Why Politics Fails: The Five Traps of the Modern World & How to Escape Them

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Solidarity: we want a safety net when times are tough, but often we care about solidarity only when we need it ourselves. The solidarity trap looks at fights over Obamacare and the merits of the Universal Basic Income; school choice and misperceptions of welfare fraud; creating social solidarity between Hindus and Muslims in India; and even, just maybe, among Americans. Finally, the section on prosperity analyzes measures of prosperity, the Malthusian trap and the Great Divergence, inclusive institutions, credible commitments, collective action problems along with selective incentives and encompassing organizations, the prisoner’s dilemma and tit-for-tat, the resource curse, and manias.

Proportional representation is one possible step toward fixing some of the problems we have. It has the benefit of being proven as a workable system with mostly positive results. I have long wished we weren't a de facto two-party state. For instance, a segment of the public is blaming their gradual loss of unjustified privilege on those who are still struggling to be accepted as equal human beings, let alone citizens. As reprehensible as that is, there is an aspect of it that is quite understandable. If your economic situation and future prospects aren't looking good, you want to blame someone or something. When those with too much power and money manipulate the public discourse to keep it about abstract appearances rather than tangible issues, it becomes easy to blame people who aren't like you, whether race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, whatever.You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.

It is hard to argue with these, though one could imagine others - for example, the tradeoffs between effectiveness and representation or stability and change or providing what the people want versus what the people need. How much our choices here depend on values or normative perspectives as opposed to empirics is another issue that Ansell hints at (he recognizes the inevitability of disagreement and sometimes lays out alternative positions, for example, on solidarity), but doesn’t treat as systematically. Nevertheless, these topics and tradeoffs provide a strong framework for a tour of political science. An examination of the dilemmas confronting capitalist democracies and the role that politics can play in managing them. These are big questions, I’ll grant you. But it’s a big book! Drawing on almost two decades of my own research and cutting edge scholarship across the social sciences, I explain why politics fails so often. Throughout the book, I continually trace how our individual self-interest sabotages our collective goals. Vision with execution is the clear driver of success, just as its absence is an equation for failure.

WHAT CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT CAN DO

To answer the first question, Light identified and ranked 41 important past government failures (between 2001 – 2014) from a search of news stories listed in the Pew Research Center’s “News Interest Index.” The problem is each of these five goals results in a political trap. For example, we all want a say in how we're governed, but it's impossible to have any true 'will of the people'. And we want to be richer tomorrow, but what makes us richer in the short run makes us poorer over the long haul. Join Ben Ansell and Blavatnik Professor of Government and Public Policy, Pepper Culpepper, as they discuss how we can escape these traps and avoid political failure.