Voting Reformation: 3 Alternate Approaches to Participatory Democracy | Dan Ariely
- 6 years ago
The maxim "One Man, One Vote" is so enshrined in our understanding of democracy that its weaknesses are difficult to see. Yet weaknesses it has. Ariely's latest book is "Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations" (https://goo.gl/SkXk2p).
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Transcript - So when we think about democracy I think there’s kind of a real interesting opportunity to think about what is participatory democracy in the modern connected world. And I think there’s all kind of versions that are much better than the vote every two-year kind of version that we have right now. For example there’s a lovely experiment that said what if people got to vote on where five percent of their income tax goes to. So you would get a list of all the things the government does, right. Which is actually already a good thing because people don’t know what the government does. At some point we went to the Chapel Hill Public Library and we asked people when was the last time you got a benefit from taxpayer’s money? People couldn’t remember when was the last time. And they were in a public library funded by taxpayer’s money. So, you know, we don’t really understand what the government does, what taxes go for. But if you’ve got a list of all the things the government does and you could decide five percent. You probably don’t want people to allocate all of their income tax because there’s some things that the government needs to worry about. But doing some kind of marginal contribution and thinking where we want to be I think would get people to be more involved, care more, look at waster. I think it would make government offices a bit more accountable. So that’s one version where I think we could get participatory democracy to be closer to what we want it to be. Read Full Transcript Here: https://goo.gl/ewkpqq.
Read more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink.com/videos/dan-airely-on-democracy-voting-and-politics
Follow Big Think here:
YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BigThinkdotcom
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Transcript - So when we think about democracy I think there’s kind of a real interesting opportunity to think about what is participatory democracy in the modern connected world. And I think there’s all kind of versions that are much better than the vote every two-year kind of version that we have right now. For example there’s a lovely experiment that said what if people got to vote on where five percent of their income tax goes to. So you would get a list of all the things the government does, right. Which is actually already a good thing because people don’t know what the government does. At some point we went to the Chapel Hill Public Library and we asked people when was the last time you got a benefit from taxpayer’s money? People couldn’t remember when was the last time. And they were in a public library funded by taxpayer’s money. So, you know, we don’t really understand what the government does, what taxes go for. But if you’ve got a list of all the things the government does and you could decide five percent. You probably don’t want people to allocate all of their income tax because there’s some things that the government needs to worry about. But doing some kind of marginal contribution and thinking where we want to be I think would get people to be more involved, care more, look at waster. I think it would make government offices a bit more accountable. So that’s one version where I think we could get participatory democracy to be closer to what we want it to be. Read Full Transcript Here: https://goo.gl/ewkpqq.