Is the idea that democracy always benefits society misguided, or just mathematics?

Plato believed that public policy should be the purview of a small group of wise leaders; in his view, ordinary citizens couldn’t possibly be well informed enough to arrive at the decisions that would best align with the common good. Jean-Jacques Rousseau disagreed, countering that normal people, voting for their opinions en masse, could indeed arrive at the ‘general will’. The French philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet (1743-94) went even further than his contemporary Rousseau, proposing that, not only could the wisdom of the crowd be trusted to reach the most beneficial conclusions, but that it was mathematically provable that this was the case. This animated explainer from Wireless Philosophy (or Wi-Phi) details the logic of Condorcet’s so-called ‘jury theorem’, while also identifying weaknesses in the perhaps overly optimistic assumptions embedded in his logic.