WHAT IF IT’S NOT THE POLITICIANS’ FAULT?

They’re just responding to the incentives we’ve set up for them.

The US government shutdown is unquestionably a failure. But a failure of what?

Democrats and their supporters would place the blame with the Republicans. And of course, Republicans and their supporters would place the blame with the Democrats. Either side would disparage the morality and intelligence of the other’s people.

But what if the elected politicians responsible for this situation are just normal people responding to the incentives and powers inherent in the system that they are a part of?

Let’s assume for a moment that these politicians are just people with varying degrees of empathy, foresight, greed, and wisdom, like the rest of the population. If that’s the case, then, presumably we could remove all of those particular individuals and replace them with another set of individuals and probably end up with similar problems.

So if we want a more efficient government — one whose actions benefit rather than harm the country as a whole — perhaps what we need are changes to the system and to the incentives and powers it provides.

President Obama recently referred to himself as “the President of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.” While the longevity of our democracy is something we can be proud of, we don’t need to keep it’s original operating system to retain government of the people, by the people, for the people.

Much of the way our democracy operates is a remnant of the bold experiment that our Founding Fathers undertook. Since then we have learned a lot about democracies and how to make them operate in ways that more faithfully and efficiently reflect the will of the people.

Perhaps it’s time to upgrade our democracy, to rethink its organization. Let’s look at ideas like instant-runoff voting and parliamentary democracies and engage political scientists to design a new system that is more likely to ensure that no matter what sort of person we end up with in an elected office they will be more likely to act in accordance with the will of the people by virtue of the incentives and powers presented to them by that system.

Or we could just “throw the bums out” yet again and pretend that neither the next bunch of politicians nor we are also just a bunch of bums.