Sorry about slow posting — I’ve been busy drinking too much port at high table both giving talks at Oxford and grading final papers from Princeton. But I did want to weigh in on this Matt O’Brien piece on the problems or lack thereof with democracy.

O’Brien criticizes David Brooks, who argues that we need more Simpson-Bowles commissions of wise men who take the long view; O’Brien argues that democratic institutions demonstrably lead on average to better governance. I’d agree.

But I’d also add that this is a very strange time to be arguing for more elite commissions, and Simpson-Bowles is a remarkably bad role model for, well, anything.

Think about what happened to economic policy in the aftermath of the Great Recession. America was (and still is) suffering from huge unemployment and depressed spending, which wasn’t just causing great current hardship but undermining our long-run prospects by exiling productive workers from the labor force and causing us to forgo much-needed investment. And faced with this disastrous current reality, our bipartisan wise men decided that the crucial challenge was … cutting entitlements.

This didn’t just totally misjudge the nation’s needs, it was also strangely incoherent even on its own terms. Yes, an aging population and rising health costs may eventually force cuts in benefits, although that’s far less certain than Beltway orthodoxy would have you believe. But why, exactly, is it urgent to deal with the prospect of possible future benefit cuts by, um, cutting future benefits?

And for what it’s worth, Bowles and especially Simpson are actually fairly ridiculous figures. If this is elite wisdom …

More broadly, the notion that we’re in trouble because politicians pander to a public that wants something for nothing is utterly at odds with what has actually happened since 2008. In both America and Europe, budget deficits have clearly come down too fast, perpetuating the slump while probably if anything worsening the long-run fiscal outlook. If there was pandering going on here, it was a case of pandering to elite deficit obsessions, not popular desire for a good time. Also, isn’t it curious that populist measures like debt relief for families went nowhere,even though they have a long historical track record of doing good, while banks were made whole?

The idea that anyone would look at the past five years and declare that what we need is two, three, many Simpson-Bowles commissions is quite mind-boggling.