Via Chuck, Alex Tabarrok’s So You Think You Can Be President? game show proposal:
Our system for choosing presidents doesn’t work very well. Voters are woefully uninformed on the most basic of issues and many end up voting on whim. I don’t think restricting the franchise is a good solution, however. A better idea is to create procedures that encourage voters to become better informed. Our current institutions for providing information are lousy. Debates, for example, are boring, the politicians don’t answer the questions and most importantly the voters don’t know what a good answer is.
Thus what we need is a way of conveying information to uninformed, unsophisticated voters in a way that is entertaining yet produces information about politicians that is correlated with real skills.
I suggest a game show, So You Think You Can Be President? SYTYCBP would have at least three segments. [...]
This clever idea would tell voters a lot about an aspiring politician, to be sure. But not the most important thing: how much he weighs.
2 Comments
Hangman’s got to know that little detail to properly set the knot. Don’t want the poor fellow dancing his way to heaven, however despicable he may have been on earth.
Absolutely. Much more important than whether they resist pandering to Salma Hayek.