Should we be ruled by the brightest and the best?

Our masters are those who managed to climb the greasy pole the fastest. Their reward is their dominion over us. Life’s also-rans may not be happy about this state of affairs, but probably console themselves with the idea that at least decisions are being taken on our behalfs by people who have some sort of extraordinary skill and ability.

Today, the education system is much more efficient at identifying talent and promoting it. Although Etonians are over-represented at Oxford and Cambridge, a lot of very bright scholarship boys and girls get in too. Marxists bemoan this state of affairs, because it depletes the proletariat of future leaders of the revolution. But, leaving that aside, and given that the vast bulk of MPs are educated to university level, we can take comfort that we we no longer have ministers in government who left education at the age of eleven, like Ernest Bevin.

But, is this really a benefit? Real median wages in the UK (and the US) have stalled over the last forty years. We have recessions more frequently than ever. The recovery of GDP from the 2008 Global Financial Crisis was slower than in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Governments promise to eliminate the (government) deficit and end up doubling it. The growth in labour productivity (which isn’t everything, but in the long run is nearly everything) has been lower since the elites took charge than since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Whichever party is in power, election promises turn to dust. The UK’s GDP per capita drifts further and further behind our major rivals.

Political problems are hard to fix. Many of them are about the sharing of pain, the allocation of misery. How much money to allocate to education, or defence, or health, or pensions, or poverty relief is not some sort of exercise in multi-variate calculus. It’s about deciding on winners and losers. Packing parliament with a single class — those who have cleared life’s educational hurdles by the biggest margin — will lead to a particular allocation which, ahem, does not favour those who have drawn the losing numbers in the lottery of life.

When a government is full of very old people, education spending becomes, magically, a lower priority than hip replacements. Having empathy with people who you have never met, and with whom you have nothing in common is almost impossible. When those people rarely vote, it’s harder still.

So, what is to be done? Chosing MPs by lot has something to be said for it. Citizens’ Assemblies have been proposed. Maybe some sort of hybrid system could be devised, but expecting MPs to voter for a system where half of them have to give up their jobs to individuals chosen at random seems an unlikely development.

Please write your answers to me, on a postcard, at the usual address.