Reading Hive Mind by Garret Jones. Finding it good through the first chapters, until he got to the "Ingredients for Good Politics" and the Coase Theorem. A fast summary: if a state has people focused on the long term, and willing to accept the results of elections, there can be effective bipartisan deals to handle externalities (like pollution) using Coase. Coase says that if you have good negotiators they can find a win-win solution without the need for regulation.
Then I started thinking about the Matthew Effect.
An assumption in the discussion is that high IQ people are more future-oriented and more able to do tit for tat bargaining, without holding grudges which lead to mutual destruction. The problem when you apply the idea to politics is that those with the gold/assets are able to hire those with IQ (lobbyists and lawyers) to rig the bargain.
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