Content warning Long thread/8
Others say we should limit voting to "Vulcans" who can pass a knowledge test about the views of neoclassical economists, and if this means that fewer Black people and women are eligible to vote because either condition is "negatively correlated" with familiarity with "politics," then so mote be it. After all, these groups are "much more likely than others to be mistaken about what they really need":
8/
Content warning Long thread/9
These arguments and some of their most gaping errors are rehearsed in an excellent *Democracy Journal* article by @henryfarrell, #HugoMercier, and #MelissaSchwartzberg (Mercier's research is often misinterpreted and misquoted by libertarian elitists to bolster their position):
https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/68/the-new-libertarian-elitists/
9/
Content warning Long thread/10
The article is a companion piece to a new academic article in *#AmericanPoliticalScienceReview*, where the authors propose a new subdiscipline of #PoliticalScience, #AnalyticalDemocracyTheory:
What's "Analytical Democracy Theory?" It's the systematic study of when and how collective decision-making works, and when it goes wrong.
10/
Content warning Long thread/11
Because the libertarian elitists aren't completely, utterly wrong - there *are* times when groups of people make bad decisions. From that crumb of truth, the libertarian elitists theorize an entire nihilistic cake in which self-governance is impossible and where we fools and sentimentalists must be subjugated to the will of our intellectual betters, for our own good.
This isn't the first time libertarian political scientists have pulled this trick.
11/
Content warning Long thread/12
You've probably heard of the "#TragedyOfTheCommons," which claims to be a "realist" account of what happens when people try to share something - a park, a beach, a forest - without anyone owning it. According to the "tragedy," these commons are inevitably ruined by "rational" actors who know that if they don't overgraze, pollute or despoil, someone else will, so they might as well get there first.
12/
Content warning Long thread/13
The Tragedy of the Commons feels right, and we've all experienced some version of it - the messy kitchen at your office or student house-share, the litter in the park, etc. But the paper that brought us the idea of the Tragedy of the Commons, published in 1968 by #GarrettHardin in *Science*, was a hoax:
13/
Content warning Long thread/14
Hardin didn't just claim that some commons turned tragic - he claimed that the tragedy was *inevitable*, and, moreover, that *every commons* had experienced a tragedy. But Hardin made it all up. It wasn't true. What's more, Hardin - an ardent #WhiteNationalist - used his "realist's account of the commons to justify colonization and genocide.
14/
Content warning Long thread/15
After all, if the people who lived in these colonized places didn't have property rights to keep their commons from tragifying, then those commons were already doomed. The colonizers who seized their lands and murdered the people they found there were actually *saving* the colonized from their own tragedies.
15/
Content warning Long thread/16
Hardin went on to pioneer the idea of #LifeboatEthics, a greased slide to mass-extermination of "inferior" people (Hardin was also a #eugenicist) in order to save our planet from "overpopulation."
Hardin's flawed account of the commons is a sterling example of the problem with #economism, the ideology that underpins neoclassical economics:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse
16/
Content warning Long thread/17
Economism was summed up in by Ely Devons who quipped ""If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"
Hardin asked himself "If I were reliant upon a commons, what would I do?" And, being a realist (that is, an asshole), Hardin decided that he would steal everything from the commons because that's what the other realists would do if he didn't get there first.
17/
Content warning Long thread/18
Hardin didn't go and look at a commons. But someone else did.
#ElinorOstrom won the Nobel for her work studying the properties of successful, durable commons. She went and looked at commons:
https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons
Ostom codified the circumstances, mechanisms and principles that distinguished successful commons from failed commons.
18/
