Anybody can be elected.
But, once elected, does anybody receive the information and training to make informed decisions?
Some simple considerations on how to improve the “intellectual immune system” of our elected officials.
As today is Sunday, a short post.
This blog is supposedly talking about technology and politics, and their impact on everyday life.
But the same applies the other way around.
If you search around my blog, you will see that long before I started working I was in and around active politics, either directly, or through my family, contacts, friends.
In the 1970s, the two major Italian political parties were the Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party- I called them the “two churches”.
As both had rules, regulations, and… a way of training candidates and elected members.
This was due in part to a “command and control” attitude (maybe stronger in the Communist Party, with a formal school), but also to deliver a basic knowledge on the working of the office that, if elected, they were supposed to take care of.
Most parliaments around the world are not really democratic: yes, anybody can be elected (theoretically), but the complexity of the system clearly generates and advantage for those who come to the seat with a strong cultural background.
I do not agree with those that say that this was by design: it is an accident of history, as, initially active and passive voting rights were linked to the social status.
In Italy, it was well into the XX century before women were allowed to vote.
If you pick up any book on the history of parliaments, just limiting to, say, the XIX and XX century, you will see that the industrialization of society has gone hand in hand with an increasing complexity in law making.
Not just in the process- but also in the content.
And, unfortunately, this means that most of the information needed to decide how to cast the vote is filtered and processed by interest groups.
Yes, again the Internet. But how many of the candidates receive a basic training to help them discern real informative websites from increasingly sophisticated “fake news” websites?
We are all human. Including the staff and members of any elected office, from the town council to the parliament.
And some websites remind me of jokes that Borges and others liked to play, with fake references to non-existing books, and so on.
Or, with more levity, a 1950s movie where an actress was constantly making up statistics, until eventually she admitted that she saw that, when told numbers, most people took the numbers at face value; therefore, she invented statistics to get credibility.
Almost two decades ago John Allen Paulos wrote some entertaining books about numeracy- recovering or adding the basic numerical skills required in our complex society.
I do not really think that schools should deliver training on the “nuts and bolts” of the Internet- it would be akin to teach them how to use a mobile phone, or a TV set.
Instead, anybody could benefit from some basic literacy on how to use the medium as an information source.
If you want: teaching people how to do a “quick due diligence” on the information that they receive.
I still hear too often people (also so called “experts”) quoting figures from dubious or spurious statistics or “social scientists”.
Often, with nobody questioning the source of the information- or how representative was the population that they used to produce the study.
And, for politicians, the worst of all: the endless number of small studies pushing the results on some marginal activities, and projecting impressive savings…. to promote some “innovative projects” (i.e. grants).
Pity that, if you take something that is useless (say, the discarded frying oil) and use it, it is fine, provided that supply exceeds demand.
But as soon as demand start picking up, it is a resource.
Just have a look at what happened with the prices of some staple crops, that, after becoming cash crops via biofuel incentives, became prohibitively expensive in various developing countries.
You do not need to be a subject expert to coordinate or write laws and regulations, but you need to have access to experts that can reliably filter the many minutiae and technicalities on your behalf.
But it is still the duty of those using the experts to be able to “vet” them- is a question of method, not of content.
And, being a question of method, why not add that to the normal introductory training that is given upon taking the office?
Actually- why not to create a series of lectures that are required before being confirmed as a candidate, for any office?
I have been a consultant for more than 50% of my life, but I still believe that consultants should be resources when it makes sense.
And, for this training activity, I think that consultants should have a limited or non-existing role (limited for smaller organizations; non-existing, for larger ones, that have all the skills in house).
If done by employees working inside the support organization of, say, the city council, the government, the parliament, this would have at least two benefits.
Use resources that are already available, and have somebody that is working daily deliver training on what they know, and understanding how to communicate with their future “bosses”.
I will soon publish a list of books that could help in building these critical skills- without any consultant (myself included! I am doing it), just using the brain and a library.
Tags: borges, election, filter, group, interest, internet, numeracy, official, paulos, politics, scientist, social, technology, training