85086 - Transcription: Podcast With US #108: Democracy and Elections

N. Lygeros

For some of us it’s maybe too early to talk about elections if we want to have an objective point of view. But the fact is that we are already talking about that. So the idea in this podcast is to talk about democracy. Because very often we see some remarks about democracy in relation with economy. The problem is not to compare  democracy with economy. Democracy should be always the first choice. So if we  have a democracy we can talk about economy but if we have only economy it’s not obvious that the system will be democratic. The idea is to say “stop to compare these two things because they are in fact  incomparable”. So the idea is the following. We are thinking about economy and politics it’s in fact the most important thing.
But we know that the most important thing for every government is in reality energy and strategy. So the point of view is the following. When we have democracy we need strategy and energy. We need strategy to avoid big problems. We need energy to avoid survival problems. These two components are very important for a democracy and they are not at all a detail.
So we have to think more about energy and strategy than economy to talk about a democracy because a democracy without strategy is dead and a democracy without energy will die. So our point of view is if we want really to talk about democracy we should seek about its very important components and not only to talk about economy. Because even dictatorships have economy.