It is often assumed that elected leaders have one or both of two advantages over the layman: they have information available to them that we do not; and they are generally more intelligent or at the very least, better educated. Before you start scoffing me because you don’t necessarily think this about the current people in charge, consider that you probably had somebody in mind who you thought would do a better job, even if you didn’t have any intention to vote for them. All candidates for any public office must be considered to be at least of slightly above average intelligence by enough people, otherwise they wouldn’t have gotten the nomination to begin with.

Yes, this is open for discussion. No snide comments until the end, please.

Obviously not everyone believes this, so the motives for choosing who will represent a given constituency go beyond capability. It’s easy to lapse into conspiracy theory and say that leaders are elected by a shadow group or other less than democratic means, but that’s outside the scope of this discussion. Suffice it to say that not everyone has the time to research the facts and make important decisions based on those, and so we pick others we believe are going to do this in our place. Since nobody thinks like anybody else, it breaks down into major groups, and ultimately nobody is happy—but at least those we are picking, we believe on some fundamental level, to be smart enough to do the job correctly.

So is there anything we can do about this? Naturally.

I propose a presidential nominee test. It would not be difficult to create an accurate simulation of world markets, political developments, alliances and aggressions, and numerous variables describing the internal state of America and overall general world events. It would be an all-immersing simulation: a few days to a week inside a building, sealed off entirely from the real world, while the candidate is given situations inside the simulator and evaluated on his or her competencies on dealing with these. Part of the of the test would include “unsolvable” situations: ones in which there is no right answer.

The most obvious downside to this I will address right off the bat: it works better for a two (or few) party system. It does not make it as easy for regular guys off the street to run for president, unless the test were optional, in which case it would be difficult to enforce for the big guys. The excuses would be many, including the obvious one, time.

But as long as we’re stuck with a few party system, we might as well look for ways to improve it. Let’s look at the pros and cons in detail.

It would obviously be a big consumer of time and money to get the project made at all. Furthermore, there is not necessarily agreement among experts in various disciplines as to how markets react under certain conditions, and for this reason the test can be easily denounced as unrealistic. There is also the obvious point of the candidate knowing how people expect him to act in certain situations, so the actions displayed in the simulation would not necessarily be indicative of how he would truly react in office.

However, I don’t think an extremely high level of accuracy is needed, because I believe we have the insight today to create a realistic enough model that it will work and reveal behavior over a one-week period. The test would not need to be accurate enough to mimic precisely real world situations, nor immersive enough that a candidate forgets to “act the part”. The majority of the scenarios outside of the lose-lose ones would be ones with no right or wrong answer, as the reaction and thought process leading up to the resolution can be considered just as valid, if not more so, than the resolution itself.

I believe the test also needs to be completely transparent. Every minute spent “on the job” in the simulator would be recorded, open for anyone to watch (or make fun of). In this way, the audience has the advantage of seeing what decisions the candidate makes while knowing they both had access to the same amount of information. (One potential downside to this is that future candidates are able to see how the situation would be run ahead of time, and so the scenarios would need to be novel every year. This may be impractical over the long run.)

Such a plan will not eliminate incapable leaders, however, it would provide more insight than we currently receive as to how candidates may act during potentially real events. How a person handles stress, not to mention their grasp of global cause and effect, are qualities that we currently do not asses when choosing leadership. Perhaps its time we start.

At this point, it’s time to point out the major flaw in the plan. It sounds good. The plan would be difficult—most likely impossible—to implement and enforce. But imagine such a plan was already in place. What’s the catch?

The catch is that it wouldn’t change anything. It is not a lack of data with which to evaluate our leaders that we’re missing. It’s a lack of reason. The reason for one’s choice of candidate is rationalized after the choice has been made. This is true regardless of whom you voted for, assuming you voted at all.

Nevertheless, something similar to what I described already exists. Of course it’s on a much simpler scale and no one is using it for any sort of official appointment, but it’s a start, right? At the very least, you can do it yourself, proving to yourself that you can’t run a country, either.

[Nation States]

-Ted