But it still seems like, everyone would prefer politicians who make SOME bold claims unhedged.
I'm sure that, other things being equal, they would. But at what cost, if other things are not equal? It might very easily turn out that the kind of people who could hand-on-heart swear to all sorts of awesome-sounding manifesto promises and remain completely dry were strongly correlated to the kind of people who wouldn't be all that competent at putting it all into practice once in power, and/or who had overlooked some really important undesirable consequences of their idealistic promises. So after a while you'd learn to prefer politicians who made less outstanding claims and hedged a bit more, as the best balance between having good intentions and actually delivering what they intended...
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Date: 2014-07-10 04:02 pm (UTC)I'm sure that, other things being equal, they would. But at what cost, if other things are not equal? It might very easily turn out that the kind of people who could hand-on-heart swear to all sorts of awesome-sounding manifesto promises and remain completely dry were strongly correlated to the kind of people who wouldn't be all that competent at putting it all into practice once in power, and/or who had overlooked some really important undesirable consequences of their idealistic promises. So after a while you'd learn to prefer politicians who made less outstanding claims and hedged a bit more, as the best balance between having good intentions and actually delivering what they intended...