Controversial opinion of the day. Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is the worst way of running a state apart from everything else we’ve tried. One of our hosts rejects this, and says that actually we know of and have tried far better ways of steering the ship of state.

We talk of the original, some say ideal, democracy - Athens. Did Athens do better over the long term than its non-democratic neighbors? Probably, but the timescale is short. Did democracy lead to better decision making in the detail? No. Democrats killed Socrates. And then the Sicilian expedition, mentioned in Thucidides, shows the assembly of a radical democracy being persuaded to make a terrible geostrategic error by a demagogue whipping them into a frenzy.

What are we looking for when we’re choosing a system of government? Perhaps 1) high average qualit ...