Quiz LNAT en ligne

Democracies that leave voting to individual choice consistently produce governments elected by a minority of those entitled to vote. Where turnout falls below half the electorate, the party that forms a government may command the active support of barely a quarter of eligible citizens. Compulsory voting, already used in more than twenty countries, offers a remedy. If every citizen must attend a polling station, the resulting government can claim to rest on the expressed preference of the whole community rather than of the committed few.

Critics object that forcing people to vote is illiberal, and that a reluctant voter will simply choose at random, adding noise rather than legitimacy. The first objection carries less weight than it appears to: citizens are already compelled to perform jury service and to pay taxes, obligations far more onerous than marking a ballot once every few years. The charge of randomness is more serious, but it assumes that non-voters have no preferences worth recording. In fact, surveys repeatedly show that those who abstain hold political views broadly similar in distribution to those who vote; they stay at home not from indifference to outcomes but from a sense that their single vote cannot matter. Compulsion removes precisely that disincentive.

The strongest case for compulsory voting, however, is not statistical but civic. A citizen who knows she must vote has a reason to inform herself, and a political culture in which everyone participates is one in which parties must appeal to the whole electorate rather than concentrate on mobilising a narrow and often unrepresentative base.

Few public policies enjoy such uncritical support as the spread of closed-circuit television. Town councils install cameras in the confident belief that they deter crime, and the public, reassured by the sight of them, rarely asks whether that belief is well founded. Yet the evidence for a deterrent effect is surprisingly thin. Large reviews of controlled studies find that cameras produce, at best, a modest reduction in crime, and that almost all of this reduction occurs in one setting: enclosed car parks. On the open street, where cameras are most visible and most numerous, their measurable effect on the crime rate is close to zero.

There are good reasons why this should be so. Much street crime is impulsive, or committed under the influence of drink, and an offender in that state does not pause to calculate the risk of being filmed. Where crime is planned, the response to a camera is not to abandon the offence but to move a few streets away, or to cover one's face. The displacement of crime is not its prevention.

None of this shows that cameras are useless. Recorded footage can help to identify and convict offenders after the event, and that is a genuine benefit. But it is a benefit of a quite different kind from deterrence, and it is deterrence that is invariably promised when a new scheme is announced. A technology sold as a way of stopping crimes from happening turns out, on inspection, to be mainly a way of investigating crimes that have happened already.

It has become fashionable for governments to steer students, through fees and funding, away from the humanities and towards science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The reasoning is economic: a modern economy needs engineers and programmers, not historians, and public money should be spent where it yields the greatest return. On its own terms the argument is not absurd. But its terms are too narrow.

The first difficulty is that the economic premise is less secure than it looks. Employers report that what they most often lack is not technical knowledge, which can be taught on the job, but the ability to write clearly, to weigh evidence and to construct an argument, the very skills a good humanities degree is designed to develop. A graduate who can master a body of scientific fact but cannot explain it to a non-specialist is of limited use, and it is not obvious that a narrowly technical education produces the more valuable employee.

The deeper objection is that the economic frame is not the only one that matters. A society educates its citizens not merely to staff its industries but to sustain its public life. The study of history, philosophy and literature equips people to understand the institutions they have inherited, to recognise a bad argument when a politician offers one, and to imagine lives unlike their own. These are not luxuries that a country indulges when it is rich and abandons when it is poor. They are the conditions of a functioning democracy, and a state that starves them in the name of growth may find it has purchased prosperity at the cost of judgement.