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In his new book, Jason Brennan makes us consider why we ever thought we could rely on democracy to fulfill human needs.
A special museum should exist for books with assumptions dramatically different than the ones you carry around every day.
For example, many assume that humans rarely commit mistakes; we think maybe 5 per day, on our worst days. Yet the scholars who analyze mistakes tell us that we commit dozens of mistakes daily. The frequency of our mistakes has a huge impact on the magnitude of humility we should feel. Such humility should open our eyes to better decisions.
Jason Brennan's important book, Against Democracy, makes us wonder—-why in the world do we think democracy is ideal? Brennan makes us consider why we ever thought we could rely on democracy to fulfill human needs.
By raising the questions he discusses, Brennan enables us to see that there are democracies and then there are democracies. You cannot read this book and ever again assign fealty to the assumption that adults can be depended on to provide public policy wisdom.