Top Highlights

• Democracy, in other words, is leadership by the stupid, who make unrealizable promises to the ignorant, and this always leads to disaster.
• voters have become directionless consumers influenced by spin-doctors, or feel that politicians are now just populists led by focus groups,
• Aristotle recognized that political authority has to depend, to some extent, on the consent of the governed.
• One way of testing many of these “co-operative” hypotheses about human nature is called “game theory”, which seems to show that people are usually nice to each other for selfish reasons.
• Reciprocity pays off. But the strategy works only if the games are played by relatively small groups in which each “player” can remember the names and previous behaviour of other players.