There's a long list, almost every problem in this country and worldwide ultimately comes down to political failures. We have almost zero long-term consideration going into political decision making. We have a terrible voting system that forces citizens to either vote for who they want OR effect the outcome of the race. This causes the two parties to eternally maintain their monopoly of political power, they'll continually shift to absorb any upstart interest groups. Which in turn leads to only two solutions being proposed for each political issue, each targeted to appeal to their constituency instead of solving the problem. Each party only needs to be less hated than the other by 50%+1 of the population.So yeah, I think it's broken, it barely ever worked well.
And in the context of this article, I think we do a ridiculously poor job of listening to constituents, largely because there isn't a successful near-universal political social network that forces politicians to listen.
waterlesscloud|13 years ago
What would any of these proposals do to increase long term thinking? Making it easy to express opinions on 10 topics a minute seems virtually certain to increase short term shallow thinking.
In other words, in what concrete ways would any of this make anything better?