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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Analytical Democratic Theory proposes doing for democratic deliberation what Ostrom did for commons: to create an empirical account of the methods, arrangements, circumstances and systems that produce good group reasoning, and avoid the pitfalls that lead to bad group reasoning. The economists' term for this is #microfoundations: the close study of interaction among individuals, which then produces a "macro" account of how to structure whole societies.
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Here are some examples of how microfoundations can answer some very big questions:
* Backfire effects: The original backfire effect research was a fluke. It turns out that in most cases, people who are presented with well-sourced facts and good arguments change their minds - but not always.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-019-09528-x
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