What's Your Vote Worth?

Economist Dambisa Moyo argues that to save liberal democracy, it’s time to kill its core principle: One vote for one person.

- Peter Coy

It’s hard sometimes not to despair for the future of democracies. Voters can be tribal and poorly informed. Last year the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania surveyed 1,013 U.S. adults and found that only a quarter could name all three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial). A third couldn’t name any.

Dambisa Moyo has had that same sinking feeling. But unlike you, she wrote a book about it. In Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth—and How to Fix It, she argues that the public is too shortsighted to choose economic policies that will produce long-term prosperity. “Political myopia is the central obstacle on the path of growth in advanced economies,” she writes.

Readers are likely to find themselves nodding along until page 198, which is where Edge of Chaos gets seriously edgy. At the end of a list of fixes, she calls for a system of “weighted voting,” in which a ballot counts more or less depending on a voter’s qualifications. Weight would be determined by a civics test or maybe by one’s profession or education.