FROM JAMES JOYCE, MIGUEL DE CERVANTES AND LEO TOLSTOY

IT’S CALLED THE Dunning-Kruger Effect. It’s the tendency of incompetents to see themselves as far more capable than they are. In this year of elections all over the world, it’s worth noting that a singular deficiency of democracy is the calibre of people it attracts as candidates. People of genuine ability tend not to have the same confidence in their own competence as idiots do. Doubt and intelligence go hand in hand. Result: you get a lot more fools elected to public office than would occur in the wider community.

“A decent civil service can usually act as a check on complete incompetence – though even that dam appears to have broken during the premiership of Boris Johnson in the UK,” says Ferris Wheyhl of Liberty Or Death, a high-end bookmaker based in the Caribbean, specializing in electoral outcomes. “And don’t get me going on Trump 1. The problem with civil servants is a conflict of interest. Their interests are best served in pleasing their masters. And so the incompetence of their masters can be supercharged by the servility of the servants. I was only obeying orders, as they say. The people always lose.”

Occasionally, people of real ability make it into positions of power, but statistically elections throw up more useless chaff than wheat. “It’s the exceptions that everyone remembers, and that keeps the democratic show on the road,” Wheyhl says. “And the turnover. The sheer number of elected politicians in a given lifetime allows for the concealment of stupidity. Much like the endless round of competitions permits the vast bulk of mediocrity to shelter behind the glory of the stars. But the fools dominate, and sometimes so many of them gather that it produces disaster.”

So now you know why your vote really does count. Just not in the way you thought.