(2023-05-05) Doctorow Daily Links Ostromizing Democracy

Pluralistic: Ostromizing democracy (04 May 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow. You know how "realist" has become a synonym for "asshole?" As in, "I'm not a racist, I'm just a 'race realist?'" That same "realism" is also used to discredit the idea of democracy itself, among a group of self-styled "libertarian elitists," who claim that social science proves that democracy doesn't work – and can't work

That's why noted "realist" Peter Thiel thinks women shouldn't be allowed to vote. Thiel says that mothers are apt to sideline the "science" of economics for the soppy, sentimental idea that children shouldn't starve to death and thus vote for politicians who are willing to tax rich people.

Some of these libertarian elitists want to replace democracy with markets, because "markets impose an effective 'user fee' for irrationality that is absent from democracy.

These arguments and some of their most gaping errors are rehearsed in an excellent Democracy Journal article by Henry Farrell, Hugo Mercier, and Melissa Schwartzberg.

The article is a companion piece to a new academic article in American Political Science Review, where the authors propose a new subdiscipline of political science, Analytical Democracy Theory.

What's "Analytical Democracy Theory?" It's the systematic study of when and how collective decision-making works, and when it goes wrong.

the paper that brought us the idea of the Tragedy of the Commons, published in 1968 by Garrett Hardin in Science, was a hoax: 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 white nationalist – used his "realist's account of the commons to justify colonization and genocide.... Hardin went on to pioneer the idea of "lifeboat ethics,"

Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel for her work studying the properties of successful, durable commons. She went and looked at commons

Ostom codified the circumstances, mechanisms and principles that distinguished successful commons from failed commons.

Analytical Democratic Theory proposes doing for democratic deliberation what Ostrom did for commons

Realism is a demand dressed up as an observation. Realists like Margaret Thatcher insisted "there is no alternative" to neoliberalism, but what she meant was "stop trying to think of an alternative."

The Ostrom method – actually studying how something works, rather than asking yourself how it would work if everyone thought like you – is a powerful tonic to this, but it's not the only one. One of the things that makes science fiction so powerful is its ability to ask how a system would work under some different social arrangement.

There are sf writers who are making enormous strides in imagining how deliberative tools could enable new democratic institutions. Ruthanna Emrys's stunning 2022 novel "A Half-Built Garden" is a tour-de-force

My next novel, "The Lost Cause," is at root a tale of competing group decision-making methodologies, between post-Green New Deal repair collectives, seafaring anarcho-capitalist techno-solutionists, and terrorizing white nationalist militias (it's out in November).