We cannot solve the problem of ignorant voters or dogmatic elites in democracy (but we can mitigate it)

From The problem with democracy by Sam Bowman.

An interesting insight tying together two acknowledged issues: the challenge represented by low information voters, and the challenge of bridging narrow expertise (deep content knowledge but possibly at the expense of broad contextual knowledge) with generalist knowledge (broad contextual knowledge but little depth).

The choice we have in a democracy appears to be between open-minded ignoramuses or well-informed ideologues. There is no reason to think that either will choose anything like the ‘right’ policy for any given problem. And, as Jeffrey Friedman has argued, unlike when you buy the ‘wrong’ flavour of ice-cream and can immediately buy a different kind next time, the feedback mechanism in politics is weak and difficult to discern.

The answer may be to recognise these crippling limitations of democracy and, wherever possible, prefer decentralized market mechanisms. We cannot solve the problem of ignorant voters or dogmatic elites in democracy, but we can at least try to take as much power out of their hands as possible.