What fish can teach us about democracy 📊 September 12, 2021
Plus: posts on social sorting, public opinion twenty years after 9/11, and improving representation in Congress
As promised, here are a few paragraphs adapted from the draft text of STRENGTH IN NUMBERS, which has just gone into production at W. W. Norton and should be out next summer. This section of the book presents various challenges and responses to the argument that the people can, in the aggregate, make “good” and “rational” decisions on public policy and other matters of government. We begin with the development of the concept of public opinion in political philosophy, tracing its roots back to Plato and Aristotle and beyond. We read primary documents from the Enlightenment and around the time of America’s founding to assess the extent to which enfranchised people were supposed to be sovereign self-governors. We observe the rise of polling and some of the first criticisms of “government by survey” from Walter Lippmann and others. And we review the empirical literature on the matter.
The tie-in? While we get into the science of polling later, this the…
