Slightly Less Democracy Means Slightly More Freedom.

• Author: Henderson, David R.

10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less By Garett Jones 233 pp.; Stanford University Press, 2020

One of the principles I taught my economics students the first day of class and then applied incessantly thereafter was the importance of thinking on the margin. Garett Jones, an economics professor at George Mason University, has written a whole book in which he does just that. Jones considers what would happen if we made highly democratic countries less democratic and entrusted certain political decisions more to unelected officials. If you think he's attacking democracy, you're missing his point. He is calling for slightly less democracy. In short, he is thinking on the margin.

In what will probably be one of the most important books of 2020, Jones argues that if we made the United States and many other countries slightly less democratic, we would get slightly more freedom and slightly better policies. He makes his case by examining the details of central bank policy on inflation, appointed versus elected judges, restrictions on who can vote, the effects of the European Union, and the extreme case of Singapore.

Refreshingly, he knows how to coin humorous but informative lines. For example, in discussing William F. Buckley Jr.'s famous statement that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard University faculty, Jones proposes an alternative: "Rather than being governed by the masses of Boston or by the professors of Harvard, I'd far rather be governed by the engineering faculty of MIT."

I started reading his book as someone who hates having important decisions made by "faceless bureaucrats." I ended up thinking, along with Jones, that that might be better. He makes clear that basic democracy is good for a simple, important reason: "democracies don't engage in widespread slaughter of their own citizens." Thus, he calls for only slightly less, rather than a lot less, democracy.

The evidence / Exhibit A for Jones's case is the effect of central bank independence on the inflation rate. He references a path-breaking 1993 article by Harvard economists Alberto Alesino and Lawrence Summers that looked at central banks around the world and used simple graphs to show that the more independent a bank was from the political system, the lower the inflation rate. If you dislike high inflation, as most people and most economists do, Alesino and...