1/7

Good article by Janan Ganesh, but while I agree that governance is what democracies are supposed to do best, I would also argue that democracies, as Churchill is supposed to have said about the US, do end up usually doing the right thing, but... https://www.ft.com/content/92ec21e7-2070-4105-b145-1063fa3c6b41
2/7

only after having tried out the alternatives. While non-democracies often go to their graves sticking rigidly to their institutions, healthy democracies are pragmatic and flexible, trying first one thing and, when that fails, trying something else.
3/7

This adjustment process may seem uglier and more dispiriting than the steadfastness of countries that don’t adjust as quickly, but for that reason, ironically, it most undermines the credibility of democracies just as they are proving their greatest worth.
4/7

All political systems make bad mistakes, but the ones that deliver the most in the long run, and that outlast their rivals, are the ones in which mistakes are identified and self-correcting, and of all political systems democracies seem the least bad at doing that.
5/7

After all it was in the 1930s and 1970s, both periods of huge structural change in the world, when the prestige of democracy was at its lowest, but it was also the democracies who adjusted and ultimately managed best.
6/7

Over the next 10-15 years I suspect (assuming we get though our ecological crisis) the most important test of our various political systems will have to do with which does a better job of reversing the extreme levels of income inequality that afflict all the major...
7/7

countries of the world, and so resolves the social, political and economic consequences of extreme income inequality. Obviously the jury is still out, but I know how I would bet.
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