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Bryce Tolpen's avatar

An agglomeration of agglomerations! I haven't seen anything like your spreadsheet where someone takes others' numbers about governing, the economy, and social protections and draws correlations from them. It was fun (though somewhat discouraging) to click around and re-sort the data.

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Elle Griffin's avatar

I loved that part too, it's fun to play around in there and see where various countries rank on certain things!!!

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Kumar's avatar

Re: bad actors gaining power. “Democracies are better places to live not because democratic leaders are better people, but because their interests happen to align with that of the majority of their citizens.” - CGP Grey. Checks and balances, term limits, elections, etc are all attempts to align the interests of leaders to that of their people. A book that explores this more in depth is The Dictators Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita.

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Elle Griffin's avatar

Yes, I agree with that take. I don't think our current versions of democracy are the best ones, only that they are our best attempt to align the interests of our leaders with the interests of a majority of citizens. Not an easy feat to accomplish!

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David Roberts's avatar

This is a great resource, Elle!

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