Promises, popularity and potential disaster

Politicians need to be popular. The path to popularity is paved with popular promises. It’s been ever thus. Despite skirting bankruptcy twice in a generation, with devastating consequences for many citizens, the impulse to promise the popular is as strong as ever.

While this trait is true of all democracies, our excessive instinct to binge on the popular seems as ingrained as our need to binge on the hard stuff. Both excesses ignore ...