South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang observed that democracy becomes meaningless unless every citizen understands basic economics. That’s putting it mildly. Without the capacity to evaluate economic arguments, democracy becomes something more troubling than merely meaningless: it becomes a sophisticated form of institutional betrayal, where the forms of self-government persist while the substance quietly evaporates. The pattern is depressingly familiar by now. Citizens armed only with household budget intuitions will choose policies that sound eminently reasonable but produce catastrophic outcomes. They will demand government spending cuts during recessions, support trade wars that destroy their purchasing power, and elect leaders who promise economic miracles through monetary manipulation. The tragedy is that this isn’t really voter failure at all, but rather a fundamental design flaw in how we’ve constructed democratic participation itself.

We’ve built a system that demands citizens make collective choices about complex economic policies while providing them almost no institutional support for understanding how economies actually work. This leaves us drifting between technocracy, where experts make decisions too complex for public input, and populism, where democratic participation persists but citizens remain vulnerable to manipulation. Neither path preserves what we actually need: a functioning democracy where citizens can meaningfully evaluate the choices before them. The solution requires treating economic reasoning as democratic infrastructure rather than individual responsibility. Many states already require some economics education in schools, but clearly it’s not enough. We need to teach basic economics the way we teach literacy and numeracy, not as optional enrichment or a single semester course, but as essential equipment for citizenship woven throughout education. Students should graduate understanding inflation, trade-offs, opportunity costs, and how to recognize impossible promises. Just as we fund public broadcasting for news, we should fund accessible economic explainers that help citizens understand current policy debates, not propaganda but genuinely educational content that explains what different policies actually do, with their costs and benefits spelled out clearly. Economists themselves bear some responsibility here. They need to engage more actively in public discourse, to call out politicians for misinformation directly and publicly rather than confining themselves to academic journals and professional conferences. They need to make policy discourse more transparent by translating technical debates into accessible language. More conferences and public talks should be open to broader audiences and, frankly, made less tedious, because engaging presentation matters as much as rigorous analysis when the goal is public understanding rather than peer review. We might even experiment with citizen economic juries for major decisions, where randomly selected citizens work with economists to understand the evidence, then explain their reasoning to the broader public, creating informed intermediaries who can translate expert knowledge into accessible terms. These are not revolutionary proposals, merely sensible investments in the infrastructure that democracy requires to function. The key insight is recognizing that we don’t ask citizens to individually build roads or generate electricity, and we shouldn’t ask them to individually acquire the economic knowledge necessary for meaningful democratic participation either.

Consider two elections from 2024, which together illustrate how economic complexity creates exploitable space for political manipulation.

The U.S. election showed this plainly enough. Despite measurable economic success under Biden (inflation falling from 9.1% to under 3%, historic low unemployment, robust GDP growth), voters rejected these outcomes entirely. Young voters, experiencing inflation acutely through used car prices and fuel costs in a country where extreme inequality leaves them financially precarious, gave Biden catastrophic approval ratings while simultaneously supporting Trump’s demonstrably inflationary agenda of massive tariffs, immigration restrictions, deficit-expanding tax cuts, and threats to Federal Reserve independence. Now, this wasn’t irrational in any simple sense. These were rational responses to incomplete information, sensible choices made within information environments that had been carefully distorted. Young voters felt genuine economic distress, certainly, but they operated in environments where acquiring real economic understanding costs considerable time and energy while offering negligible personal benefits, all while navigating competing narratives designed more to persuade than inform. Biden had deployed anti-inflation measures targeting structural causes: strategic petroleum reserves, infrastructure investments, prescription drug negotiations, competition policy. Trump promised superior inflation fighting while proposing policies that economists nearly universally predict would increase prices. The average voter simply had no institutional framework to evaluate these competing claims, and so they voted on the basis of what they could directly observe: prices were higher, life felt harder, time for a change.

US Election Economic Indicators

Germany provided an equally instructive parallel. Friedrich Merz built his entire campaign around defending the constitutional debt brake against reform, despite widespread economic consensus that rigid fiscal constraints prevent countercyclical policy and undermine growth through infrastructure underinvestment. He deployed categorical rhetoric against SPD and Green reform advocates, framing any debt brake reform as fiscal irresponsibility of the most dangerous sort. Then, after winning but before taking office, Merz promptly reformed the debt brake with the very politicians he had spent months vilifying. The cynicism was breathtaking, but more importantly, it worked precisely because voters lacked the framework to recognize the contradiction when it arrived.

Consider one more example, which captures something essential about false intuition and dishonest populist narratives. The fisherman who voted for Brexit to escape EU quotas received marginal quota increases in exchange for something far more valuable: the supply chain infrastructure that had taken decades to build. The visible problem (EU limits on catches) diminished slightly, while the invisible infrastructure that moved fish from boats to buyers collapsed entirely, though this collapse took some time to become apparent. Fresh catch now spoils at customs checkpoints while bureaucrats verify health certificates. Processing plants sit empty because EU workers can no longer fill the jobs. The economic fundamentals remained entirely unchanged: Britain imports most of the fish it eats while exporting the fish it catches, and decades of integration had created supply chains designed for frictionless European trade, not sovereign isolation. Infrastructure, it turns out, doesn’t much care about political sovereignty. What the fishers achieved, then, was the elimination of a minor quota constraint while creating major supply chain failures. They swapped functional access to customers for symbolic control over increasingly empty waters. They got exactly what they voted for and discovered, too late, that it wasn’t remotely what they needed.

Brexit Impact on Fishing Industry

These examples point to something fundamental about how the inability to evaluate economic reasoning creates exploitable space for populist narratives. When citizens lack frameworks for recognizing trade-offs and unintended consequences, they become vulnerable to whoever can craft the most emotionally compelling story about economic causation, regardless of empirical evidence or logical consistency. This is not a minor problem of civic education but a crisis in the foundation of democratic legitimacy itself.

The issue matters profoundly for democratic theory because legitimacy requires informed consent, not merely the procedural act of voting. When citizens cannot meaningfully evaluate the economic arguments underlying policies that determine their material welfare, their consent becomes ceremonial rather than substantive. Democracy degrades from collective self-determination into something closer to collective self-harm, and the degradation happens through mechanisms that feel thoroughly democratic while undermining democracy’s very foundation. The temporal dimension makes things worse. Economic policies operate on timescales that mock electoral cycles: infrastructure investment pays dividends over decades while imposing immediate costs, creating a situation where citizens experience pain now and forget benefits later, or conversely, enjoy benefits now while ignoring deferred costs. Electoral cycles favor short-term thinking while economic prosperity requires long-term planning. This represents not voter shortsightedness but institutional design failure at a fundamental level, a mismatch between the timeframes of democratic accountability and economic cause-and-effect that no amount of voter education can fully overcome. The individual incentive structure compounds the problem. Each citizen faces prohibitive costs to acquire meaningful economic knowledge while receiving minimal benefits from casting an informed vote, since their individual electoral influence approaches zero. This makes economic education individually irrational but collectively essential, creating a classic coordination failure where rational individual behavior produces collectively destructive outcomes. One might as well complain about the weather as complain about individual voters failing to educate themselves under these conditions. Political competition amplifies rather than corrects this problem because it naturally favors simple narratives over complex analysis. Citizens can easily visualize factory closures but struggle to recognize the diffuse benefits from trade or the hidden costs of protectionism without substantial institutional support. Political systems exploit this asymmetry, as they must, promising visible benefits while minimizing discussion of invisible costs. The competition for votes ensures that the most successful politicians are often those most willing to work with, rather than against, economic ignorance. Democracy’s theoretical foundation assumes that voters can identify and pursue their interests through electoral choice. Economic misunderstanding on this scale destroys this assumption not through voter failure but through institutional failure to provide the necessary education. Citizens cannot judge their interests when institutions fail to provide frameworks for understanding the mechanisms that determine economic outcomes, and without such frameworks, the whole edifice of democratic legitimacy rests on increasingly shaky ground. One arrives, then, at something philosophers might call a performative contradiction. Democratic institutions claim legitimacy through informed consent while undermining the conditions necessary for genuine informed consent to exist. Our societies demand that citizens choose policies affecting extraordinarily complex economic systems while providing them virtually no institutional framework for understanding those systems, then express surprise and indignation when the results are catastrophic.

Plato already described this around 380 BC. His ship of state allegory captured the fundamental flaw of the republic:

Suppose the following to be the state of affairs on board a ship or ships. The captain is larger and stronger than any of the crew, but a bit deaf and short-sighted, and doesn’t know much about navigation. The crew are all quarrelling with each other about how to navigate the ship, each thinking he ought to be at the helm; they know no navigation and cannot say that anyone ever taught it them, or that they spent any time studying it; indeed they say it can’t be taught and are ready to murder anyone who says it can.

They spend all their time milling round the captain and trying to get him to give them the wheel. If one faction is more successful than another, their rivals may kill them and throw them overboard, lay out the honest captain with drugs or drink, take control of the ship, help themselves to what’s on board, and behave as if they were on a drunken pleasure-cruise.

Finally, they reserve their admiration for the man who knows how to lend a hand in controlling the captain by force or fraud; they praise his seamanship and navigation and knowledge of the sea and condemn everyone else as useless. They have no idea that the true navigator must study the seasons of the year, the sky, the stars, the winds and other professional subjects, if he is to be really fit to control a ship; and they think that it’s quite impossible to acquire professional skill in navigation (quite apart from whether they want it exercised) and that there’s no such thing as an art of navigation. In these circumstances aren’t the sailors on any such ship bound to regard the true navigator as a gossip and a stargazer, of no use to them at all? (Republic Book 6, 488a–489d)

Replace navigation with economics, and you have a rather precise description of contemporary democracy. Economists disagree ferociously about many things, of course, but they do converge on certain navigational basics through empirical evidence and careful analysis. Economic analysis, at its best, helps distinguish between policies with genuinely debatable trade-offs and those that simply promise impossible outcomes, between difficult choices and magical thinking. Plato’s original solution was characteristically elitist: philosopher-kings who combined technical knowledge with wisdom about ultimate purposes. Modern democracy rejects this approach entirely, and rightly so, insisting on popular sovereignty even when the popular will consistently produces destructive outcomes. We make this choice because legitimate governance requires the consent of the governed, and the alternatives (rule by force or fraud) have proven themselves catastrophically worse for human welfare across virtually every historical case we can examine. But consent becomes meaningless when institutions fail to provide citizens with the tools necessary to meaningfully evaluate their choices. A vote cast within incomplete information environments isn’t really democratic participation at all but something closer to institutional theater, an elaborate ritual that mimics democracy while lacking its substance. Economic policy amplifies this contradiction because economic relationships involve constraints and trade-offs that persist regardless of political preferences. Citizens can reasonably demand that tariffs simultaneously protect domestic jobs and reduce consumer prices, but economic systems simply don’t accommodate such demands regardless of their political popularity or emotional appeal. The laws of economics, unlike the laws of politics, cannot be repealed by majority vote. Democracy without institutional support for economic reasoning becomes a kind of performance art: the ship wanders aimlessly while the crew congratulates itself on democratic participation, never noticing that navigation requires considerably more than good intentions and loud opinions.

Yet democracy remains worth defending, not out of romantic attachment but because of stubborn empirical evidence that refuses to go away. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have demonstrated, through comprehensive historical analysis, that inclusive political institutions consistently outperform extractive alternatives in generating long-term prosperity. Countries with broad political participation, rule of law, and protection of property rights achieve sustained economic growth while their authoritarian counterparts tend toward stagnation and crisis. This is not ideological preference masquerading as analysis but a fairly robust empirical finding that holds across diverse contexts and time periods. The mechanism is straightforward enough, even if politically difficult to achieve. Inclusive political institutions create incentives for inclusive economic institutions, which in turn enable innovation, investment, and broad-based prosperity. When institutions genuinely enable citizens to participate meaningfully in decisions affecting their lives, they tend to choose policies that expand opportunity rather than concentrate power, though this tendency requires continuous institutional support to function properly and can be derailed by the very economic ignorance we’ve been discussing.

The capacity for economic reasoning transforms this from theoretical possibility into practical reality. Citizens who understand basic economics can begin to distinguish between policies that generate broad prosperity and those that merely redistribute existing wealth upward, even if imperfectly and gradually. Economic outcomes often arrive slowly and get obscured by political noise, of course. Benefits may remain invisible while costs hit immediately, and powerful interests have become remarkably skilled at reframing failures as victories. But institutional support for economic literacy beats institutional neglect even in these distorted environments, because citizens with basic economic intuition can at least recognize the most obvious contradictions and impossible promises. They can distinguish between difficult trade-offs and pure snake oil, even if they cannot always evaluate the finer points of macroeconomic policy. The solution, then, requires reconceptualizing economic reasoning as democratic infrastructure rather than individual responsibility. Just as we wouldn’t expect citizens to individually fund roads or maintain electrical grids, we shouldn’t expect them to individually acquire the economic knowledge necessary for meaningful democratic participation. This reconceptualization creates virtuous cycles: economically informed voters choose better policies, which produce better outcomes, which reinforce confidence in democratic institutions and create space for even better policy choices. Democracy becomes not just legitimate in theory but effective in practice, capable of actually delivering the broad-based prosperity it promises. The alternative is what we’re largely experiencing now: continuing to sail in circles while institutional navigators stand ignored in the corner, offering increasingly desperate warnings that no one with power seems interested in hearing. Plato’s allegory, properly understood, was darker and more precise than it first appears. The captain represents citizens, powerful but kept short-sighted about economic navigation. The quarreling crew represents politicians, fighting for control while dismissing or actively undermining economic evidence. The true navigator represents economists and policy experts, dismissed as “stargazers” disconnected from practical concerns, their warnings unheeded until the ship runs aground and everyone wonders how this could possibly have happened.

When it works, because economists can map the routes and calculate the currents, politicians can debate which ports are worth reaching and why, and citizens can choose their destination with reasonably full knowledge of what the journey will actually entail. Anything less than this isn’t really democracy at all, just an elaborate institutional performance that maintains democracy’s forms while abandoning its substance. We would do well to remember this before we congratulate ourselves too heartily on our democratic achievements.