Recommended: America the Clueless

Frank Bruni has a provocative piece in today's New Your Times Op Ed section: America the Clueless.  He points to numerous recent polls that show that large parts of the American public are truly clueless about the politics going on around them. That is consistent with other findings from respected pollsters like the Pew Foundation, that find, for example that most people know relatively little about the religion they are so sure is true (their own), or that a fair fraction of high school seniors can't find the USA on a world map.

I have pointed out before that, by definition, about half the population has an IQ below 100 (that is how IQ is scaled), and that success in an undergraduate program -- at least if the college hasn't dumbed it down too much -- generally takes an IQ of at least somewhere around 115, or for the statisticians out there, about one standard deviation above the mean.  So some of these findings really aren't that surprising.

But what does take some pondering is this: in an increasingly complex world, where issues like climate change, energy policy, health care delivery, bank regulation or foreign relations are complex, many-faceted, and require study in arcane fields to even understand all the issues, what is the proper policy role of an electorate that can't even name the current vice president or their own members of Congress, or perhaps even find the USA on a world map?