CANDIDATES SCORED HIGHER THAN AVERAGE ON ABILITY AND LEADERSHIP.

Now, an immediate qualifier: The study is about Sweden. And Sweden, although a longstanding democracy, is not necessarily typical. It has proportional representation, candidates drawn from centralized party lists, lots of “leisure politicians” (i.e., office-holders who, especially at the town and county level, don’t make more than a modest fee for attending meetings), and so on.

On the other hand, in many other respects Sweden is not that different from other OECD nations — rich, peaceful, democratic, high levels of education and, in recent years, lots of citizens who think they’re not being very well served by politicians (which probably led to the recent yuge disaster in Sweden, the very unfortunate and much covered-up… well, you know, everybody on Fox has been talking about it).

Sweden also has some unique data sources, including some Really Big Data.

The five economists who did the study, two from the University of California at Berkeley and three from Swedish institutions, relied on detailed demographic and income data for every Swede — not a sample of Swedes, but every Swede — for the last three decades. Moreover, for Swedish men they had scores on cognitive ability (i.e., roughly, “intelligence”) and leadership traits collected when the men were 18 or 19 and subjected to two days’ of testing in preparation for compulsory military service.

Reading about data of this sort always makes me queasy. It’s really interesting to have. But would you want to live in a society where your teen-year intelligence and leadership scores were available to social scientists? I’m sure every precaution is taken to ensure privacy. But the CIA takes every precaution, too, and you can read its internal memos on WikiLeaks.

What do these very private data say? Candidates for office in Sweden score significantly better than the general population on all the different measures of ability and leadership at all levels of government.

The outscoring is more modest at the lowest levels of government, but it grows with every step up toward national office.

Members of the Swedish parliament are well above population norms for cognitive ability, leadership, educational attainment, and both potential income, as predicted by their demographic and occupational data, and actual income before entering office. Swedish mayors compare favourably with the CEOs of companies with 25 to 250 employees, while Swedish MPs are at the ability level of CEOs of companies with more than 250 employees.

For me, as an academic economist, the study clinches its credibility with the following: “Academic economists and political scientists have the most years of education, rank second and third in cognitive scores, but have among the lowest leadership scores … Academics are smart, but lack leadership, and as a result they accumulate the most years of education, but neither lead organizations nor make lifeor-death decisions.

Mayors, MPs and CEOs are marginally less smart, substantially less educated, but have higher leadership scores and, fittingly, do lead public and private organizations.”

The current prime minister’s father once said MPs were nobodies 50 yards from Parliament Hill.

Maybe he was right then. Though Canada isn’t Sweden, I bet he wouldn’t be right today.

If politicians so often disappoint, it’s not because most aren’t able. It’s because the job they’re asked to do is actually very hard.