Democracy is practical

The moral case for democracy is based, in part, on its ability to deliver better lives for the people

Some people argue for democracy purely on abstract moral grounds, suggesting that people need to be able to express their will and anything that subverts their will is tyranny. Still, if democracy produced terrible outcomes, while dictatorships produced great outcomes, then it would be easy to argue that democracy is immoral because it leads to bad outcomes. Therefore, for anyone who wants to defend democracy, it is comforting to note that democracy generally produces better results over the long-term.

Once again, let me repeat, as I’ve said in other essays, the benefits of democracy have been well-documented. People in democracies are better protected against those diseases that arise from pollution, are more likely to be vaccinated against common childhood illnesses, and tend to have better educations provided by their governments. Democracies tend to experience more economic growth than non-democracies, though at any given time there might be a non-democracy that is growing very fast. One study has shown that men are taller in democracies. In the long-run, democracies offer a stability that seems to produce better outcomes for people, when compared to the long-run experiences in autocracies. Autocracies have a habit of producing 30 years of excellent economic growth but then lapsing into war, or civil war, or a chaotic period of civil unrest, or stagnation caused by the fragility that most autocracies suffer over the long-term because they lack legitimacy.

Amartya Sen won a Nobel Prize in Economics in part for showing the connection between individual freedom and economic development. Since I have previously referenced this work without ever directly quoting, I’m going to post this here so I can refer back to it (and so that you can refer back to it). More than anyone else, he has made the point that democracies are practical. Sen wrote this in 1999, listing the real benefits that democracy delivers:

I have discussed elsewhere the remarkable fact that, in the terrible history of famines in the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press. We cannot find exceptions to this rule, no matter where we look: the recent famines of Ethiopia, Somalia, or other dictatorial regimes; famines in the Soviet Union in the 1930s; China’s 1958-61 famine with the failure of the Great Leap Forward; or earlier still, the famines in Ireland or India under alien rule. China, although it was in many ways doing much better economically than India, still managed (unlike India) to have a famine, indeed the largest recorded famine in world history: Nearly 30 million people died in the famine of 1958-61, while faulty governmental policies remained uncorrected for three full years. The policies went uncriticized because there were no opposition parties in parliament, no free press, and no multiparty elections. Indeed, it is precisely this lack of challenge that allowed the deeply defective policies to continue even though they were killing millions each year. The same can be said about the world’s two contemporary famines, occurring right now in North Korea and Sudan.

Famines are often associated with what look like natural disasters, and commentators often settle for the simplicity of explaining famines by pointing to these events: the floods in China during the failed Great Leap Forward, the droughts in Ethiopia, or crop failures in North Korea. Nevertheless, many countries with similar natural problems, or even worse ones, manage perfectly well, because a responsive government intervenes to help alleviate hunger. Since the primary victims of a famine are the indigent, deaths can be prevented by recreating incomes (for example, through employment programs), which makes food accessible to potential famine victims. Even the poorest democratic countries that have faced terrible droughts or floods or other natural disasters (such as India in 1973, or Zimbabwe and Botswana in the early 1980s) have been able to feed their people without experiencing a famine.

Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort. Not surprisingly, while India continued to have famines under British rule right up to independence (the last famine, which I witnessed as a child, was in 1943, four years before independence), they disappeared suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and a free press.

…There is, I believe, an important lesson here. Many economic technocrats recommend the use of economic incentives (which the market system provides) while ignoring political incentives (which democratic systems could guarantee). This is to opt for a deeply unbalanced set of ground rules. The protective power of democracy may not be missed much when a country is lucky enough to be facing no serious calamity, when everything is going quite smoothly. Yet the danger of insecurity, arising from changed economic or other circumstances, or from uncorrected mistakes of policy, can lurk behind what looks like a healthy state.

The recent problems of East and Southeast Asia bring out, among other things, the penalties of undemocratic governance. This is so in two striking respects. First, the development of the financial crisis in some of these economies (including South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia) has been closely linked to the lack of transparency in business, in particular the lack of public participation in reviewing financial arrangements. The absence of an effective democratic forum has been central to this failing.

…The vulnerable in Indonesia may not have missed democracy when things went up and up, but that lacuna kept their voice low and muffled as the unequally shared crisis developed. The protective role of democracy is strongly missed when it is most needed.