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How much effort should a person be reasonably expected to carry out if they want to be politically informed?
On one extreme, no effort should be required. It's hard to know what this looks like, but one could imagine a world in which chips in your brain automatically feed you current news and political events from a raw and unfiltered pool of sources. You would just have the knowledge, and if anything wasn't listed, you have the right to be outraged.
On the other, serious and substantial effort. Basically, you'd have to devote much time to knowing the current political scene and all perspectives and facts. Think of watching both CNN or Fox as mandatory activities to ensure you hear both perspectives, or read articles about the same thing from both sides, etc. Do your own research every time and come to your own conclusions.
This is assuming, of course, that whatever your line is, external parties must meet their end of the deal. So if you say that a person should be able to watch CNN and be informed, then CNN must report all things that are relevant without partisan slant.
My own thought is that the bar for being informed currently seems rather high. The avenues for uncovering relevant facts and knowledge requires much more than "I know what I was taught in school" because that stuff got outdated before you even graduated. Twitter, paywalled news institutions, academic meta-reviews, etc. are all things you would have to learn to read and discover.
But maybe individuals should invest hours into researching at least one topic a week. What say you?
This was actually a lot easier in the pre-digital world, and persisted until relatively recently—until the 2010s I had a newspaper delivered to my house every day. The nice thing about newspapers was not just that they curated the news for you but that they were laid out in a way to encourage browsing rather than dedicated reading. Even if you skipped half the articles you could still glance at them and get the gist of the news. Newspapers still exist, but it's not the same. I cancelled my subscription after unreliable delivery meant that the paper was either coming late (i.e. after I left for work) or not at all. Then the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cut print editions to a few days a week and made you download pdfs the rest of the time, and, accompanied with a price increase, this was the last straw. But what really doesn't exist anymore is newspaper culture. By this I mean the utter ubiquity of the daily paper in people's lives. When I was a kid, everyone read the paper, and I mean everyone. Blue-collar workers like my dad would get to work a half-hour early to drink coffee and read the paper. If you didn't have a subscription, no problem. You couldn't enter a bus, or a break room, or a coffee shop without someone having left one lying around, or, in the case of the coffee shop, one provided by the establishment for customer convenience. There was a time when "Did you see the article about..." was a reasonable conversation starter, even among strangers, because even if the guy hadn't read it chances are he was at least vaguely familiar with it.
This is a fascinating peek into the news culture of the pre internet era. I do wonder if the industry of journalism was better because these people actually had more power, and news wasn’t so commoditized. Maybe actually being important to the everyday person gave journalists a lot of status, and that encouraged them to take their ideals seriously.
The actual secret reason is nobody really knew what people read when they bought the newspaper. So, you couldn't cut the foreign policy stories, local news, etc. OTOH, the Internet knows exactly what you're clicking on, and media responded accordingly.
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the WSJ print edition used to be decent 13 years ago when I read it; I dunno if it still is.
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Isn't the point of representative democracy to get an agent that is informed politically on your behalf? This is the simplest idea ever, since it takes a bunch of time, energy and resources to be informed you pay money(taxes) to a person to represent you and you keep informed of what (s)he does and if that truly represents you. If it doesn't you communicate with that person that you think it is wrong... and if they don't listen you don't vote for them next time.
It looks naive when you try to put it succintly. But that is the problem with the modern political landscape, that everything is corrupt to the core including the people that are supposed to expose the corruption.
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One of the arguments made in the 18th and 19th centuries for restricting the franchise to male landowners with large estates was that being politically informed was the equivalent of a full-time job and that only a wealthy individual who did not have to work for a living had the free time to learn about the issues of the day and make reasonable voting decisions. Such a position eventually became politically untenable given the trends of industrialization and urbanization, but I think it was certainly an understandable concern.
For my part, I try to read or skim several articles from one of a few news aggregator sites every morning, as well as keep up with scientific advancements if possible. If a topic piques my interest, I may dig a little deeper and find the original source. I also usually try to read books relevant to current events as they pop up (e.g. pandemics, the history of Ukraine, AI). This all adds up to less than an hour each day and has a much higher information density than watching cable news, so it doesn't seem like an unreasonable expectation to me.
For an unrelated reason last night I went looking for daily podcasts that cover the day's top headlines in several broad categories -- like the sections of a newspaper -- in a few minutes. I found a couple, but there are shockingly few of these.
For about a year I've been listening to the BBC's global new report, but it has too much magazine-like filler, is too keen on pushing narratives, and releases several episodes per day. I was hoping to find 2-3 more compact headlines+lead paragraphs only podcasts from different sources. I have yet to go through the ones I found, but I think there's a market for something like this:
Monday-Friday, a 10-minute podcast that goes through 5-6 top news headlines from one source. The source changes everyday, rotating through 5-10 sources, so you get some different perspectives on the same big stories. Maybe on the weekend, 10-20 minutes going through some niche subject headlines, like sports, entertainment, tech, etc.
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Speaking of news aggregators, I created https://pubstack.site , an RSS aggregator mostly focused on substack blogs
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Was it ever really restricted to 'large' estates, of the kind that had full time managers ?
I don't think that was the argument used. Just that you don't want losers and proletariat and such having any say in how your society is run. Look how it all ended up in the end.
Antebellum figures in the Deep South used a version of that argument (laced with an assumption of elite superiority) -- civilization is a product of the leisure class. This argument hasn't been debunked IMO. Serfs/slaves were made unnecessary by technological improvements.
However, more common was the argument that the franchise should be restricted to those with a fixed stake in the country, who wouldn't simply vote themselves unsustainable handouts from the treasury. See: the Putney Debates.
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It ended with empires over which the sun never sets.
The British empire didn’t have universal male suffrage until it was very much in the tail end of its run.
The way I parsed the gp comment was what the lack of suffrage lead to
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Politics is extremely serious, it is a matter of megadeaths. Some 20-30% of GDP is government spending in most countries. Nuclear powers like the US, UK or Russia have a special responsibility to avoid crises which risk the destruction of Western civilization. Political decisions determine who lives and who dies, whether masses of wealth are created or destroyed.
Consider the sabotage campaign against nuclear energy, the gain-of-function problem, Tiktok being markedly more predatory in the West than in China, our idiotic wars in the Middle East, pervasive regulatory issues that cripple the production of energy, goods, housing, healthcare and education. These are very important issues.
When is this ever going to happen? Who decides what relevant or partisan means? This is an insoluble problem.
Citizens should be obliged not merely to read newspapers or watch TV shows with various slants but to develop their own world-models. They unironically need to think critically about what they read and watch. Most people think critically in the sense that they solely analyze why their political opponents are lying to them. People need to think about the information they're being told by various sources, what they observe in their actual lives, how various predictions and so on stack up in reality.
Of course there's little incentive to do this, we don't live in the world of prediction markets or electronic direct democracy.
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"How much of a moral imperative is there to be well-read?" is probably the bigger question around this.
I'd say as it concerns anything worth speaking of, one should have enough knowledge to string together both sides of an argument and have them make sense to those that hold them to be a moral person.
I also say that morality isn't widespread in the current world.
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Depends what you mean by informed. To understand the minutiae and intricacies of a long-standing story, like Russia vs. Ukraine, means a lot of reading. I remember a while back the media loved to tout how The Daily Show viewers are more informed, but by informed, having a superficial understanding, that is, recognizing the names. I think any mainstream news sites do a poor job, and alterative sites are not much better, and both are biased. You have to spend hours doing independent research, such as seeking out a wide range of non-mainstream sources, to have any hope of being sufficiently informed for a complicated story like SVB (and how banking and regulation and finance works), Russia vs. Ukraine , etc.
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EDIT: It appears I misread you and just popped off on something on my mind. I'll leave it here anyway. See the last paragraph for a thought on your actual question
Virtually any altruistic use of time would be more ethically sound. Zero effort.
I believe voting would work better like jury duty, where a small representative sample of the population is picked and make it their full time job to become politically informed. Of course, this annuls one of the main adaptive benefits of a democracy, which is giving people a "Close Door" elevator button to press when they're frustrated which usually does nothing.
I do think people have an ethical obligation not to be politically militant on subjects where they haven't done the legwork. The "time" required depends on the subject.
What makes you say the time should differ? Presumably, if I need to research something, I can find the relevant meta-reviews and literature overviews fairly quickly if its a non-history field. For history, you presumably need to read, but JSTOR can come in handy if needed (we'll assume money is not a problem, or you're tech-saavy enough to get around paywalls). Also, there are reputable enough youtube channels, for example, that give relatively concise explanations and truths that would otherwise require many hours of reading.
How we get to a point that we have a fast reference for any subject is important, but assuming you have it, why would it take less or more time?
Important political questions are a bundle of (a) values, and (b) a gobsmacking number of empirical claims. To become a militant advocate of minimum wage increase/abolition probably requires a modest investigation into whether it affects job creation, consumer prices, and skill aquisition, as well as interrogating your values on deploying state power against voluntary exchanges and transferring wealth between classes. To become a militant advocate of radical economic changes like communism or georgism, on the other hand, should require an almost unfathomable amount of research into the science of economics and investigation into the values underpinning our status quo.
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