Pay attention, or be bamboozled by bread and circuses  

Ross Gittins has an interesting article in the SMH on how the great mass of consumers is regularly outmanouevred by vested interest groups -Pay attention, or be bamboozled by bread and circuses.

After being paid to study the performance of politicians for the past 35 years it finally occurs to me that the problem with democracy is the same problem we have with competition in markets: for it to work well requires more effort and attention on the part of voters (or customers) than they're prepared to devote to it.

The similarity between democracy and markets is hardly surprising because they're both forms of competition. Businesses compete for our custom, political parties compete for our vote.

With the competition between, say, the Big Four banks, we expect to sit back while they compete with each other to attract our business, and this process produces the highest quality service at the keenest prices.

But it never works that way. Unless we pay close attention to the deal we're getting, unless we shop around and are prepared move our business to get a better deal, we don't get a very good deal at all.

It turns out that competition in markets is a two-way street: the customers have to put a fair bit of effort into making it work. If they don't, the banks will still compete with each other, but they'll do it in ways that yield the customer little benefit - advertising and phony product differentiation.

And I now see that competition in politics works much the same way. Unless enough of us pay close attention to what the pollies are doing and saying, they'll find ways to compete that are easier for them and less beneficial for us.

Effective competition between the banks is dogged by our misplaced loyalty to a particular bank, loyalty our bank happily takes advantage of. Similarly, the fact that maybe 60 per cent of voters are rusted on to one party or the other greatly diminishes the effectiveness of the competition between them.

But the problem goes deeper than that. A lot of it arises because the sellers (whether banks or political parties) are professional players, whereas the buyers (customers or voters) are amateurs.

When you earn your livelihood from banking or politics it's not hard to be always fully abreast of market conditions - who's offering what, who's genuine and who's faking, what the punters most prefer to buy.

But because banking and voting constitute such small parts of our busy lives, it's hard to be well-informed about what the sellers are up to. This gives them a considerable advantage over us. ...

All of us want more and better services from government - we each have a list of problems we want fixed - but few of us are prepared to pay more tax, and many of us want to pay less.

Much of the unsatisfactory behaviour of politicians arises from their attempts to satisfy - or appear to satisfy - these mutually inconsistent demands. They try to placate the many interest groups by tackling a huge range of problems, but never spend enough on any particular problem to actually fix it.

In any case, they know that, should they actually fix a problem, we'd be grateful for about a week before moving on to the next problem on our list.

Because we take so little interest in the details of problems and their solutions, because we rarely follow up yesterday's concerns, because our emotions are so easily swayed by vested interests or the media, the pollies learnt a long time ago that appearances matter more to voters than the reality of the situation.

So they concentrate their efforts on creating the appearance of effective action to "address" problems, on applying those solutions the public imagines will work rather than the less emotionally satisfying measures that really do work, and on squaring away the highly publicised problems of particular individuals rather than seeking systemic solutions.

They keep us distracted with bread and circuses - pitching for the Football World Cup, for instance - and try to dominate the 24-hour news cycle to create the appearance of unceasing activity to fix our problems, keep the media busy and leave little room for dissent to bloom.

And all because we don't pay enough attention.