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Comment by nitwit005 | Hacker News Reader

An aging population and fewer children may be issues, but when zero family members and zero employees want to rub the business, they don't seem like the main problem.

It's a country with 92% of people living in cities, despite government intervention to support rural areas. People keep making the choice to leave.

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If 92% of the people live in the city this means the country side are only 8% of votes. If your goal is to be in the power rather than making good decisions in the long term you do decisions that will be popular in the short term at any cost. Extend it to other large groups and you end up with a recipe for disaster.

If politicians are conditioned like this (and I believe this has to be the situation for most developed countries even if it's with different topics), there is no way we can work well in the long term. This is a massive problem with democracy...

I want to clarify that I'm not advocating for dictatorships at all, period. I think that democracy is actually the best system that mankind has had so far.

In America we solve this problem with the much maligned electoral college. Keeps the folks in highly populated coastal cities from controlling the whole country.

Suuuure, works soooooo well

I’d respect that argument if states were forced not to allocate their electors in a winner-takes-all manner.

Correction, it’s not the electoral college itself but the senate primarily that favors representatives from the countryside (and not really countryside so much as low population states. Voters in states with both countryside and huge cities, say Texas, are also underrepresented in the Senate)

Electoral college votes for a state are senate seats plus house seats. House is roughly population based.

Senate is 2 per state and constitutes half the legislative branch. So it very heavily favors representation for low-population states.

House has significantly more seats than senate (4X), so electoral college only slightly favors low population states.

My issue with electoral college isn’t the weighting but the voting. First past the post is idiotic; every democrat in a red state gets their vote ignored and every Republican in a blue state gets their vote ignored, meanwhile purple states are chucked marketing funds by the boatload. It’s inherently divisive because there’s no political reason for a candidate to unite a state that’s already won or lost, like California or Texas.

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