelled by what is called the miracle of aggregation.

However, that will only work if the ignorant voters are "perfectly ignorant" and their votes are truly random or at least based on non-policy factors such as a candidate's good looks. Imperfect ignorance, however, can be a problem. If the votes of the ignorant are random with a bias towards some good policy, that's great. However, if the votes of the ignorant are biased towards lousy policy, politicians will have no choice but to support such policies if they want to win elections. We do know that there are some fairly universal biases towards certain bad policies - Bryan Caplan wrote an entire book about such biases in economic policy. The support for protectionist tarriffs, for example, seems to be almost a human universal.

At this point it is tempting to say that "stupid people shouldn't vote," or if one is less politically correct "only elites should vote." Although some kind of intelligence testing for voters or a restriction of the voting franchise to some kind of aristocracy is appealing, the available data shows that the reality is not that good. Intelligent voters are more likely to support fringe left-wing parties and society's elites are more likely to hold extreme views and be closed-minded about those views. History also shows that having only the aristocracy vote does not prevent the elevation of very lousy leaders to power. While these approaches might turn out to be incremental improvements, they are certainly not solutions.

Campaigns to educate and inform voters have also seem like a good idea but they decades of them have produced no demonstrable success. Pouring money into them does not seem to make voters any less ignorant over the long term - if anything, democratic politics get dumbed down with the passage of time. To make matters worse, any such attempts to "raise awareness" attract progressives and tend to degenerate into exercises in leftist propaganda which manufacture consent for even more lousy policy.

Why do humans have such widespread, persistent and foolish biases towards bad ideas? If these bad policies had negative repercussions for the reproductive fitness of individuals, I would be inclined to suspect they are caused by an infection which affects the brain. However, they don't really seem to, so I suspect they may be largely genetic. After all, we do know that attitudes and political party attachment have a large genetic component.

We also know that all but the past few centuries of human evolution happened under Malthusian conditions, where the total amount of wealth and food avaliable was strictly limited in ways it is not today. Some of these lousy policies with deep appeal, such as the redistribution of wealth, do make more sense under those conditions because they allow the population of a society to increase. So perhaps these biases have genetic roots and are adaptations to a world which no longer exists? I'm not aware of any studies on the heritability of the support for various economic policies, but they would be very interesting to see. If I'm right about this, then wise and rational democracy is a completely hopeless enterprise - well, at least for the next few thousand years, anyway.