Commentary: The impossibility of an informed electorate!

August 20, 2016 - Just about any example will make the point, but let's pick one that seems simple on the surface. Let's pick the conventional wisdom that personal incomes are declining.

To know whether they are declining, citizens would have to know the following facts, which are very difficult to know without having the time and interest to be a policy wonk.

Where did the data on incomes come from? The government? The media? Academia? Think tanks?

What are the biases, blind spots, and ideologies of the sources?

What statistical methodologies were used to compile the data?

How is "income" defined? Is it per-capita income or household income? Does it count only pay or does it include income from welfare, entitlements, unemployment compensation, disability programs, veterans benefits, and investment returns?

If income is defined as household income, how have households changed over the period being compared? Are there fewer or more single parent and single-earner households?

A worker might say that it is easy to know if income has declined: just look at your pay stub. Unfortunately, even that is complicated.

It's complicated because a significant portion of employee remuneration is in the form of non-cash benefits instead of cash, including such benefits as medical insurance, the employer's share of FICA taxes, and sick leave and other time off.

Also, from an employer's perspective, each employee is a cost, and that cost not only includes cash pay and non-cash benefits, but also the cost of myriad government mandates and regulations, such as family medical leave, EEOC and OSHA reporting requirements and lawsuits, wage and hour laws, investment regulations regarding traditional pension plans and 401(k) plans, and the new issue of the purported gap between the pay of women and men, which is an issue ripe with biases and statistical malpractice.

How have these employee costs changed over the years? A clue: the ratio of human resources staffers to the total number of company employees used to be about 1:150. Now it is approximately 1:100. In a very real sense, the additional HR people needed to administer the additional employment regulations comes out of employee paychecks.

Again, this is just one example out of hundreds of the complexities facing the electorate.

What can be done about this? Here is a solution:

High schools and colleges should be teaching students to become informed citizens and voters. Their curricula should include courses on how to question what is said by government, media, academia, and the two political parties; how to distinguish between propaganda and facts, and between biases and truth; how to find non-mainstream sources of information; and how to be a self-taught person, or autodidactic, through life.

Students would learn that issues of the day are much more complex than the way they are presented by those with hidden agendas or by those who just don't know better. In other words, they would become discerning citizens and an informed electorate.

If taught properly, students would love such courses. They would be wide-eyed over what they would discover. For example, they might find out why Amerikan public schools are so bureaucratic, top-heavy, costly, and low performing. They might find out why colleges are so expensive and why so many college students have gone into debt for degrees of questionable value.

Which is why the education establishment would never teach such courses and prefers an uninformed electorate.