The overwhelming majority of voters are “low information voters”. That’s even true of the majority of people that read the New York Times. Democracy doesn’t work because voters are highly skilled; it works (if at all) because politicians know that success is more popular than failure, and thus they have an incentive to produce success.

If you poll people item by item on what might be called the “neoliberal agenda”, you’ll often find the public is opposed to policies such as free trade and congestion pricing. But if you were to poll residents of Asia as to which country had the most effective economic policies, they’d probably name a place like Singapore. And Singapore is well run precisely because it adopts “unpopular” technocratic policies like zero tariffs, forced saving, and congestion pricing.