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

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Highly recommended for those who want to try to both grasp why we do self-defeating things repeatedly and figure out ways to start working toward a better society. 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. My current view of this is rather than defunding the police, observing the police would be the best way of ensuring public safety but removing or reducing the possibility of egregious police violence. In his new book Why Politics Fails, award-winning Oxford professor Ben Ansell shows that it’s not the politicians that are the problem, it’s that our collective goals result in five political ‘traps’. Mounk : Talk us through equality. What is the trap of equality and why is that something that we all desire but that we individually act to undermine?

People really don't like extremes of inequality. But that doesn't mean that they are preternaturally driven to want extremes of equality. That doesn't necessarily hold. People don't care, it seems from most surveys, about equal wealth, per se. But they do care quite strongly about their treatment. People care about being treated equally—no exceptions, the rules apply to all of us. They care less about the more abstract ideas of the overall aggregate equality of outcomes in society. Mounk : Your last trap is about solidarity—what is the trap of solidarity, how is that different from the trap of equality, and how do we get out of it?That sounds rather tragic. And the temptation for academics like myself is often to leave the story there, waving our hands helplessly, and say, gosh isn’t collective action difficult? But I don’t want you to think the book is a desperate jeremiad. I also explain what we can do to escape these traps. 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.

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.” An examination of the dilemmas confronting capitalist democracies and the role that politics can play in managing them. Politics is defined as making promises to each other. The reasons why it is so hard to keep these promises are explored along 5 challenges: It is the ultimate clash between individual self-interest and collective goals that pulls at the threads of political action. Once we understand this, we can implement solutions to make politics work better. A meticulous study of how different societies find it so difficult to achieve widely shared goals’ Financial TimesIn this research paper, Paul C. Light writes that the “first step in preventing future failures is to find a reasonable set of past failures that might yield lessons for repair.” To meet this goal, Light asks four key questions about past federal government failures: (1) where did government fail, (2) why did government fail, (3) who caused the failures, and (4) what can be done to fix the underlying problems? But talk me through what you think would be a better constitutional setup. Are there institutional reforms that would help the political parties represent where the center of public opinion seems to lie more effectively? Ansell does offer some light amidst the gloom – in an example which would make any Scot weep. “Oil finds make citizens richer,” he says. But he focuses on Norway, not Scotland, for his European analysis. Policy: Government might not have been given the policy, or any policy at all, needed to solve the problem at hand; or the policy might have been either too difficult to deliver or delegated to a vulnerable or historically unreliable organization. Why is so hard to get the world we want? Despite our current political tumult, there are things that we do broadly agree on - we want to govern ourselves not dance to the tunes of dictators; we want to be treated equally and avoid a dystopian society of a tiny elite and impoverished masses; we want to be looked after when we’re ill or destitute; we want to be safe in our houses and on our streets; and we want to have enough to live on and ideally more from generation to generation.