Joe Carroll
The World of Books
Hillary Clinton won more popular votes than Donald Trump in the US Presidential election but he won more Electoral College votes under the system devised by an 18th-Century intellectual elite, some of whom were slave-owners. So is he the democratically elected President?
Eamon de Valera did not believe the Irish people had the right to be wrong when the First Dáil narrowly accepted the Anglo-Irish Treaty which he rejected in 1922. You could argue that the six counties of Northern Ireland was an inherently undemocratic entity as it was deliberately chosen to produce a two-thirds unionist majority. .
How can majority/minority disputes be solved rationally? In 2004, a financial journalist on The New Yorker, James Surowiecki, wrote a book called The Wisdom of Crowds (Abacus, £9.99pb), subtitled Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few. It was highly praised for its analysis of decision-making in the worlds of business, science, stock-markets and politics. Except for the last category – politics – the author was able to demonstrate, often statistically, that “under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.”
He points out dangers that can undermine this group intelligence. There can be a tendency to “follow the herd” or to “group think”. Examples would be the way the Celtic Tiger era was dominated by the rush to get into property at any price because the price could only go up.
This was preceded by the “dot-com bubble” in the US in the late 1990s when it was enough for a company to announce that it was specialising in information technology for its shares to go through the roof. Belatedly it was realised that the valuation put on many of these companies before they ever made a profit was crazy.
But aberrations aside, the arguments for “group intelligence” can be proved “under the right circumstances” such as experiments in laboratories and in universities with guinea pig students.
When it comes to democracy and politics, left to the last and shortest chapter in the book, the author concedes that the “wisdom of crowds” can be a dubious concept but not altogether to be ruled out. He refers to the work of two political scientists in the US, James Fishkin and Bruce Ackerman, who argued 14 years ago after the election of George W. Bush as president that something dramatic needed to be done to “stop the hollowing out of American democracy.”
As the professors saw it, ”Americans are increasingly isolated from each other and alienated from the political system, public debate is becoming coarser and less informative, and the idea of the public good is being eclipsed by our worship of private interest.”
Private interest
That was 14 years ago. Has the election of Donald Trump shown things have got any better? What about our own situation? Water charges were a major issue in last year’s general election. Was this an example of “the idea of the public good being eclipsed by our worship of private interest”?
The author goes on to show that it is extremely hard to define “public interest”. In the Irish election, for example, one could argue that it was in the public interest to have water charges so that the future supply could be safeguarded (apart from the argument that not having charges could leave Ireland open to heavy EU fines).
But opponents of water charges could point to Britain where in some areas the water supply has been privatised leaving it vulnerable to exploitation and what was to stop that happening here if a centralised water authority were set up?
Irish politicians when faced with an election result which has gone wrong for them, often say resignedly: “The Irish people in their wisdom have…” What they really mean is that in this case the Irish people have acted stupidly. They have put self-interest before the common good. But who is to say what really motivates the voter in the privacy of the voting booth? He or she might actually be voting for the common good, and if a good government is the overall result you could say it is an example of the “wisdom of the crowd”.