August 17, 2016
The Page 99 Test: Against Democracy
“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” –Ford Madox Ford The Page 99 Test is a website that…
Author: Jason Brennan
August 16, 2016
Politics Is Not a Poem: Against Semiotic Arguments for Democracy
Excerpted from the intro of chapter 5–perhaps my favorite chapter–of Against Democracy. “The instinct of worship is still so strong upon us that, having nearly worn out our capacity…
August 15, 2016
Is Democracy Going Out of Fashion? Are All Heads Together Always Smarter than Just Some Heads?
So asks conservative British Member of the European Parliament Dan Hannan in today’s Washington Examiner. I’m among his targets, though, like many critics, he confuses epistocracy with technocracy. Still, his main…
August 13, 2016
Situational Enemies
Mill hypothesized that political participation might have certain benefits, including making us more open-minded and more concerned with one another’s welfare. The empirical evidence shows that he was mostly wrong….
August 12, 2016
Deliberative Democracy: A “Neutral” Result is a Negative Result
Chapter 3 of Against Democracy looks at the empirical work on how political participation, and in particular, deliberative democracy, affects us. Mill hypothesized that deliberation would tend to educate and ennoble…
August 11, 2016
4 Ways to Be a Better Voter, in Scientific American
Here’s a nice article from Scientific American’s Mind’s September edition on becoming a better voter, including parts of an interview with me on this topic. Excerpt: “We’ve found that having more information…