(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- It’s hard sometimes not to despair for the future of democracies. Voters can be tribal and poorly informed. Last year the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania surveyed 1,013 U.S. adults and found that only a quarter could name all three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial). A third couldn’t name any.
Dambisa Moyo has had that same sinking feeling. But unlike you, she wrote a book about it. In Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth—and How to Fix It, she argues that the public is too shortsighted to choose economic policies that will produce long-term prosperity. “Political myopia is the central obstacle on the path of growth in advanced economies,” she writes.
Readers are likely to find themselves nodding along until page 198, which is where Edge of Chaos gets seriously edgy. At the end of a list of fixes, she calls for a system of “weighted voting,” in which a ballot counts more or less depending on a voter’s qualifications. Weight would be determined by a civics test or maybe by one’s profession or education.
Weighted voting “will no doubt be seen as jarring and antithetical to the principles of democracy,” Moyo concedes. Yet she argues that it “reduces the influence of those most likely to be apathetic or disengaged from public policy debates and thus to make poor electoral choices.”
As a black woman, Moyo belongs to two groups that were long denied any vote in America, let alone an equal one. Women didn’t get to vote in national elections in the U.S. until 1920, and the black electorate still faces obstacles. As recently as December, the American Civil Liberties Union accused Alabama of suppressing the black vote in its special U.S. Senate election by insisting on photo IDs while closing driver’s license offices in predominantly black counties.
Yet Moyo presumably sees herself as one of the people who would get an overweighted vote: She holds a master’s degree from Harvard and a doctorate in economics from the University of Oxford. Born and raised in Zambia, Moyo has worked for Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and the World Bank and expects to become a U.S. citizen this year. (She’s published three other books, the best-known being Dead Aid, which argues that dependence on foreign aid has actually made Africa poorer.)
Moyo says her aim is to save democracy, not squelch it, through weighted voting and other tweaks to the political system: compulsory voting, higher salaries for officeholders, longer terms in office combined with stricter limits on the number of terms, etc. Because if something isn’t done soon to boost growth, tyrants will arise. “In fact,” she writes, “overwhelming evidence shows that economic growth is a prerequisite for democracy, not the other way around.”
She’s right that a stagnant economy is dangerous to civil liberty. Global freedom declined for a 12th consecutive year in 2017, the watchdog group Freedom House said recently, citing setbacks in Bahrain, Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, among other countries. With economic anxiety on the rise, 70 percent of the world’s putative democracies have become “indistinguishable from authoritarian regimes,” Moyo writes.
As is often the case, though, Moyo’s solutions aren’t as persuasive as her diagnosis. If you think about it, even devoted democrats draw the line somewhere on ballot box access: The right to vote is generally denied to prisoners, children, noncitizens, and people judged mentally incompetent. But imagine the envy and anger that would be unleashed if voting power were based on profession or education. Who would decide how to divide the public into first-, second-, and third-class citizens? Would biology professors be certified as “highly qualified” but high school history teachers ranked “standard qualified”? What about journalists vs. carpenters vs. actors vs. the unemployed? And how much of the public would be consigned to the lowest tier of “unqualified” voters—would it be 1 percent or 10 percent or more?
A civics test seems a more defensible way to implement weighted voting, but not really. It implicitly equates knowledge with good judgment, which experience tells us isn’t a sound equation. As the conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr. once said, “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”
In the end, Moyo comes across as a well-meaning meritocrat. Democracy has its flaws, all right, but elitism isn’t the way to cure them.
To contact the author of this story: Peter Coy in New York at pcoy3@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Chris Rovzar at crovzar@bloomberg.net, Justin Ocean
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