Thoughts on democracy

Is it rational to vote?

Obviously in some cases it is rational to vote, but let’s choose a fairly realistic situation: voting is none compulsory and about 20 million people vote. In no case will an election ever be determined by a single vote.

In this case, is it rational to vote?

You can suggest all sorts of additions to the scenario, for example, “well me voting encourages others to vote”, but this really misses the point. Especially as the flow on effects of your vote are still likely to be negligible.

A case can be made that even one more vote makes the government feel more compelled to honour its election promises. This seems doubtful to me but even so, on a cost benefits analysis, is voting worthwhile. You could spend that time doing some other political or social activity which might have more of an affect.

Is democracy an instrumental or intrinsic good

Secondly, for those that believe democracy is a good thing (most/all people who will reach this blog, I imagine), do you believe it is an intrinsic or instrumental good. That is to say, is having a say in your government valuable in and of itself, or is it valuable because it leads to other goods (ie. leads to accountability of government and policies that benefit the majority)? I have to say, at least in the abstract, I don’t believe that it is an intrinsic good. If everyone could be twice as happy (literally everyone) through another system of government then I believe this would be a better system of government. In the practical world though, I believe that a democracy has a heavy tolerance for imperfection (ie. for corrupt officials, incorrect decisions etc) and I believe it probably is one of the most useful forms of government for achieving these intrinsic goods that government is meant to aim at.

Learning French

I’ve been trying to learn French recently and, while I feel like my vocabulary is getting better, I still can’t understand French when spoken at a natural speed, even if the sentence is simple.  A friend recommended that I check out http://www.rfi.fr/lfen/statiques/accueil.asp which has a number of features for those trying to learn French. Best of all (to my mind) is “The news in simple French”. Accompanied by scripts, this is definitely what I need in order to get used to spoken French.

Strange Horizons: Von Neumann’s Poem

My poem, Von Neumann’s Poem was published on Strange Horizons a week or so ago. Regardless of whether you like it or not, you should check out the other stuff on the site (especially the fiction) if you’re a fan of science fiction or fantasy. The stories and poems here are free to view and each year they publish some of the best short science fiction around.

A Non-polar world

As a follow on from the comments on Tuesday, Richard N. Haass’s article, The Age of Non-Polarity is available from the Foreign Affairs website. This talks about a world that is no longer defined by a small group of powers but instead by large, dispersed power centres. From the article:

The twentieth century started out distinctly multipolar. But after almost 50 years, two world wars, and many smaller conflicts, a bipolar system emerged. Then, with the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union, bipolarity gave way to unipolarity — an international system dominated by one power, in this case the United States. But today power is diffuse.

Also, at least in the media that I interact with, the impression is given that America and China are on near equal footing (in terms of superpower status). However, at the moment, China is on a far lower level than the United States. In fact, America, the European Union, Japan and Germany by itself (depending on whose figures you have faith in) all have larger economies than China. In the case of the USA, the economy is significantly larger than that of China. From the media coverage at the moment it would be easy to assume that China was, at the very least, the second largest economy, but this isn’t the case.

Of course, China’s economy is growing strongly while the power of the US seems to be on the decline. Still, this fact seems to be leading to a portrayal of the state of the world in some of the media which is not accurate. My perception on this may be a bit skewed as I live in Australia and so the role of China is more important in the media I read than it would be in some other countries.

A weak state world

The American Interest blog has a post by Francis Fukuyama about the rise of a weak state world. From the post:

[The 20th Century] world was dominated by strong, centralized states, and international politics was the story about the interaction of these strong, centralized states—Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, the former Soviet Union, and the like. What is different about today’s international world is that it is dominated not by strong states, but by weak and sometimes failing states where the usual instruments of power, in particular, hard military power, don’t work that well.

Following the end of the Cold War it seems harder to predict the role of superpowers in the world. Will China, India, Russia or the EU gain superpower status along with America? Will the role of the superpower change and weak states (collectively) define world affairs as much as any lone superpower? Are superpowers as relevant as they used to be or are superpowers a thing of the past?

Hey

This blog is my place to post news, links and my thoughts. I probably won’t update it particularly regularly but I’ll keep an eye on it so if anyone leaves a comment I’ll make sure that I get back to them.